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6
Living with One Foot in Tomorrow

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“Where does the time go?” Wherever it goes, “tempus fugit”—that’s how it gets there. It flies, in a hurry. Also, “time is of the essence.” From a dreamcrafting point of view, this is especially true.

Aspirational fields do more than create alignment between the otherwise random elements of daily life—they also (and perhaps more importantly) bring past, present, and future into alignment. Out of a sense of purpose comes a clear connection between things being done now in order to achieve other things later.

It is easy to recognize the unaligned life: waking hours are divided between work that delivers little or no satisfaction, and leisure time largely spent watching other people pursue their life missions. What we broadly call entertainment, in all its forms, is the product of artists and technicians operating within their own aspirational fields; actors, for example, who crafted a dream career for themselves, and as a result are now well paid to portray characters pursuing a dream.Virtually everything we use, view, listen to, or in some way consume during our leisure time is the output of someone else’s dream, the product of someone else’s life-in-alignment. It’s disheartening to contemplate the millions of lives that completely lack any such alignment, that are not driven by any focused sense of purpose, and for which existence is largely reduced to a passive process of consumption rather than an active process of creation. In any discussion about the seeming “scarcity” of time, it’s disheartening to contemplate the amount of time an entire culture collectively wastes in its consumption of mass-produced simulations of experience and achievement. Invariably, those people who “catch fire” with a burning sense of mission soon find themselves investing much less of their time consuming the product of other people’s dreams, and more time in the pursuit of their own.

Our whole concept of time itself tends to change, “with time.” When we’re four years old, the interval between birthdays feels extremely long—a quarter of a lifetime, to be precise. At age one hundred, those birthdays seem crowded awfully close together, separated by a mere hundredth of a lifetime. For some adolescents, it hardly seems worth making the bed in the morning, since they’ll be messing it up again so soon; for some older folks, it hardly seems worth taking down the artificial Christmas tree, since they’ll be putting it back up again so soon.

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Some of the sciences force us to expand our time-perspective. Geologists, for example, might think of mountains of solid rock as if they were made of a liquid that is moving extremely slowly. A movie camera in space taking one single frame of the Rocky Mountains every ten thousand years, say, might produce a film that (when projected at the standard speed of twenty-four frames per second) would depict the mountains as a rising and falling “big splash” created when two geological plates collide. We, with our extremely brief life spans (in geological terms) just happen to be around to witness the “moment” when the splash is high. To us the mountains are “frozen in time,” frozen solid, so to speak; but to other beings whose lifespans extend over millions of years, say, these same mountains may be behaving exactly the way water appears to behave to us. And when astronomer Carl Sagan compressed the fifteen-billion-year lifetime of our entire universe into a single calendar year, we could hardly fail to be surprised when we discovered that the first dinosaurs make their appearance no earlier than on the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth month (December) of this “cosmic year.” The very first humans show up on the last day of the year, December 31, at around 10:30 P.M. The Renaissance occurs one second before midnight. All of history since then falls within the last second.

Even in our own experience, the rate at which time passes can seem to vary. When we find ourselves totally engrossed in a stimulating, challenging, enjoyable activity, we speak of “losing track of time.” The hours speed by without our awareness. Even very brief delays, however—like the stalled car in front of us when the light turns green, or the computer that “takes forever” to perform this or that function—can seem unbearably long.

As with the “no willpower” myth, the “not enough time” myth is symptomatic of a life out of alignment. The randomly scattered iron filings from the high school experiment number in the thousands; but with the arrival of a magnetic field, these filings align to create one single pattern. There will never be enough time to complete all of the random, unrelated, disjointed activities that arise in our daily lives and pull us in every direction; even if we free up more time, the unconnected activities will expand and multiply accordingly, to forever exceed the available time. But when an aspirational field brings all of this randomness into alignment—when most activities, that is, begin pulling in the same direction—two things happen. First, what felt like “many” conflicting priorities begins to feel more like “one” overarching (and thus far less overwhelming) priority; and second, it becomes much easier to see which activities don’t support this priority, don’t contribute anything to it, don’t belong—and thus to let them go. Without alignment, virtually everything on our plates seems about equally important; when alignment kicks in, many things become immediately and conspicuously unimportant. People on a mission are people who know what to discontinue.

