“Imagination rules the world.” -Napoleon

There’s a phrase that I heard all the time growing up: “Success is the journey, not the destination.”

Motivational statements like these are nice to hear. But they’re useless if nobody tells you how to absorb it into your brain. So I’ll tell you how.

When you are in either work or leisure, a non insignificant portion of your stress/worry comes from a feeling of guilt in your heart.

When you are working hard, you feel guilty that you’re not having as much fun as you think you need to. “I should go out more”, you tell yourself. When you are partying a lot, you feel guilty that you’re not working towards your goals. “I need to lock in,” you tell yourself. As a result you have a life where it is impossible to ever be 100% present, and you often fall into this weird middle category where you always feel like you’re in the wrong place. This is especially common as I’ve seen among people in their 20s, especially those facing a quarter life crisis.^[1]

Deep down, you want to be the person who, when they work, goes all in and doesn’t worry about the fun they could be having instead. The person who, when they go out dancing, they can just be in the moment with their friends, not worrying about work.

To reach this state, we need to talk about the mental timeline of your brain.

Your mental timeline is your ability to connect what you are doing in the present with the future. You use this map constantly without noticing. As you buy a coffee, you intuitively visualize yourself holding it. Before you call your mom, you’ve already heard her pick up. You can imagine that every action you do is connected to a small preview of its future.

But here’s the thing: this mental timeline is very good at rendering only a few steps ahead.

It’s super easy to visualize the coffee you just ordered and feel the first sip. It’s easy to visualize your Friday night at the bar with your friends. But your long term goals, the virtues that should drive every decision of your life, they are foggy. You may see a house, people, money, or the word “success”, but nothing that you can concretely feel.

This fogginess in your brain leads to guilt in the present moment. When you can’t see why you’re on the road that you are, every hour on it feels like time that could’ve been spent elsewhere. When you go out with your friends but you feel guilty about not working, it’s because you don’t see the end vision of why you’re hanging out with your friends.

Let’s take Law School Larry as an example.

Larry is 24 and just graduated from UNC Chapel Hill. 3.95 GPA, majored in history, now he’s in UVA for law school.

He’s adjusted not badly - he’s made some friends, networked some, and secured a cushy internship next summer. But there’s one night where he’s grinding through a 50-page final paper at 2am and the familiar question enters his ahead: “What is all this actually for?” “What am I doing with my life?”

Let’s pause the story and take a look at his current motivation. Why is he in law school? Why is he going into north of $300,000 in debt for this piece of paper called a degree?

If we take a journey in his mind… Larry has this vague idea that upon graduation he’ll land a spot at a corporate law firm in New York, make a lot of money, and then the money problem will go away. That’s his most acute worry right now because he’s in debt.

Ok, so we have an internal motivator. Never worry about money again. This makes perfect sense, but it only goes a couple nodes ahead. And it’s not a specific moment. He just vaguely knows that he wants the flow of worry in about money to stop.

Let’s take everything a layer deeper, and imagine a scene 20 years in the future.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in 2046. Larry’s on day four of a family hiking trip in the Appalachian Mountains. He, his wife, and their three kids, ages 9, 7, and 3, reach their cabin for the night, drop their bags, and walk to the sunset spot - a nice flat rock. His wife unpacks picnic sandwiches and lunchables for the kids, and they all watch the sunset together. One of the kids jokes that one cloud looks like a dragon pooping. The others argue it’s a turtle stuck on its back while the parents laugh and take their respective sides. Larry, with his mouth full of bacon, argues that it’s two clouds, not one.

As the sun goes down and he and his wife clean up the picnic. “Oh yeah, your phone’s in this backpack pocket!” his wife says. “Forgot about that,” Larry quips as he he takes one last glimpse at the glistening horizon, his kids in his peripheral vision playing tag.

He feels a grin spread across his face. He’s made it. This is what life’s all about.

Now you’re wondering: What does this have to do with Larry’s law school essay?

Let’s backtrack.

First off, it’s a Wednesday afternoon and Larry’s phone has been off for a week. How? Because a week ago, Larry decided he’d take the week off to join the rest of the family hiking. No PTO request, no coverage email, nada. He’s designed a life where he can just do that.

How’d he achieve this life? He decided to start a small business to focus on a passion he’d had since high school - running shoe soles. He is the CEO, and therefore decides how to use his time.

How did he get the capital to start a small business? He worked in corporate law for a few years, stacking up a lot of money to pay student loans and provide for his family.

How did he work in corporate law for a few years? He did well in law school. Which, some nights, required him to grind a 50-page paper.

So here’s where that leaves us: Larry staring at his blinking cursor, on page 31 of 50. He can feel his mind start to spiral. “What is this all for?”

That’s when he closes his eyes. He visualizes the sunset. His family. That future peak moment he’s building towards. But most of all, he feels the lightness, the emotion of the freedom he feels in that future moment.

He opens his eyes and works at the paper with a renewed energy. There will be no half-assing this assignment. It will get done.

The reason this works is Larry has hypnotized himself to, whenever he stumbles on a wall in regards of work, he is able to connect to his specific why on a deep level.

So many people have this vague idea of what success is. Maybe it’s a lot of money so you can travel. Maybe it’s finding the perfect man/woman. Maybe it’s raising a family. But this vague idea floating around in your head will never motivate you as much as the specific positive visualization.

