By Hafsa Sarfraz
Major life changes are never easy because your instincts and the urgent matters of the day work against you. But when you learn to focus on your future-self, you’ll be surprised at what can you achieve. Many of us dream of a future that’s very different from our present. We’ll live in Hawaii instead of Haversack, abandon single-hood for family life, or paint murals for a living. But getting from here to there is hard, largely because of some powerful psychological forces align against reinvention.
It’s our nature to spend our energy primarily on today’s immediate matters, to hold a distorted perception of our future, or, even if we’re future focused, to keep chasing after what turn out to be wrong dreams. Too often we just gave up when we need to push harder and persist when we actually should quit. Yet without a clearer eyed assessment of our present and our future and a more effective approach to setting, pursuing and achieving goals we can end up with a future we really don’t want, in which we are sick, broke, lonely, or just plain unfulfilled. We have to modify our identities as we go through life. Before you can reinvent yourself, you have to know who you currently are. People need to understand their strengths, their weaknesses, their passion and their own story – only then they can look up to the responsibility.
In reinvention it is important to find concordance between what really matters to us and the goals we chase. But too often our future plans are overly influenced by other. These external pressures can detach us from our core values. If we don’t go through a process of self-discovery, but just accept other’s decision, 10 years later we might find our self-saying “I don’t think that’s me”. Japan is very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.
When you know who you are you can recognize what you need to overcome to keep your personality away from blocking your dream. Force yourself to envision your future, keeping in mind our tendency to revert to a baseline level of happiness even after success. And to further complicate things, reinventing yourself is particularly hard because nobody is going to praise you for it -especially in the beginning. The good news is that the path to doing work you love might not look the way you expected, but it can still get you to where you want to go-if you make the choice to try something new.
It’s never too late to reinvent yourself.