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You start to grow by letting go.

Many have come to see their lives as something of an uphill battle. Trudging uphill forever is a wearisome, discouraging ordeal; yet climbing a mountain, celebrating success at the summit, moving to a higher mountain, and so on, can be exhilarating. At each “base site,” climbers leave some of their cargo or provisions behind. The closer they get to the goal, the lighter their load becomes. The Apollo Saturn 5 rocket jettisons each of its three stages in turn, lightening its load the higher it gets, discarding all of the unnecessary sections one by one, until only the barest of essentials remain for the ultimate achievement of the mission. The main reason so many people don’t have time to get everything done is that they’re trying to get too many things done. Step one for dreamcrafters looking for ways to “free up some time” is to look for things to stop doing.

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When Time Isn’t Money

Apenny saved is how many pennies earned? Whereas, a stitch in time saves how many stitches? If proverbs hold any weight, it would appear that “time saved” can sometimes outvalue “money saved” by a nine-to-one ratio.

You wouldn’t think so, though, if you based your conclusion on a survey of the local shopping center. For every merchant promising to save you some time (one-hour photofinishing, eyeglasses in an hour, shoes repaired “while-u-wait”), there are dozens touting discounts, prices slashed, lowest prices in town, two-for-the-price-of-one, annual year-end blowout, everything must go, save like you’ve never saved before, the one-of-a-kind sales event to end all sales events.

Thrift is a virtue, no question. But if “time is money,” as Ben Franklin first pointed out in the mid-1700s, shouldn’t our sense of thrift apply to time as well? After all, money is a renewable resource, whereas time is not. Even if we waste money in the most frivolous and irresponsible ways, we can always (in theory, at least) find ways to earn some more; wasted time, however, is utterly irretrievable.

Yet in hundreds of subtle and unconscious ways, we are culturally predisposed to “save money” even when doing so entails wasting time. Book buyers who force themselves to “finish this crummy book if it kills me” are trying to ensure they get their “money’s worth”—unaware that they are compounding their first error, a waste of money, with an even costlier second one, a waste of time. How many do-it-yourselfers invest huge amounts of time in what turn out to be frustrating projects for which they have little aptitude solely to “save a few bucks”—and wind up with an unsatisfactory result? How many shoppers eat up the better part of a day driving far afield to buy from stores where they believe they’ll encounter lower prices? (Weekend traffic at the border crossing between Buffalo and Toronto has historically been heavy in both directions, as streams of shoppers go off in search of the bargains they believe await them in the neighboring country—a lovely example of mutual grass-is-greener thinking in action.) The contest between retail commerce and e-commerce may ultimately prove to be a contest between least expensive versus least time-consuming shopping options.

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Those whose lives are not driven by a sense of mission may encounter so-called time management courses or books, but the usefulness of these will be directly proportional to the enthusiasm they feel for whatever it is they intend to subsequently do with their more-skillfully managed time. At its root, the choice between saving time versus saving money is an alignment issue. Those with no dream to align to will tend to follow their predisposition and conditioning. For dreamcrafters, it becomes a choice based on whichever option best supports the mission, or best reinforces their alignment to it. It means there will be situations where it will make more sense to take a fiscal “hit” in order to free up some valuable time for dreamcrafting, and, admittedly, others when time invested in something seemingly unrelated to the mission will nevertheless contribute in some indirect but valuable way to its overall success.

We begin to live with one foot in tomorrow when we start making conscious choices today for the primary purpose of freeing up time in the future to devote to our big dream.

