Our Future Gets Brighter, When Our Past Gets Clearer
Last week, a mentor of mine recommended a book by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Now, you should know, I never listen to music or audiobooks while I’m running. But I was so intrigued by the first few insights of this book, I had to bring it with me on my next set of miles in Logan Square.
One of the insights that grabbed my attention was the relationship between the future and the past. Specifically, Sullivan and Hardy explain that our future gets brighter as our past gets clearer. Last month we reflected on setting goals you can control. And a large part of discerning what’s in our control (and what isn’t) comes from reflecting on our past.
Here are three steps you can take to get clearer on yours:
Name your gains. Stop measuring your progress against a competitor's valuation or your idealized Series B deck. Look backward instead. Count the hurdles you've cleared, the relationships you've built, and the product iterations you've survived. Your own capability is your real platform.
Rewrite negative scripts. The job you lost. The relationship that ended. The plan that blew up. The door that slammed shut. Most of us keep those moments in our back pocket like a bad report card—proof we weren't enough. But that's not what they are. They're proof you've already survived things that would've finished a lot of people. Negative scripts become self-fulfilling prophecies unless we replace them with the truth.
Bury the old identity. Are you still making decisions based on who you were five years ago? Still chasing a version of success you dreamed up in a season that's long gone? The labels you accepted back then—"I'm not a leader," "I'm too busy," "I’m not ready"—those have an expiration date. Name them. Thank them for getting you here. Then take them off and move on.
Jay-Z said it best: you can't heal what you don't reveal. That line lands because it's true in every season of life. Until we're willing to look backward and tell the truth (good and bad) about where we've been, we don't actually grow into the next version of ourselves. We just repeat the same season with different scenery. But when we do the work of revealing—when we stop hiding and start naming what actually happened—the future gets bright. Really bright.
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Reading about it is one thing. Doing it is another.
I built a one-page worksheet to walk you through all three steps — naming your gains, rewriting the negative scripts, and burying the identity you've outgrown. Print it, sit with it for twenty minutes, and do it again next quarter.