When you write, the future is bright.
You can change anything in your life for the better by writing about it, including but not limited to:
- Your net worth
- Your belt line
- The quality of your marriage
- Mundane things like your morning routine
- Complex things like the global economy
If I could sum up everything you can change just by writing into one concept, it would be The Future.
And there is no better time to change the future than when the present is most bleak.
December 15, 2017 was one of the darkest days of my life.
I was 6 months into building my real estate sales business.
$10,000 in the hole. $1500 in total business revenue.
Zero evidence that I could successfully sell real estate.
The first big closing of my career was scheduled for the next day.
My client, who had not been particularly religious up to this conversation:
“I’ve spent a lot of time praying about it, and I don’t believe God wants me to buy this property. Thanks so much for all your hard work, Cody, but I am going to take a step back from purchasing for a bit.”
My jaw went slack as I hung up the phone.
I needed the money from that closing to pay my credit card minimums.
I had next to no cash.
I was devastated.
I didn’t know what to do until I stumbled onto a podcast with a fiery, Canadian psychotherapist named Jordan Peterson.
I listened as he explained why people tend to remain in states of anxiety and depression far longer than necessary.
I don’t remember his specific words, but a paraphrase goes something like this:
“The reason why people tend to remain in protracted states of nervousness or depression is because they haven’t sorted out the story of their lives.
- Where are they going?
- Where are they now?
- Where have they been?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then you are trapped inside a vortex of worry and sadness.”
In 20 seconds, he described my situation perfectly.
I didn’t have a clear plan for my future, so I didn’t know where I was going.
I was lost.
Peterson went on to describe a writing program that he developed with a group of other psychologists called the Self Authoring Suite. The purpose of the course was to help people sort out the story of their lives.
I did a deep dive on the program immediately and learned there were three components:
- Past authoring
- Present authoring (broken into virtues and vices)
- Future authoring
At this point, I had been keeping a journal for more than 6 years, so I was no stranger to the power of private free writing.
I had already thoroughly explored my past and present.
All my skeletons were ventilating quite nicely on the front lawn.
What I needed was a plan for the future.
The beauty of the future authoring program is in its simplicity.
The basic idea is that when you have no plan for the future, then a bad one is better than what you have.
And once you begin implementing your bad plan, all the reasons it sucks become obvious.
Then you update the plan.
And boy did I make a bad plan.
It was elaborate (more than 40 pages) and ambitious.
I was going to earn enough from real estate to move into my own condo in the city.
Then I was going to quit real estate, find a job at the local university, and get my PhD program paid for as I pursued a career in clinical psychology.
If you know me now, then you can see the absurdity of this terrible plan.
But I got to work on it. I trusted it. And I implemented it.
I made $3800 the following January (which allowed me to catch up my credit card minimums).
Then I made $14000 in February and a mind-boggling $35000 in May.
I couldn’t believe it was possible to make that much money in a month.
And I was hooked on entrepreneurship. I never turned back.
When I compared the $14000 I made in February to the $20/hour I would have made at the local university, I decided I could probably make this real estate thing work after all.
And guess what? I updated the plan.
I took the plan that I had so meticulously drawn out three months earlier, stripped out the parts I knew wouldn’t work (pretty much everything about PhDs and universities), and filled the gaps with better ideas.
I worked that plan for another 90 days.
Then I updated it.
And I have continued to follow this draft and edit rhythm for my plan for the future ever since.
Fast forward six years.
I have accomplished all my major real estate goals.
I’ve sold a lot of property, built a sales team that helped lots of people sell lots of property, flipped and wholesaled a lot of houses. Hell, I even hosted my own national television show.
As 2023 gave rise to 2024, I set my sights on a new business goal: to learn how to make and sell digital products.
I got tired of seeing all these absurd stories online:
- “23 year old streamer earns $12 million in 2023.”
- “18 year old influencer nets $7 million in first year online”
- “65 year old retiree reinvents a new career on the internet and becomes millionaire”
I kept asking myself, what the hell are these people doing to get these results?
Then I found Dan Koe and his Digital Economics course.
Dan is one of the people you read about in those headlines.
He is 30 years old and did more than $4 million in revenue in his online business in 2023 after being in business only 4 years.
He packaged all he has learned about building businesses online into a digital master course you can purchase and move through at your own pace.
Access to the entire course costs $1000.
The information I found inside this course filled the gaps I needed in the plan I had at the time.
One idea stands out above the rest:
Don’t wait to build your first digital product.
Think back over the last couple of years.
What’s one product that you couldn’t shut up about? That you had to tell all your friends about?
Take that product, make your own version of it, make your version better in all the ways you can, then sell it.
THAT WAS IT.
The answer for me couldn’t have been clearer.
Future Authoring was that product.
At this point, I have done future authoring more than 13 times myself and I bet 100 people have done the program at my recommendation.
By guiding many others through the process and doing it myself a bunch, I have found lots of things I would do differently.
And this is how the idea for Business Authoring was born.
I am building an online course to merge Future Authoring with Digital Economics. A future authoring for aspiring and professional entrepreneurs who want create a plan for their business or update the one they already have.
A future authoring program for entrepreneurs.
If you want to be part of the beta test for this program when I finish, sign up for early release here.
If you want to get started writing the story of your life right away, I highly recommend you checkout the entire self authoring suite.
- If you are struggling with integrating experiences in your past, start with past authoring.
- if you are struggling to understand why you do what you do in the present, start with present authoring.
- If you are struggling to make a plan for your future, start with future authoring.
You will get out of all these programs what you put in.
And if you put a lot in, I promise you will change your future for the better.
You can change anything in your life for the better by writing about it.
When you write, the future is bright.