What Macros Teach Us about Saving Time

Show of hands: how many of you out there use “macro” commands on your computers? Even among those who sit at computers for much of their workday, the proportion who routinely use macros is surprisingly slim. Instructors who deliver courses on computer operation report that many in attendance admit to being somewhat scared of macros. From what these reluctant computer users have seen, a macro appears to set off some kind of frantic chain reaction inside the computer, with all manner of operations unfolding far too quickly for the eye to follow. The concern is that if the machine went on some kind of file-destroying rampage, there’d be no way to stop it, no way to know, even, before it was too late.

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What follows is not a sales pitch for using macros on your computer, but for applying the model of the macro to free up blocks of time in your life.

Computer macros are designed to bundle multiple commands into a single command. Where they become most useful as time-savers is in situations where the operator must perform the same string of commands many times. Some of these more complex commands can take minutes to execute by hand; multiply that by the number of times the same string must be repeated, and you’re describing a significant time eater. The macro tool works like a tape recorder, but all it records is keystrokes and/or mouse clicks. The operator may choose to assign the macro to a keystroke combination: “Alt + R,” say, to represent all the commands for “formatting the weekly reports.” The recorder is started, the operator performs the entire string of commands manually in the usual way, and the recorder is then stopped. When it’s time to format the weekly report again, the operator types Alt + R, and the computer promptly goes crazy, performing the entire string of commands in the blink of an eye. It then stops and waits, as if saying, “Anything else?”

When people discover how much time macros can save them, they discover many uses for them. Even single words or strings of words that recur frequently can be reduced to a single keystroke. Apart from computers, anyone who has ever programmed a telephone for speed dialing, or entered a five-digit code number printed after the title of a show in their television listings in order to speed program their VCR to record the show, has had experience with macros; the common denominator is the elimination of frequently repeated steps or activities. The time savings all add up. And that is the main learning we can derive from macros—even if each only saves us a little chunk of time, the chunks add up very quickly, and become big chunks of free time in, (ahem,) no time.

We can all find frequently repeated sequences of events that eat up a lot of time in our lives. “This is the third trip I’ve had to make to this mall today,” Terry tells a friend encountered in the food court area. “I came this morning to buy some new shoes. But when I got home I realized I’d forgotten to bring in the dry cleaning. Now I pick up my daughter at school, and she tells me she needs a blouse for school tomorrow. Honestly, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

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Not if we repeat the same string of time-consuming activities—like trips to the mall—more often than we need to, there aren’t. Terry is missing opportunities for “bundling.” If a daily outing to pick up a daughter at school is a given, that’s the time to also visit the mall to buy shoes and drop off dry cleaning, etc. Same number of errands, but only one trip between home and mall.

With practice, we begin to uncover bundling opportunities nearly everywhere we look. Phrases such as, “I need to [do this], but I’ll wait until I have to [do that],” or “While I’m [doing this], I might as well also [do that], save me having to do it later” indicate there is bundling taking place, which virtually always translates into time saved. Like money in the bank, it all adds up.

Multitasking is another aspect of bundling that can produce a great many “little” savings in time, which can quickly add a lot to the total. Sylvia is engaged to be married; her fiancé lives in a distant city. Their phone calls every evening mean a lot to her; but as a (still single) mom, she often works late, and must prepare dinner for her teenage son when she gets home. She buys a handsfree cordless telephone headset that allows her to speak to her future husband while preparing dinner—and discovers this actually makes dinner preparation a part of the day she looks forward to.

For many of us there’s a routine that marks the start of each day: shower, make coffee, turn on the computer, what have you. But standing there waiting for the coffee to be ready, then sitting there waiting for the computer to boot up, represent lost opportunities for bundling. Simply revising the order of things, so that water boils and computers boot up while the shower is running, adds no more effort, yet frees up time. The telltale phrases for multitasking sound like, “I’ll get this started now, so it can be [doing this] while I’m [doing that],” or, “I know I have to [do that], but give me a moment to [do this] first, so when [that] is finished, [this] will be ready.” It’s all more savings in the time bank, without any extra work.

