First, this email might not be for everyone.
This email will make some of you upset, but not with me. This email could possibly make you take a long walk.
Please understand that my intention is to only help you with this email, not to get you to spiral out.
Ready? Take some deep breaths because here we go.
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There is a disease among Creators. It’s easy to spread and almost impossible to notice. After working with Creators for almost a decade now, I noticed signs of the disease but could never fully put it into words.
But now I can.
For the longest time, I’ve been trying to figure out what is the core difference between those that succeed and those that fail. I’ve always had a number of theories, but none of them were solid enough. I couldn’t figure out why two people could be given the exact same resources and only one of them walks out a success.
Then I took some time to reflect on my own journey which has had a number of ups and downs and I caught something. It’s like I had been viewing the world in black and white and now it was technicolor.
I unlocked what I had been looking for all of this time.
It’s the Future Fantasy Disease.
Now, this email won’t do an adequate job of fully covering what this is about, but it will let you know if it’s something that is affecting you. How do you know if it is?
Well, I’m going to give you 5 signs that I sometimes see in myself during my unsuccessful moments.
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1. Constantly in the ideation phase but rarely execute on your plan.
It’s very easy to beat ourselves up for not reaching our goals and rarely do we not reach them because of resources. However, we do like to look back and put the blame on something.
But think of it like this.
You leave your house and plan on going to the store. You check the map on your phone and it tells you that there is construction on the road that you usually take so what do you do?
- Give up and go back inside
- Find another route
You go with #2. You plan around things.
You understand that taking the usual route is incompatible with what you want to achieve today. When we don’t reach the goals that we set, we fail to take into account the things that we are doing today that are incompatible with what we want to achieve tomorrow.
So what do we do instead?
We escape the painful present and run into the future. But we can not solve today’s problems until we stand on the ground and assess what is around us.
The majority of your thoughts and actions have to be in the present.
2. Your vision of success is a highlight reel, but not a picture of the day-to-day
Do you know what I do when I escape into the future? I picture a future with no problems.
Everything is taken care of.
But here’s the issue with that. There will always be problems! To achieve the future that you want you have to exchange the problems you have today for a set of new ones.
So what do you do? You need to picture that future with those new problems so you know you can handle daily life with them.
For example, let’s say I want to make $100M. To do that with what I do that means I’m going to have to become a known figure. I have to be okay with doing interviews and constantly putting myself out there.
If I can’t handle that daily, then that’s not the future I’m going for.
You don’t want to live with an empty pantry, but you also don’t want to put gas in the car, talk to the cashier that blabs for 10 mins, or go out into the hot sun.
Which of my current problems am I willing to trade in for new ones?
3. You get defensive when talking about your plans for the future.
Why would we get defensive about something that is meant for us?
Because we don’t want people poking holes into it. Subconsciously we know they are fragile because they are a fantasy we escape to, but when they stop being an escape then they become easier to talk about with anyone.
Because you already know the plan to get there.
Again, it’s like talking about going to the store. You aren’t defensive when talking about that.
“Going to the store? Oh really? How are you going to get there!?”
4. The older you get, the more regret you experience about the life you didn’t lead
I’m not a fan of regret. It’s something I actively avoid but the truth is that at times I feel there is a version of me that is living the life that I feel we deserve.
There is a me that is living up to our potential.
He knew how to get to the store.
5. You identify more with your future self than your present self
For me, this is the toughest one because I can look in the mirror and tell myself this isn’t really who I am. I’m the better version of myself that is on the inside, but what’s the reality?
The reality is exactly what I see in the mirror. The reality is exactly my environment.
I have to identify with who I am now with the understanding I have the power to change that. But what often happens?
When I don’t like what I’m seeing I escape to the future. Future me is going to be so awesome!
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Looking back at not only myself, but the ones I’ve tried to help, when the results weren’t attained it was because there was confusion between reality and fantasy.
When you love the future more than living in the present moment you can get lost. The future becomes your escape because you are unhappy with the present.
But if you can’t be happy in the present and stay associated with the steps required to make the future happen, then what happens? You quit because the present is too painful.
This is why there is such a low success rate with Creators. It isn’t because the required info isn’t out there. It isn’t because the teachers suck (okay, some do).
It’s because we confuse fantasy with reality. It’s so easy to sell this dream that we get stuck only thinking about the dream and stop trying to accept who we are so that we can figure out how to make it happen.
You should want more for yourself. You should believe you can achieve more, but those thoughts can’t be your primary thoughts. They can’t be the things that you escape to every single day.
You and I need to stay in the present and understand what we need to do today and then get this…we have to do the same thing again tomorrow and the day after.
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If you see yourself in this email then that’s good. You see the issue.
Acknowledge it. Accept it.
Then look back through it again and see what you need to fix.
If you’d like me to go deeper into this kind of stuff let me know and I will. I’m limited by what I can do in email but this is something I wanted to address so that going into August, you are better prepared.
Have a great weekend.
– Scrivs
PS: Oh, at the beginning I mentioned that I took a look at my own life and noticed something about the times I found success. The answer is so obvious I won’t even tell you in this email.
Maybe tomorrow…