Jay Papasan:
One of the most powerful tools we use in our ONE Thing coaching program is the gift of imagination. How can we tap into our imagination to get the gift of perspective without the pain of actually having to live a future that we want to explore?
And the tool that we use is called the Someday Letter. There’s lots of different versions out there, but we have our very own. It allows us to go into the future, which can be a little scary for a lot of us – it certainly was for me – and visit where we want to go, see it in as complete a vision as we can make of it, and then with that perspective, start navigating our present to get there faster and more assuredly.
And I can tell you, as someone who’s been teaching this for years, I resisted it. I was nervous. There was something about trying to get that specific about my future that was holding me back. It took me 18 months to get there.
This episode is about the magic I found on the other side of my resistance, and that you can, too. So, today, we’re going deep into one of our favorite tools, the Someday Letter.
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Jay Papasan:
[00:01:07] I’m Jay Papasan. And this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results
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Jay Papasan:
So, what is a Someday Letter and why is it important? The short form is we teach people to write a letter to themselves in the future, at least ten years in the future. The whole point of it is to go way beyond where our current imagination extends. Most of us are really good at setting annual goals. We wanna go way beyond where our logic is engaged, and we wanna use calculators and numbers to look at our future and really cast a vision.
It’s about giving ourselves permission to actually dream. And that dream, when we do it properly, gives us tons and tons of clarity, and that clarity is what we harness in the present. There’s lots of research about how this works and why it works. A lot of psychologists will call it temporal distancing. It’s our ability to get perspective by stepping out of ourselves.
It’s kind of like if we gave advice to a young person in our life. Hey, imagine you’re giving advice to your child or that favorite nephew. We get perspective on our own lives by stepping out of our bodies. That’s the magic of this. It also gives us clarity, and it helps us organize our goals.
Now, in The ONE Thing concept, we latched onto it because we wanna work backwards from a vision instead of looking forwards. If you look at your life going forwards, there is an infinite number of options for how you could choose to spend the next day. The question we want to answer is: how can I invest my time in alignment with the future I want?
When we work backwards from a future goal, it’s crazy how many fewer choices we have. We’re setting an annual goal that has to be in alignment with our five-year goals, that should be in alignment with this future. It takes a lot of options off the table, and that’s the second benefit. It keeps us from running in circles.
You’ve heard me talk in this podcast about one of the chapters we explored, but cut. The low-hanging fruit is a lie. If we’re always chasing the next big gain, you can literally run in circles year after year and get no closer to the future you ultimately want. Short-term gains are short-term gains. We’re trying to invest our times to get to the future we truly wanna create, and those are not small gains.
When we have a Someday Letter with our core values as a compass, we can make great decisions day to day, and we will know, we’ll have real evidence that we’re investing our time appropriately to make that vision happen.
Now, before I continue, I’ll just give you a quick resource. I’m gonna share it again later in the episode, but in case you’re short on time and you really want me to get to the point, we are providing our workbook, usually reserved for our coaching clients and paying customers, at a URL where you can go and download it for free. If you go to the1thing.com with the number one, the1thing.com/mysomedayletter, you can download this resource for free.
Now, the surface, this may sound a little simplistic, right? I’m gonna write a letter to myself 10 years from now. It’s a little bit more than that. We’ve got a refined process, and there’s some really good science about how to do it and how not to do it. For instance, all the science would tell us, casting a vision of the future, it’s not manifesting. Just ’cause you write it down is not gonna make it true. You have to methodically work from that vision and set actual goals and milestones so that you can get to it.
Manifestation sounds great, but there’s no evidence to back it up. But you do want a vision, and a vision in itself has gravity. Because it works for you, that’s the thing that you truly want, it’s aligned with who you are and who you want to become, it has a kind of gravity. Instead of pushing yourself, you now have something pulling you forward.
So, it is a bit of a process. It doesn’t take that long. And in this episode, we’ll walk you through how to do it and provide the tools, so that you can do it for yourself the right way. Since The ONE Thing came out in 2013, we’ve been teaching the wisdom of setting someday goals. But the Someday Letter didn’t really arrive as one of our tools until the fall of 2023. Coach Jordan Fried, who you’ve met on our episodes here on the podcast in the past, he facilitated a session at our annual gathering, and it was on the Someday Letter. And at its heart, it’s a series of thoughtful questions about what your future might look like.
And I looked at those questions, and the very first one is, “Who’s with you and who’s not?” And the first thing I thought, I turned to my wife, is, “Our beloved dog, Taco, is not gonna be here in 10 years.” And I got a little choked up, and I shut down right there on the spot. One, I was a co-host of the event. A lot of people were having an emotional experience with it. And for whatever reason, I didn’t have the courage in that moment to do it. And then, I kept putting it off, and I kept putting it off, and I kept putting it off.