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“Where the heck did I leave my keys?”At any given moment, hundreds of thousands of people in homes and offices across the country are looking for something they were the last person to handle or use. (Our favorite is the lost soul wandering back and forth through a busy parking lot, trying desperately to recall where he or she parked the car.) How nice it would be if some guardian angel armed with a stopwatch kept careful records of how much time we spend over a lifetime looking for things we’ve misplaced, and added all of that time together, and gave it back to us as one big block of free time to use however we wished. No such block of free time will come our way, alas, unless we do the giving ourselves.

In most cases, our tendency to misplace things is the product of simple inattention. The solution thus involves nothing more than cultivating the habit of paying attention anytime we’re placing anything where we’ll need to find it again. It means training ourselves to avoid putting things down without thinking the moment the phone rings or some other distraction arises, and to always remain aware of where things are being deposited. (“I must remember, I’m parked directly opposite the striped awning, row L as in nephew Larry,” or, “I must remember, I stuck my keys in my coat pocket.”) In our own homes, it means taking the old saying to heart: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” Hardly the kind of grandmotherly advice anyone is likely to embrace with wild enthusiasm, admittedly—and yet, for anyone looking for ways to free up blocks of time in their lives, few strategies will free up more time than this one.

Tortoises and Hares

A great many of the broken dreams and unrealized goals that have been blamed on the “no willpower” myth might more properly be heaped at the base of a huge pedestal bearing the inscription “no patience.” Many have lost their ability to see how today connects with a more distant tomorrow. They’re in a hurry; time is short. They want it now, or not at all. In other words, they have lost their ability to project.

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The mundane task of removing an adhesive price sticker or label (as from a floppy disk or the spine of a videocassette, say) can teach us another useful dreamcrafting principle, this one related to making the dream a reality as quickly as possible.

Imagine a television game show on which contestants race to peel the labels from the spines of videocassettes for big prizes. What’s the strategy to maximize the chances of winning?

Paper, when pulled, tends to tear or shred. Once contestants have used a fingernail to pry up an edge of the label, they will pull on this edge to attempt to peel the remainder of the label free. If they pull too sharply, however, the label shreds, and they must once again use a fingernail to pry up another edge. This cycle may be repeated a number of times as the label shreds again and again, costing the contestant valuable seconds. The only way to win this race is to pull upon the label slowly. No sudden jerky tugs that cause the paper to shred; just a nice slow steady pressure that removes the entire label as a single piece.

Skilled runners know how going slower can sometimes get them to the finish line sooner than their competitors. They worry about running an early lap too fast and depleting their reserves of energy prematurely. The trick, they know, is to win the race in the final lap—and not before. Slow and steady really does win the race.

A wonderful magazine ad for a piano-playing course began with a quote along the lines of, “I dreamed of learning to play the piano—but decided against it, because I knew it would take me ten years to become as good as I wanted to be.” This was followed, in smaller print, by the line, “Mind you, I made that decision ten years ago.” In the age of instant gratification, anything for which the payback is less than immediate is in danger of being abandoned.

Those in a hurry to make a dream come true must accept the fact that sometimes the quickest way to get there is slowly, steadily, methodically. Efforts to force the pace and cut some corners almost invariably lead to failure, and the need to make a painful choice between either starting again from scratch or abandoning the mission altogether. (In the glory days of Total Quality Management, the saying was, “If you haven’t got the time to do it right, when will you find the time to do it over?” The entire phrase subsequently became the title of a time management book by Jeffrey J. Mayer.) The good news for those moving toward a big dream, of course, is that however long it may take to get there, the journey itself will invariably yield pleasures as satisfying as those associated with successfully reaching the final destination. (More on this in chapter 10.)

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The aspirational field, as stated earlier, links past, present and future. One of the steps the impatient are perhaps most in danger of skipping involves taking the time to discover how these links can be put to work to help make the big dream come true.

