Your (future) life as a movie

Where are you headed?

When Jo and I got married, someone gave us the advice, “Every day, your relationship will grow or die a little bit, there’s no such thing as staying the same.”

While doing wonders for our relationship, I’ve also subconsciously applied it to so many other things in life. Every day I’m either getting better or atrophying at:

• My body via exercising

• My mindset via what I read/consume

• Our business via where I’m choosing to spend my time

But - for my analytical brain, this perspective immediately raised a problem - how do I measure “better” or “worse”?

Whether it’s our relationship, my fitness, or the business, without having something to measure against it’s difficult some days to know if I’ve improved or declined.

For example, let’s look at fitness

• if my goal is to be a bodybuilder (it’s not, but I’m currently reading Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it was his for a long time), going for a long hike would most likely atrophy my muscle definition or take me further from my goal

• my actual fitness goals are about being able to do the things that bring me joy, meaning that a long hike is bringing me closer to my goal.

How is this applicable to business?

This week, we chatted with @theaashimaverma about our experience transitioning our business from an agency/service-based business to an education/coaching business and what we learned along the way.

Asshima had reached out because she’s considering making a similar change. As she shared that she was starting to be burnt out with her current business and what she was exploring & learning about to possibly change, it felt shockingly similar to when I left corporate.

Storytime…

After I finished my MBA at IU in 2020 (mountain top experience), I got a job in the pharmaceutical industry and burnt out in under 12 months working fully remote (valley experience), not because of the technical job responsibilities, but the stress the structure of it was causing me.

When I joined Jo working at our company, I was so excited about what I was leaving.

I was so focused on what I was leaving that I didn’t do a great job of looking forward to what would actually fulfill me. All I knew was that I enjoyed working with Jo more than the environment in my corporate, so I switched jobs based on vibes.

Over the years since then, I’ve started to describe this as being “pushed” to join Jo rather than “pulled” because once the honeymoon period of working together wore off, I started to recognize some of the same feelings creeping in that I had felt in corporate.

I wasn’t feeling pulled to work each day; it was slowly becoming just another job.

To put this in the framework from the first section, I never defined what my personal goal with our business was so I had no way to measure (and control) if each day it was getting better or worse. So I defaulted to comparing to:

• Jo was creatively fulfilled by much of what our business was doing

• Our clients were passionate about what their business was doing

• On socials, everyone was posting about “major wins” (I logically knew much of it was marketing..)

Honestly, the answer comes from looking inward to find what mattered to me, not externally at everyone else.

Once I started doing the introspective work, we were able to start making changes to our business so that each day is better than the previous one as we’re evolving as a business. This brings us to today:

• I love writing my emails each week and I’m going on a year of almost weekly sends

• We’re a coaching business now

• I’m brainstorming daily on how I can use Lyndon’s List to turn me into my grad school dream of being a tech founder (currently cooking)

Where do you start?

The future.

Here are three tangible journal questions to ‘future state’ your life and allow yourself to dream about what the best version could be. Since I love movies and television, my process is all about making a movie about my future best life: