Make Things Easier for Your Future Self

Thiago talk about this idea of making things easier for your future self.

You know, this is one of the more big picture ones, I think, when I look at people's careers. You know, I remember when I. When I graduated from college and I was. I was looking at different careers in different businesses, and I noticed some people over time worked harder. They had to work harder and harder and harder. And other people had to work less and less and less. And there was such a clear divergence. You know, Maybe in your 20s it wasn't clear. They were kind of on the same path. In their 30s, it started to get more clear. By the time they hit their 40s, 50s, 60s, it's like two completely different lives. I would see my friend's parents and in there, at the time they were in their 50s and some were just working like I couldn't imagine. Even in my 20s, I couldn't imagine working that hard. They were often doing consulting work or professional services, or they were executives in companies and other people, whether they had a career or a business, it didn't matter so much. They had a much easier lifestyle and often were producing results with much less effort. And the difference, I think, is leverage. We talk a lot about leverage in our work either. Day by day, you're building some sort of leverage. And you can think of leverage as power. Some source of power, some source of influence that is increasing with time. You can think of an investing account that you're putting money into every month as a form of leverage. Over time, that's going to get more and more powerful. A blog that you regularly publish to is a form of leverage. Every post you add adds not one post of value, but adds kind of exponential value. The posts and the ideas start connecting with each other. And so what I like to do, you know, there's different kinds of leverage. There's financial leverage, there's relationship leverage, there's health leverage. But I think one of the most powerful as well as one of the most accessible to anyone, is ideal leverage, intellectual leverage. If you have a knowledge base, a knowledge base is. It's like a database, but it's not just data, ones and zeros. It's like knowledge, wisdom, the things you've learned from your personal experience. That is something that compounds over time. It grows on itself. It interconnects and has a kind of like a. Like a cat, like a catalyst. And I think that's what we're doing, building up this, these knowledge assets is making it each day's work a little bit easier for tomorrow's self for next week, self for next month's self.

You know what's crazy? What second Brain did for me transcends all of this. What it did was it made me treat my future self as if that person was real. And it didn't just have an impact with my ideas, it had an impact on the way I eat, the quality of my sleep, my fitness routines. Because for the first time in my life, I was actually creating something for future David. And I was thinking, what will 30 year old David, what will 40 year old, 50, 60, 70 year old David want? And normally it's called the end of history illusion. You think that the person that you are now is the person that you're always gonna be. But when you have this second brain, you're always thinking about what your future self is gonna want. And it becomes this radical shift in your own identity, treating who you're going to be in the future as somebody worth considering. Like a wife, like a sister, like a mother. And when that happens, you're able to act with more direction, more diligence, and live a healthier life.

Yeah, I think so. And here's the trick though, that makes doing this with ideas so powerful. Usually, I mean, what we're talking about here is delayed gratification. Usually it's a trade off. I can favor myself now or I can favor myself in the future. Like with finances, you think, I can spend the money now, I can spend the money money later, that you can't really spend it both times, but with ideas you can. So what I notice is when I write something down, I get a benefit in that instant. I get the benefit of seeing my idea in a concrete form. I get the benefit of having it not on my mind and not having to keep track of it. I get the benefit of sharing it with someone else. And so we're talking about this future benefit and it's hard to plan for the far future, Right? But that is just a secondary benefit. It would be worth doing, I truly believe, and I know it would be worth doing, even if the only benefit I get is right now and all the future benefits are just icing on the cake.