Where Lessons of the Past Meet Expectations of the Future

Our personal histories dictate not only what we believe about how life and the world around us works, but also the things we believe in. When we refer to a person’s “character,” we are often referring to those beliefs that person holds dear, the values he or she stands for.

Organizations in pursuit of a collective big dream find it easier to retain a sense of focus on a day-to-day basis if they define their core values, the non-negotiable beliefs that guide all their decisions and activities. Individuals seeking to make a dream come true will also greatly benefit if their own personal core beliefs are clearly defined and declared. This is because in the midst of a rapidly changing world—into which dreamcrafters are setting out to introduce further change—their core beliefs become the one reassuring constant in their own lives and the lives of those around them. As they undertake to fashion their “new” selves, their values remind them (and others) that the best of their “old” selves is not being discarded.

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The words that are used to identify these values become what we might think of as “suitcase words”—they are used to carry a large, and evolving, set of ideas and behaviors through life, through past, present, and future alike. As a values-driven person moves into the future, he or she is free to learn from the experience, and as a result to add things to (or remove things from) these suitcases, as appropriate. This does not mean the values themselves change, but rather, some of the behaviors associated with them may change. For example, where “quality” (applied to telephone courtesy, say) years ago might have meant “answering the phone before the third ring,” the advent of answering machines may make this behavior less relevant, and a new behavior (“respond to all phone messages within X hours”) might take its place.

Conservatism (or even fundamentalism in the secular sense) is the byproduct of a failure or inability to project what one “believes in” into the future. It creates a fortress mentality driven by a fear of losing the core values. It strives to protect “what was,” even though this may no longer be relevant, because there seems no other way to ensure the survival of those precious values that are associated with the past (the “good old days”).

When dreamcrafters take the time to clarify their values in order to consciously link their vision of (future) success to the things they believe in most deeply, this act of projection gives them “permission” to move forward without putting their basic belief system in jeopardy, or without losing any sense of who they are. It equips them to discover new behaviors that they had not formerly associated with their values, and to adopt these as they advance; it allows them to recognize old behaviors that are no longer relevant, and to discard these as they advance. Not only does this ongoing process of adding things to, and removing things from, the suitcase words do nothing to violate or weaken the person’s core values— it quite often serves to strengthen or reinforce them, by keeping them in better alignment with an ever-changing world. In short, dreamcrafters on a mission do not typically lose sight of who they were and who they are— their journey toward who they will be tends if anything to define their character with greater clarity and precision than ever before.

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From a “craft” point of view, the process for clarifying one’s core values takes only a few moments, and is simplicity itself. (Warning: the impatient skip this step at their own peril.) Pen and paper are required. To begin:

Jot down single words (honesty, helpfulness) or phrases (open and full communication, or always give the benefit of the doubt) that capture the principles that guide you in life, that you believe in, that you consider non-negotiable values you stand for, or inflexible rules of personal conduct.

Next, rate these in terms of their importance to you, by affixing a number to each.

Finally, transcribe the “top three” on a fresh sheet of paper. (Three has proven to be the ideal number for this exercise; any more and the power of these core beliefs becomes diluted.) Your top three items represent your core values. These are the suitcase words you will carry along with you on your journey, each one full of the appropriate—aligned—behaviors that you will be drawing upon as you move forward.

As part of your ongoing process of declaration, (and in anticipation of the Inclusion strategies we’ll be exploring in chapters 8 and 9,) look for ways to integrate these values into your discussions with others about your mission. A dieter who identified integrity as one of his or her core values, for example, might say, “I know it will be hard for me to shed fifty pounds before my next birthday—and by the way, because I consider ‘integrity’ one of the key values I always try to live by, it means I can’t cheat and steal cookies when no one is looking, or fake the numbers on my progress chart. But I’m still confident I’ll be able to get there, and here’s why …”

Our core values summarize the lessons we have learned from our past, from our personal history, and what we have come to believe in as a result. Ahead of us lies our future, our personal Big Dream, symbolized by the vision of success that summarizes what we believe we are going to achieve. Where these two belief systems meet is in the heartbeat of the moment, the present, “now.” Though the past and the future may both represent decades-long periods of time, they are maddeningly inaccessible to us in the present moment. “Now” is an extremely brief slice of time, a mere heartbeat long—but in that tiny sliver of time we have the power to make choices. The choices we make can change everything. And even if a now slips by and we make a poor choice, it is followed by another heartbeat, another opportunity to make choices. As long as the heart continues to beat, choices can be made. Will the estranged parent’s last deathbed utterance be one of conciliation with the offspring, or one of alienation? The choices remain right to the end.