So here’s the process step by step, I call it the Line of Sight Method.

1. Close your eyes and look down. Take a deep, slow breath in and out.
2. Ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing. Then ask again. And again and again. Start with what’s directly in front of you - your paper, your workout, being at the social gathering. An answer will come, be it a word, phrase, or image. Then ask why you want that again, go a layer deeper.
3. …until you feel a specific positive emotion. You’ll notice that somewhere around the 4th or 5th why, the answers won’t be sentences but scenes/emotions. This is your sign to stop. You’ll know you’re at the right place when you can’t ask “why” about it anymore.
4. Build the scene (who, what, when, where). Who’s there
   1. Who’s there? Name them out loud to yourself.
   2. What’s happening? What action do you see and what sounds do you hear?
   3. Where? Where are you placed in the scene? Where’s your feet? What’s the setting?
   4. When? Name a specific day and time. Not “Sometime in 20 years”, “Wednesday, June 20, 2046 at 5:40pm”.
5. Ask yourself why this moment is possible. With every why, imagine you zoom out of the scene into a decision you made. Then ask again, what made that possible? Keep zooming back in time, decision by decision, until you reach the present.
6. Return to the present moment. Open your eyes and return to where you are. Now close your eyes again and look into the distance. The scene is still there, crystal clear. And between you and it is the line of whys and decisions connecting the present to the future scene. This is your line of sight. You can practice pulling up this scene any time, to the point where you can close your eyes at any point and the scene is right there, 100% clear.

The KEY is the visualization has to be SPECIFIC. “I want to make a lot of money” is not an emotional scene. “I want to be happy” or “I want freedom” doesn’t work either. This isn’t about concepts, but about emotions. For example, a camera can’t film “financial freedom”. But it can film that Wednesday afternoon on the flat rock with your kid joking about the cloud looking like a pooping dragon. And you have to play the footage in your head while you feel emotions in your heart.

Also, remember that you can always edit this future visualization. Who knows if Larry will still be into shoe soles a few years from now? Maybe he’ll achieve financial freedom through another business venture. Maybe he realizes during the visualization that he’ll quit law school altogether and go all in on a portable dog washing business, and will change his present task from that final paper to the business filing in Delaware. The point is the emotion he feels, knowing that he has achieved everything. He has won. You can think of the Line of Sight Method as not a life plan, but a fuel source.

Apply and practice this visualization technique over a long enough timespan, and you’ll see your brain go from this:

Before: You go on a run and you feel tired. You could go for another mile, but your mind is a jumble of thoughts. “If I go the extra mile my Strava post is gonna look good.” “Wait why do I care about Strava?” “I’ll just push on.” “Ugh, but I’m giving out. I’ll just start walking here.” Your mind is a mess.

After: You close your eyes and zoom to when you’re 70. You’re healthy and athletic enough to go on long hikes with your grandchildren. You hear your grandson go “Wow!” while discovering a bug to your left while your granddaughter to your right asks about what life was like in the 2050s. You look up at the sky and feel thankful that you ran and cared for your health in your 20s. The link is crystal clear, you open your eyes, and you run that last mile with a fiery glint in your eyes.

Before: You’re going out with your friends and it’s a blast. You laugh a lot, you have fun, but there’s this underlying feeling that you should work more - you have so much on your to do list. You leave the gathering feeling like you had fun but your time could’ve been used better. Your mind is a mess.

After: You close your eyes and zoom to when you’re 70. You’re at dinner with these same friends. Everyone’s old with gray hair but they’re all howling with laughter at that funny story from the night you went out in your 20s. Your 70 year old self is thankful that yourself that night was loose and present enough to have a fun time, creating this funny story that by now at 70 the friend group has recounted hundreds of times. The link is crystal clear, you open your eyes and you’re back at the function. You laugh more than ever. You smile more than ever. You’re 100% in the present.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward.” -Steve Jobs

Now you see how visualization, that future-based nostalgia and the emotions it invokes has the power to calm your nervous system down?^[2] This is the butterfly effect at work. Every hour you work, your financially free 70 year old thanks you. Every mile you run, your healthy 70 year old thanks you. This is all about believing in the end of your story. Because if you can’t clearly see the end point, who will?

And it’s not like you’re going to reach the end scene and be like “Ok, onto the next goal.” You’re going to, through this process, savor the journey of life in such a profound and new way. It will take practice. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your ability to connect to your mental map at any point.^[3]

Part of me doesn’t want to write this blog right now. It’s 1:30am in a hotel lobby in Paris and my eyes are straining to open.

But there’s a visualization that I am seeing 10 years into the future about when a young college student walks up to me at a conference, and glees with joy about how they went in my blog archives, read this piece and manifested their way into Harvard (which I have experience with).

You see what I’m saying? Now I have a clear link to a positive future event. And this is what motivates me to continue on.

Your ability to close your eyes and imagine the future will be your salvation. Protect and nourish it, and you will become that person who laughs more than ever at family gatherings. You will become the awesome human you are who trusts themselves to do hard things… with a smile on their face. And you will become that friend who listens with their eyes, ears, and heart when someone you care about is going through it.

That, my friend, is how simple life is.

If you want to be hypnotized to install the Line of Sight permanently… you know where to find me.

EZ