One drawback of human imagination is that we can imagine the future at its worst state. It paralyzes us. It makes us question what we are doing now. We become indecisive.

And all that takes time to do.

Time where you don’t do anything, where you just live in this fictional future.

That’s an opportunity cost right there because that time could’ve been spent doing something.

There’s a flaw in picturing the future that we all fall into and it’s simply this.

The future is an iterative model.

It’s always changing based on what’s going on right now.

Your future can change with a conversation, a book you read, something you hear on the TV, a task you complete. It’s constantly in flux, yet we take it upon ourselves that we can paint a definitive future. It’s futile to think we can. It’s taking our gift of foresight but using it to an extreme that’s not suited for our day to day lives. Take the “slider” and bring it back to the present day and cut it off at today. Do your best, and watch the vision of the future you have unfold naturally.

Take it one day at a time.

But what about all the talk about visualization?

It’s good to the extent that it provides you with a concrete image to shoot for.

Take a swimming analogy for example.

It’s good to look up every once in a while to make sure you’re swimming toward the island you want to go to.

If you just keep your head down and only go up for air side to side and swim furiously, you might not get there. You might be way off course.

Worse yet, if you just float, paddle, imagining you’ll never get there, to the point where you become so tired you drown. Yet that’s what most people do. They don’t swim. They just stay afloat, wondering, imagining a bad future, not taking the time to just swim toward where they want to go and look up every now and then to make sure they’re on the right track.

If you look at it this way too, it could also be a self fulfilling prophecy that’s not in your favor. You picture this worst case scenario which just freezes you and because it does, it might help in contributing the very scenario you’ve envisioned. You don’t take any steps toward the future you take because you’ve got another version of the future in your head that makes you take the very action to take to get to that future – namely one of inaction.

Avoid the urge to speculate about the future and realize this simple fact.

That it’s based on what we do on a day to day basis consistently that determines our future.

Take this day and swim the best you can.

And from then one, just take it one day at a time and you’ll eventually arrive at your respective “island”.