My Big, Hairy Why & My Future Self!

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Right from the onset, it is important for you to have a big, hairy why that drove you into the Wealthy Affiliate portal. It should be compelling enough to galvanize you into action when you run into a bump or out of steam in your WA journey. If you have never run out of motivation, it is a matter of time. Trust me. You will.

For me, my big hairy why is to pay back my wonderful wife for all she has done for me, and provide a formidable future for my kids.

The Love of my Life

My wife is the core reason why I need to succeed in Internet Marketing. We were high school lovers and were fortunate to make it to the registry and tie the knot as husband and wife. We love and have a great deal of admiration for each other. She trained to become a Registered Nurse and out of the love I have for kids I became a teacher. With our combined pay, we found it difficult to make ends meet in Nigeria. Those ideals we had dreamt about before we got married were slipping through our fingers.

My wife came up with a solution. She would go to the US and work as a nurse.Her close friend had done the same and offered to help her. Then she would file for our kids and me to join her. I put up some initial resistance.

My resistance stemmed from the fact that she could not tell me how long it would take her to regularize her stay and file for the kids and me to come and join her. But the following day when I found the niara( the Nigerian currency) stacked ever so weakly against the dollar, I relented and allowed her to have her way.

She traveled to the American embassy in Abuja ( Nigeria’s capital city ) and came back with the American visa firmly stamped in her passport. There was a drought of nursing professionals then in the American healthcare industry and US had to look up to developing countries to fill the yawning gap!

Needless to say, the five years I spent in Nigeria apart from my wife were the most agonising period of my life.

Running Forward while Looking Back

Now that I have a compelling why, what do I do with it? I can do either of two things: try to realize it with a hindsight on my past or create a compelling future and invest it with an equally compelling why. I do not want to be running forward and looking back. That’s a sure prescription for disaster. But that’s precisely what we do when we allow our past to dictate our future



Most people’s past is scarred with trauma.How many of us still remember that hapless teacher who taunted us and told us to our face that we were not good at Math and to this day we still remember it and find it difficult to solve the simplest Math problem! And how many of us allow the negativity of our past to flood our present and disallow us from achieving our whys?

My Future Self Concept

I was reading Benjamin Hardy’s book, “ Personality is not Permanent” and came across the Future Self concept. Basically, Dr Hardy believes you can create a future self using the power of your imagination. This concept is not new, it’s been around for a while. Dr Hardy merely re-branded it and gave it a new twist.

Albert Einstein, the renowned physicist has this to say of Imagination:

”Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Our imagination is a powerful creative tool we can put to use in creating our future self and employ it as a filter for all we do instead of our past that is filled with trauma and hooks.

It is the same thing we do as affiliate marketers when we come up with a persona of our potential client based on such demographic indicators as sex, age, income, interests so we can laser-target them in our contents.

We can come up with a future self based on our knowledge of an insanely successful internet marketer we are familiar with.We can add in all the little details and nuances about him. It could even be Kyle or Carson or a better version of ourselves. I will opt to go for a better version of myself but with all the resources and capability of a Kyle or Carson!

Get Close and Familiar with your Future Self

Make sure you get to know your future self as you know yourself. Ensure he/she is well delineated in your mind’s eye. Be able to visualize him/her. Talk to him as you would talk to a friend. Seek his opinion especially as it relates to his area of specialization. Journal about him daily.

Advantages of having a Future Self

The first advantage that comes to mind is that the idea of a future self makes you pivot forward to your future self instead of looking back to your current or past self that is cratered with a lot of pain and negativity that could effectively stop you from achieving your goals.

Dr Hardy pointed out in his book that your vision of where you want to be shapes your identity. Your identity in turn shapes your behavior and before you know it, your behavior becomes your personality. So you become who you constantly envision yourself to be. This realization can amp your chance of realizing your big why in a timely fashion.

Conclusion

As we inch towards our big WHY, let your future pull you, not the past pushing you.You should be striving towards your future self by producing more, creating more, finishing more conversations even if they are imperfect. As your future self beckons to you,you will soon find out that it is better to be prolific than to be perfect, to be done with a project than to finish it because finishing may take eternity to perfect.



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Recent Comments

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Dadaz, I enjoyed reading your post. I am a romantic at heart and love that you and your wife are still in love after all this time. Marrying your high school sweetheart could not have been easy because you both still had a lot of growing to do.

A lot of what you wrote resonated with me because I still struggle with the misperceptions of the world. I am trying to move forward and look towards the future with less of looking back at the past. It is not easy but is possible.

--Sandi

It's quite possible to have a zero past but it takes a lot of training and discipline. Keep at it. You'll get there.

Mine is much simpler, Dada! I want enough money to pay my obligations, help a few people along the way, and have a modest retirement! Anything else is pure gravy!

Jeff

General, your expectations are so modest and achievable.

Ha ha! Dada! I don't want to be greedy! I am blessed!

Thank you very much for sharing.
It must of been so hard without your wife.

The pain of separation was quite intense. Thank you.

You are very welcome my friend

This comes up in many many personal development/self help books Dada, the idea of the future self.
It is good to have a powerful why and the imagination to see where you are going. It does make a big difference.
Great post.

You are so right. Having a big enough why and being able to visualize your future self in bold relief can help you realize your goals in a short time.

I enjoyed reading your post, thanks for sharing.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

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