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Driving along life’s highway, we encounter many off-ramps that lead to other highways, other destinations. There are signs notifying us of the various exits that lie ahead, though of course we can choose to ignore these and remain on the main highway if we wish. There are signs that advise us to change lanes if we intend to take a particular exit; but even if we gently drift into the exit lane, we can still change our minds if we wish. There are markings on the road surface that begin as a single line, but widen into a wedge to divide the off-ramp from the main highway; but even as we drive over this widening wedge-shaped marking, we still have the option of choosing to go either way. Then a solid barrier appears that physically separates the off-ramp from the main highway. The “now” is upon us—now we must really make a choice between the options before us. Whichever choice we make will have potentially significant implications in terms of our ultimate journey.

Drivers proceeding along without a clear destination in mind, and no clear values to guide them, can do little more than make one sudden, impulsive choice after another and hope for the best. A dreamcrafter armed with a “road map for a dream,” and a clear understanding of what he or she believes in and stands for, is in a position to make confident and informed choices. For one driver, much of the ride will be nerve-racking, if not terrifying; for the other, much of it will be satisfying, with portions that are nothing short of exhilarating.

The process of crafting a dream is a process of bringing life into alignment, of linking our “now’s” directly to a personal future we are shaping ourselves. When we add a clear set of values to a clear vision of success, the roadway before us also becomes clearer, less threatening, more predictable, and therefore more manageable. It becomes much easier to see how what is leads directly to what will be. This is living with one foot in tomorrow.

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Gifts to Your Future Self

Picking at a roll of tape with a fingernail to get it started can be as frustrating as trying to remove an adhesive sticker or label— unless, that is, the last time you used the tape you folded a short length back upon itself to produce a protruding tab that would simplify starting it next time. Creating such a tab is an example of a gift we sometimes give ourselves to make things quicker or easier in the future.

Many people use a highlighter pen while they read books. This may be to enhance their learning, or it may be to help them find key passages later. People who highlight or underline key passages, or fold back the corners of key pages, or even create their own handwritten index of key sections in a book, are making a gift to their future selves. The day they’re looking for that one inspiring quote, they thank themselves for having made finding it so easy.

Some people have developed a variety of reminder techniques: they place something in plain view before going to bed to remind them to take action with it in the morning, or leave themselves little notes where they cannot fail to see them. They create an instant mnemonic: “I’m parked in row L as in Larry, opposite the awning. L for Larry, A for awning, L-A, as in Los Angeles. My car is parked in LA.”

Taking the time to organize photo albums or home videos, noting in writing where and when various shots were taken, storing them where they’ll be easy to find—these are gifts that your future self will appreciate more with each passing year. Keeping contact lists up-to-date is another example of an activity you’ll have plenty of occasion to thank yourself for later.

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Most of us make certain obvious big gifts to our future selves—life insurance policies, pension investments, and so on. Indeed, the Big Dream itself qualifies as the greatest gift we can ever give to our future self. Physical fitness, health, career aspirations, these all relate to creating a significantly better tomorrow. But the skillful dreamcrafter will also find a great many opportunities within the Big Dream to make some future aspect of it simpler and easier to achieve. The object is to look for ways to take some action every day, however small, that will minimize or remove some potential future source of frustration or discouragement.

