8 Decisions That Will Determine Your Future
567: Your future is being decided long before you realize it
Good morning kings.
As most of you know I put out quite a few posts over the years on the search for happiness, how to get a job, how to date and marry, how to invest, build a business, network, and navigate an increasingly chaotic world.
Everyone always wants the best stock or crypto picks, the inside track on the next hot industry, the best places to travel, the hottest product to buy, how to spend their time, or the best ways to spend their time. People want to succeed, get rich, and prosper throughout their lives.
They focus on all kinds of little things, but the reality is that your future isn’t determined by hundreds of equally important choices.
It’s determined by a surprisingly small number of decisions that compound for decades. The big ones. And they hold some heavy weight that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
The truth is a small amount of people ever really become conscious of this and act on it.
The majority of people simply coast through life, growing embittered and angry as to why they aren’t seeing meaningful change or the results or outcomes that they tell themselves they want.
The scary part is that the consequences of these decisions rarely appear overnight. They accumulate quietly, almost invisibly, until one day you look around and realize you’re living a life you never intentionally chose. That’s a pretty bleak outcome and one that I really wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
That is how people wake up in their late thirties or forties wondering where the time went. They stayed in a corporate role or job they hated because changing careers felt uncomfortable. They never invested because they always assumed there would be a better time to start or more time to do it.
They surrounded themselves with people who had no ambition and slowly adopted the same habits over time.
They married someone they weren’t truly compatible with or never made the effort to build meaningful relationships in the first place. They spent years consuming instead of creating, distracting themselves at every possible moment instead of developing themselves for the long haul.
Very few people consciously decide that they want an average life.
Instead, they simply allow inertia to make their decisions for them and end up a husk of a person at 60.
MAX PAIN. And something I am starting to see more and more later on in my life.
But the good news is your future can really boil down to several key decisions you make (or don’t make) and today we are going to walk through them step by step.
The major levers that decide if you get what you want out of life.
The decisions that determine if you are able to ascend and prosper, or if you wallow in your bad habits and inaction, wondering for years if you made the right moves.
In no particular order, with maybe the exception of #1 here, let’s get into the 10 decisions that can determine what your future ends up looking like.
Let’s get it.
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
—Marcus Aurelius
1. Whether You Ever Learn to Sell
At 33 years of age there are few blanket statements I would make about success that I absolutely live by, but learning to sell is one of them.
The person who can create value will make a decent living. The person who can create value and then communicate it will usually outperform them. The person who can’t do either is in for a rough couple decades.
Learning to sell quite literally changed my life.