And Jordan Freed was my coach at the time, and he kept getting after me, nagging me from a loving perspective, “Hey, I really think you should go ahead and set aside time to write your Someday Letter.” And I would point to my excellence at setting five-year goals. I’d been setting five-year goals since before The ONE Thing came out, and we’d gotten really good, both individually and as a family, at setting five-year goals and figuring out how to hit them. Hey, it’s just one more step. I can see five years in the future. What’s the real value of a someday goal?
I have no idea what my emotional resistance was. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was trying to get specific, not only in what I wanted to do, but in where I was going to be doing it. And the logic brain in me was starting to shut down. Like dreaming, truly dreaming without boundaries, for some reason, it made me very uncomfortable. But after 18 months, I finally battened down the hatches, took some time on a Saturday morning, got out my journal, got out the exercise, and started working through it. And I wrote a four-page letter to myself that has absolutely been transformational for me because it revealed a lot of goals that I hadn’t been courageous enough to articulate, what my days looked like, who I was working with, and what we’d be doing. And that clarity has been a massive gift in the years since.
I’ve started saying no to things that I’d said yes to in the past because they made a lot of sense from a business perspective, but they no longer aligned with the future I was trying to create. What I got so clear about is the things that gave me joy on a day-to-day basis were work that made an impact, and work very specifically around doing things like this podcast, creating content that helps other people. Books, newsletters, I wanted to do it with people that I trust, loved, and enjoyed. I really wanted to curate a circle of coworkers and friends and coaches that actually filled me up and energized me day to day.
And I know that’s a little bit idealistic. Anybody you work with for a long period of time, you’re gonna get in and out of seasons of happiness and conflict. That’s called a relationship. And I’m realistic about it, but I wanted to be more careful about making those selections. And I started to narrow it down. And I also threw some stuff out there that anybody who spent much time with me in the last few years knows, like, I’m on a quest to go to all seven continents. I wasn’t sure that was living in me, but I started listing all of the adventures on my bucket list that I would have completed in those 10 years.
And when I looked at my future self, there were values that I wanted to live or that were living in me that I hadn’t articulated yet. Adventure, travel, friendship, they were all up there, maybe in my top five, but because they sat outside of impact, family, and abundance, I wasn’t setting goals around them. And so it gave me a lot of gaps to fill in my five-year goals. And ever since then, I’ve been setting them and knocking them down.
So, that’s the gift that’s on the other side of any resistance you might feel. You may identify values that you want to bring to your life that are currently missing, and maybe they’re a little scary because you’re afraid if you put them out there, you might fail. That’s normal, folks. But if you don’t put them out there, getting to them will just be an accident. It’ll just be something that happens to you instead of something that you get to do for yourself.
So, that’s the magic and gift of this exercise. By getting real clarity on the vision of your future, you’re gonna see gaps in your dreams that you didn’t know existed. You articulate the future that you want to create. And that gift in itself is an anchor that you can tie a rope to in the future and start pulling yourself forward to day after day, month after month, and year after year. It gives alignment to all the goals that you’ll be setting today and tomorrow and the next year.
And every so often, you get to go back and update it. And what’s really cool is that you will discover, I promise you, that things that you thought set 10 years or farther in the future were actually possible in a lot less time. Because you articulated them, because you got clarity, you started pursuing them. And guess what? They were not that far out of reach. And I’ve hit some of those milestones early around my work and my relationships, and they have made my life better on a day-to-day basis. And I want this for you, too.
So, before I dive into a little bit more detail about doing the work and where you can get the tools, let’s take a quick break and I’ll see you on the other side.
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Jay Papasan:
All right. So, in this last segment, let’s set you up for success. So, I think the first step is to realize you don’t need clarity to write your Someday Letter. Writing your Someday Letter will give you clarity. If you’re thinking the other way, you’ve got it backwards. I can tell you truthfully that I thought I needed to be more clear to write it, but it was the act of doing it that brought the clarity.
And here’s the thing, your first draft is your first draft. When you write it, I would probably encourage you to share it with a loved one, your spouse, your best friend, your coach, and ask what they see is in it and what’s missing. Time and time again, when my coaching clients have shared theirs with me, I’ve been able to point out that some of their current goals are not in their future. “Oh, this thing that you say is your number one goal this year, why doesn’t that exist ten years from now? It’s so important to you today, is it really important to you at all? Or is it just something you thought you had to do to get where you thought you wanted to go?” So, it allows you also to say no in the present.