Failure to sustain motivation over the long term, remember, is a primary cause of broken dreams. By learning to live with one foot in tomorrow, dreamcrafters adopt a conscious strategy to protect their future motivation, to shield their enthusiasm and optimism from the corrosive effects of all those little aggravations that are likely to arise in future. They look for opportunities to give gifts to their future selves that will help deflect potential future motivation-robbers.

The most valuable gift to your future self:
Reduce or eliminate Time-Release Demotivators

It is not typically any one single demotivator that arises unexpectedly at some point and totally derails the mission; (in most cases, these “big” blockers have been anticipated—as part of the “naysayer” exercise in chapter 4, for example—and provision has been made to deal with them). It’s more typically the cumulative effect of many small and unrelated sources of irritation that gradually eat away at the foundations of enthusiasm, and eventually cause it to collapse. “The hardest part about hunting elephants,” as the big-game hunter said, “is the mosquitoes.”

Because these sources of demotivation are typically small, the kinds of gifts we need to make to our future selves to eliminate them can be correspondingly small; as with freeing up blocks of time, “it all adds up.” In fact, doing things now to free up time later, as outlined above, is itself a perfect example of a gift to our future selves, since “lack of time” is a major demotivator.

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But time is not the only valuable gift we can pass on to our future selves. We can do ourselves a favor by getting tedious but necessary activities out of the way now, so our future self won’t have to be bothered with them. Our objective should be not only to keep the future “to do” list as clear as possible, but also to do anything and everything we can to make tomorrow—all the tomorrows—as enjoyable and satisfying as possible.

We’re looking for ways to help our future selves maintain a cheerful, optimistic disposition. It is almost as if our two selves engage in a dialogue across time:

“Well,” says our future self, “I’d better get at this unpleasant job I’ve been dreading.”

“Don’t worry about it,” says our present self. “I’ve already taken care of it for you.”

“You did it already?”

“Yeah, I took care of it; why don’t you take the kids to a movie or something instead?”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Omigod, thank you, thank you so much.”

Receiving this kind of gift from anyone, even ourselves, can give our spirits a big boost. The effect is doubly strong when the gift is unexpected— and dreamcrafters who are generous with their gifts and make enough of them to their future selves will inevitably forget about some of them. There’s a strange kind of thrill associated with receiving a delightful surprise from someone who loves you enough to have arranged it for you some time ago, someone who no longer exists, and yet who did not die.

Efforts made today to minimize demotivational influences tomorrow constitute one of the best investment strategies anyone with a Big Dream can adopt. And as with any skill, performance improves with practice. The better we become at anticipating future sources of demotivation (no matter how small) and eliminating them ahead of time, the better we become at aligning what we’re doing today with what we expect for tomorrow. The purposeful life is a life in alignment.

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Scenic Dead-Ends

One can be managing one’s affairs perfectly, with finances in order, a beautiful home in the right neighborhood, children going to all the right schools and taking dance lessons at all the right studios, the spotless late-model car there to pick them up at all the right times, everything looked after, every detail attended to—and one can still have occasion to sit back from time to time and say, “Now … remind me one more time, why am I doing this … ? What’s this all about, again?”

In the absence of an overarching sense of purpose, none of the obsessive busywork that fills the hours of daily life seems to be leading anywhere. The victim of the classic “midlife crisis” has suddenly realized all the roads chosen thus far, while scenic enough, are proving to be deadends. In a panicky overreaction, the individual jettisons a great deal that he or she had devoted many years to achieving, and makes a frantic bid to go back to some starting point, to in some real or symbolic way begin the journey all over again. It’s an act of utter desperation. And for those who care about the individual, it’s a painful spectacle to watch.

Those who set out to realize a Big Dream can readily see how today’s activities link to something worthwhile tomorrow. They know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They know what it’s all about, what it’s all for. They may still need to make tough decisions, such as choosing between conflicting short-term needs versus long-term goals (the subject of the following chapter); but overall, they can see where their lives are heading—and as a rule, they like what they see.

By applying the time of their lives in a meaningful way, dreamcrafters are having the time of their lives.

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