Learn from my mistakes.
My 33rd year was the worst and the best year of my life.
My partner left me by phone from another country after seven years of a relationship.
My grandfather (who had raised me as my father) died.
My best friend, with whom I had a startup, kicked me out of the company I had helped to build.
I was broke.
I gained 40 kg overweight.
And I lost the house I lived in.
But it was also the best year of my life because I rose from the ashes like a phoenix.
Today, I am 42 years old and still recovering, but I see light at the end of the tunnel.
That’s why I want to share with you a theory that started as an intuition and ended up being true for me, and I think it can help you rebuild your life if you have gone through something similar to what I went through.
The Theorie of the editable past
Your past does not determine your future. It is your future that determines your past. Read it again.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs was wrong when he suggested in his Stanford speech that the dots connect backward and that you magically understand everything.
Instead, you have to choose which points from the past you want to highlight so that they connect with your present and lead you to the desired future.
Therefore, the past is modifiable.
Life can only be lived in the present; therefore, the past is a story we tell ourselves in real time, giving us identity.
So, if you change the story you tell yourself (your past), you change your identity and, consequently, your future.
Realizing this blew my mind and got me out of the shit.
Change your past.
Didn’t it ever happen to you that every day seemed like a lifetime in your youth?
It was a time of collecting experiences. And thanks to them, you can change your destiny.
Those millions of experiences you probably have stored in your memory’s file cabinet.
This file cabinet is subdivided into folders.
- The folder of romantic relationships.
- The folder of creativity.
- The folder of lost friends and contacts.
- The folder of hobbies.
- The folder of past jobs.
- The folder of things that went well.
- The folder of disappointments, betrayals, and things that went wrong.
- The folder of enemies.
- The folder of [Insert here any topic you have spent time on in the past].
The point is to choose a future and take a leap of faith.
When I hit rock bottom, I did the famous two-sheet exercise.
- Sheet A: describe my current situation (an unhealthy, overweight, addicted, bankrupt guy)
- Sheet B: describe the ideal situation I want to be in the future (A healthy person, free of addictions, with money saved and working in something he is passionate about).
After that, you realize the gap between who you are and who you want to become.
That gap can be closed by looking for a new job, finding a new partner, doing sports, eating better, generating new sources of income, you name it.
The important thing is to take the step and move from Sheet A (who you currently are) to Sheet B (who you want to become).
The theory of the magic dwarfs that modify the past.
As I began to become my new self, I realized that the dwarfs in my mind opened the folders of the past and used memories I thought I had forgotten, highlighting them to shift the milestones of my Sheet A self and craft a new narrative that would lead me to become the guy described on Sheet B.
Note: the dwarfs of my mind are the way I name the neurological process that changes some memories for others.
I reinvented myself as a writer and began to modify my past and displace the milestones that constituted my loser narrative — my alcoholism, my financial problems, my grief over the loss of my partner — with other memories that I thought I had forgotten, and that fostered my new identity as a writer.
Conclusions
- When you choose a different future, the dwarfs in your mind open the corresponding folders and begin to weave a constellation of new past moments that become the foundation on which you will build your future and your unique identity.
- Depending on the potential future you aspire to, your head will choose different checkpoints in your past. — If you want to be a chef, your brain will start remembering food-related moments. The same goes for if you want to be a paramedic, a teacher, a computer scientist, or whatever.
- As you pursue your new future, new memories from the past will become more vivid, displacing the ones that currently give you identity so that you can achieve a different identity.
Takeaway
In short, choose a future. As crazy as it may seem, the future you select will modify the stories you tell yourself in your head and the memories from your past to sustain that new personal narrative.
This is why the law of attraction works: when you visualize a better future, the dwarfs in your mind have no choice but to search in your memory’s trunk for memories capable of sustaining the future you aspire to.
Ultimately, you realize that depending on the future you decide to focus on, you will have one past or another; you will bring some memories to the light of your consciousness and bury others in the darkness of your subconscious.
So, choose your future wisely, and your past (the stories you tell yourself) will improve.
A virtual hug
AG
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