If I asked you to look back 10 years and talk about how much you’ve grown, you’d likely have many stories to show your increased compassion, knowledge, income, and many other things.

On the other hand, if I asked you about your potential growth in the next 10 years, most people don’t see themselves changing very much. This is known as the “end of history illusion“.

In a great article in the Harvard Business Review, author Benjamin Hardy shares this thought:

Despite awareness that our past self is clearly different than our present self, we tend to think that who we are right now is the “real” and “finished” version of ourselves, and our future self will be basically the same as who we are today. Gilbert puts it simply: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

While I have things that I do every week to help improve myself (reading, this blog, exercise, etc), it’s indeed a fuzzy picture of where I’d like to be in a decade.

Hardy shares some great tips in the article, but I found the biggest to be the idea of changing your identity narrative. In his words:

Your identity narrative is the story you tell about yourself: past, present, and future. If your identity is rooted in your past and present alone, that fixed mindset can make personality feel permanent. But if you focus on envisioning your future self, instead of fixating on your current self, it becomes possible to change your identity narrative.

It’s similar to what Carol Dweck shared in her TED Talk called “The power of believing that you can improve”, seen here:

In her case it was more about helping those that know they’re struggling, but it can apply to all of us. Of course, it doesn’t just happen by itself. You’ll get a little better at things as time goes on, but generally speaking experience isn’t the same as practice. If you want to get better, you need to work on it.

Your future self is not someone you discover, but someone you decide to be. I’m happy with where I am these days, but I hope I’m not the same 10 years from now.

We’re at an amazing point in history, and one that will be changing (for the worse?) as AI continues to develop. Between tools like YouTube (free), summaries of books (many free) and the books themselves (not free, but more easily available than any time in history), you can learn whatever you want whenever you want.

In a recent episode of the Founders podcast, David was talking about the book “Working Backwards” about the history of Amazon. From the show:

You’ll be shocked. If you go through this book, you’ll be shocked at how many ideas Jeff (Bezos) got from reading a paper, reading a book, having a conversation that he used inside of Amazon. If you’re paying attention, the whole world is a classroom.

The alternative, as Seth Godin recently shared, is to be “willfully uninformed“:

Today, if there’s something I don’t know, it’s almost certainly because I haven’t cared enough to find out.

I don’t understand molecular biology, the history of Sardinia or much of agronomy–but that’s my choice. Now that information is widely and freely available, our sense of agency around knowledge needs to change.

As Seth says, it’s clearly your choice. You don’t have to read and you don’t have to find educational videos to deepen your knowledge. You can make the decision to stay willfully uninformed, but you also get to deal with the consequences of that, whatever they may be in your current stage of life.

With almost every book that I read, I read with the intention of digging in deep and then blog posts just happen to come out of it. A good example of that was Adam Grant’s “Think Again“, where I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, and it just happened to generate a number of great ideas for posts.

That was flipped when I recently read “Tribe of Mentors” by Tim Ferriss. Once I understood how the book was laid out, I read it specifically to put together a long series of posts about questions from the book.

So which way is better? I really don’t know.

I tend to think that both are valuable, just in slightly different ways. In either case I’m still digging in to learn and understand what they’re trying to say, so I don’t think there’s a downside to either technique.

Going forward I’ll still likely treat most books as I did with “Think Again”, largely because I don’t know what blog posts might even exist in them until I get there. I enjoy digging in and finding surprises along the way, and that’s what I’ll continue to do for most everything I read.