Day 3,117

I got this text from my buddy Todd as I was waiting for Gavin to get called back to oral surgery to remove his wisdom teeth:

Do you guys ever think about what you would say to your younger self if you were to have a conversation with him?

I was thinking about that this morning and how profoundly different the conversation would be between me at 49 and 19 vs me at 39 and 19.

Man, I’ve changed a lot in the last 10 years.

Todd

This really hit me hard in a very positive way. My thoughts kept going back to that question over and over. Each conversation I had about work seemed to offer up another loose string to pull on this. Honestly, my thoughts aren’t distilled enough to answer it well. That said, here are some of the common threads I kept pulling at.

• Would I rather offer advice or ask questions? My 19 year old self would likely not listen to advice, but he also likely wouldn’t have enough life experience to answer my questions well.
• How much would I really want to change what was going to happen? Life has turned out rather well (as Vonnegut would suggest, as it always did, always does, and always will) largely due to having to fumble my way through without advice from my future self.
• While there’s advice I would love to have given myself as a younger person – especially “don’t waste your freshman year of college on drinking and pursuing relationships with women, get outside and enjoy the beauty of the outdoors you’re surrounded by – I still came around to it later in life.
• How much more progress would I have made towards living into my purpose had I asked myself one simple question each night before bed and wrote down and tracked my answers? “If I had only 10 more years to live, what would I stop doing today?” Would that exercise have shifted me further earlier?

All those thoughts and so many more continue to roll through my brain. I have a feeling this topic will come up again in the not too distant future.

Thanks again for the awesome question Todd!!!

Thanks!!!