So, first off, download the resource, and it’ll be in the podcast notes of this episode if you’re out on a run and really wanna grab it. Set aside thirty or forty minutes. That’s about how long it takes us to facilitate this in our trainings, and just sit there and be quiet with the questions and work through them one by one. Not all of them will apply. There may be questions about children that you don’t currently have. There may be questions about wanting to have children that you don’t currently plan to have. But there’ll also be questions about your relationships with relatives. Maybe you’re estranged, and in the future, you’re not. Maybe you’ve got friends that you don’t currently have.
What are the hobbies that you’re not currently finding the time to do that you will do in the future? Maybe you’ve taken up a new language, French, Italian, or Spanish. Maybe you’ve taken up a new hobby. It allows you to walk through all of the angles that we’ve found, not just professional ones, but what’s happening in your personal life. Who are you hanging out with? How do you spend your time? What skills are you building? What books are you reading? What life, ultimately, are you leading?
And it just takes thirty minutes, maybe an hour at the most, to draft it out. What you do then is let it sit for a day and then go back and read it. I can tell you that I carry a copy around with me. It’s in my notebook where I keep my goals, and whenever I’m looking at my goals and I feel a little lost, I can read my short Someday Letter, and I’ll often make little notes on it as I go because I’ll realize, “You know what? I don’t think that should still be there,” or, “You know what? I’m gonna add a little bit more detail to it.” But once you have it, you can start to work on it and keep it in your present.
At the minimum, we encourage our clients to read their someday letter at least once a year. Revisit it when they’re setting their next set of annual goals to make sure that they’re setting up their next year to be in alignment with the future that they dream to have.
So, here’s a quick hack for making that happen. Usually, you’re gonna be planning your goals for the following year, late November, December, at the worst, in January. So, you could do right now on the fly, just say, “Hey, Siri,” or use your favorite calendaring app. Just go ahead and set a recurring reminder for that period of time, say December 15th or January 1, and all it has to say is, “Revisit my Someday Letter.” Once it’s on the calendar, that little trigger, we all know, gives you a much higher chance to actually do it and not forget it.
So, it’s not a really complicated thing, but there is a process to it, and you need to follow the process and realize that you’re casting a vision of what you truly want, and you have to give yourself permission to dream. To truly dream without boundaries, because who knows what’s possible in 10 years? We often overestimate what we can accomplish in any given year, but we vastly underestimate not only what we can accomplish, but who we can become in five to 10 years.
Think back five to 10 years ago. How much have you grown? How much have you changed? Are the challenges you faced 10 years ago things that even scare you today? Or have you just conquered them because life moves on and we keep growing? That’s gonna be true in the future as well, and that’s part of the richness of this discovery and this process.
So, the first thing you do, get the workbook, make space, write your letter, and then spend some time revisiting the letter. And if you’re truly daring, get perspective from others. I shared mine with my wife. I shared mine with my number one at work. I shared mine with my coach because I wanted them to know where I was going, ’cause they can also hold me accountable to staying the course.
When they realize what’s important to me, not just today, but in the future, they can help me see when I’m making a mistake with a decision in the present. If you’re one of those people and you’re willing to share, I hope that you’ll go find me on Instagram or Facebook. I’m at @jaypapasan. I’m pretty easy to find. I’m the only Jay Papasan on earth at this moment, as far as Google has to say, so I can’t really hide. But if you’re willing to share some of yours, tag me and share it. DM me. I’d love to read it. I love to know that other people overcame their resistance, like I did, and tapped into the magic of truly dreaming about their future and planting a seed there that they can be working backwards from, so that their present has more meaning.
I can tell you this for a fact. The hard things that you will have to do on the journey are hard. Some things are harder to build than others. But when it’s imbued with meaning, it’s a lot less stressful. It becomes fulfilling because you know that this hard work is building a future that you truly, truly want.
So, as we do in all of our episodes, we’re gonna end with the weekly challenge. My challenge to you is to download the workbook and actually do the work. You’ll just have to block about an hour of time, probably this week would be best. Don’t delay it like I did 18 months and suspend your journey to a magic future.
But if that’s too much for you to go, I would just invite you to journal one simple question. Ten years out, what work will fill your days? And you can make it whatever it is you want. The job that you have today doesn’t have to be a job you have in 10 years. You can probably learn and train new skills, find your way into any organization, or even build your own business. So, if you don’t wanna do the whole thing, just answer this one question: ten years from now, what work will fill my days?
I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. I promise you, there’s a big payoff if you’ll do the work. We’ll see you again next week.
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Disclaimer:
This podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts, and opinions of the guest represent those of the guest and not ProduKtive or Keller Williams Realty LLC and their affiliates and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, tax, or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or results from using the information.
