The question to ask your younger self
TRANSCRIPT
In this audiocast, I invite you to join me on a slightly provocative thought experiment: Imagine you could reach back through time to ask your younger self a simple question: What do you want for me?
Not what did you want for me, but what do you want for me now. Because this conversation is happening in the present — and because that vision your younger self had remains alive — and actionable — in you today. That’s my argument….and here’s why.
I came across this quote recently.
“Discipline is remembering who you said you wanted to be.”
There are four important parts to that idea:
1 | You had a vision for yourself
One is simply that you had a vision for who you wanted to become. It was specific, ambitious, thoughtful and achievable. And it came from you. Decades ago, for instance, I had dreams of becoming an oceanographer, a literary travel writer, a jazz bassist and a spy.
2 | It was about who, not what, you wanted to become
Second, your vision is about who — not what — you wanted to be. We often default to defining ourselves by what we are, professionally. But for many of us, what we do for money is a superficial proxy for who we are, really, if or when our jobs disappear. When I left The New York Times, I began the uncomfortable exercise of figuring out who Paul von Zielbauer — no longer from The Times — actually was.
3 | You spoke your vision
The third important part of this idea that “Discipline is remembering who you said you wanted to be” is that verb — said. You spoke this vision. You expressed it to family, friends. And speaking it put life into it, whether or not you knew it at the time. Back in 1993, I’d talked about traveling the world so much that, after a Chicago taxi smashed the front end of my trusty Mazda 626, I used the insurance money to instead buy a plane ticket to Hanoi and ride my mountain bike through Vietnam.
4 | It starts with having the discipline
The fourth important part of this idea is that it starts with discipline. It takes discipline and self-belief to move the idea of who you said you wanted to be from nostalgia and memory to the present and actionable.
After I left The Times, which I did because its vision for me had become a pale shade of what I knew I could accomplish, I started a social enterprise, called Roadmonkey [https://www.oprah.com/world/philanthropic-adventure-travel-roadmonkey], that combined ass-kicking physical adventures in remote foreign lands with hands-on volunteer projects for local communities in need. I had no idea how to do it, and it didn’t make much money, but it was the purest expression of who I am and what I believe in as I could have imagined.
What are the purest expressions of who you are?
I suppose starting Roadmonkey, and building playgrounds and school rooms and chicken farms for struggling, disregarded communities in Vietnam, Peru, Tanzania and Nicaragua was my version of remembering who I said I wanted to be. (I just wish I’d been smart enough to figure out how to make a living wage from it.)
It was me asking my younger self: what do you want for me? As fate would have it, I had to ask that question yet again in 2023, when my last salaried position — head of content for a Bay Area venture capital firm — was terminated with prejudice.
“Hey, it’s me again. Yeah, I know. So, one more time: what do you want for me?”
I’ve written about that experience in a different post, about aging with resilience [https://www.agingwithstrength.com/p/aging-with-resilience-in-an-unstable], but I raise it here because many Gen X, young Boomers and even late Millennials are now going through a reckoning of forced reinvention thanks to a combination of old-school ageism and the corporate imperative to cut workforces to the bone, because…AI!
What’s in your “radiantly imagined future”?
I have a feeling it’s going to get much worse. If it doesn’t, I still encourage you to reach back through the years to ask your younger self what she or he wants for you. It’s not a question born of desperation but of determination: to live as fully and completely as possible with the years you still have. Or as we used to say at Roadmonkey, to live like you mean it.
Speaking of which: Maybe my single favorite line in literature is from an obscure F. Scott Fitzgerald short story called “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”:
“It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future.”
Encouraging you to pose this question to your younger self, about what he or she wants for you, is another way of pushing you to think about and define your radiantly imagined future. That’s where the discipline comes in: to imagine radiantly, even fiercely, who you will become, even well into middle age or older adulthood.
Nothing I’m saying here requires making radical changes to life as you know it—unless that’s what you want. It does require re-connecting to your innate understanding that you’re absolutely capable of so much more than you think you are, if you just give yourself a chance to prove it to yourself.
Audaces fortuna iuvat (fortune helps those who dare)
After successfully completing far-flung Roadmonkey expeditions — cycling through the highlands of Vietnam, or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or horsebacking through Patagonia sheep country, followed by those several days of hands-on volunteer work — people would often return home with a burning sense of mission and purpose and belief to keep that momentum going.
Many ended their jobs or the relationships that weren’t working for them, and began doing the things that matched their visions of who they said they wanted to be.
Roadmonkey is dead, unfortunately. But you aren’t.
So what are you going to do about it?
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