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Law One

Always Make Your Future
Bigger Than Your Past

A bigger future is essential for lifetime growth. The past is useful because it is rich with experiences that are worth thinking about in new ways—and all of these valuable experiences can become raw material for creating an even bigger future. Approach your past with this attitude, and you will have an insatiable desire for even better, more enjoyable experiences. Use your past to continually create a bigger future, and you will separate yourself from situations, relationships, and activities that can trap you there.

Your future is your property. Because, by definition, it hasn’t happened yet, it exists only in your mind. This means that you can choose to make it whatever you want. The act of making your future bigger than your past is the very act of growth itself: the bigger future is the vision, and growth is what makes it real. A bigger future includes anything you want to see that’s somehow an improvement on what’s true now: greater learning, contribution, opportunities, capabilities, understanding, confidence, quality of life, compassion, connectedness. The list goes on and on, limited only by what you can imagine. Some people’s bigger futures are mostly about themselves, and others’ encompass contributions to many other people and things.

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Believing in a Bigger Future

In order to make your future bigger than your past, you first have to believe that it’s possible to have a bigger future, no matter what stage you’re at in life or what your circumstances are. Often, this belief alone is enough to keep you growing.

By anyone’s standards, Dan Schmidt is a very successful entrepreneur. He has grown and continues to run several successful companies. He has been very well rewarded financially, but he prefers to focus on what it has allowed him to create for others: giving young people opportunities that don’t exist elsewhere in his industry, and creating jobs and a positive working environment for his teams. Yet Dan knows that something doesn’t feel quite right anymore. For the last six months, he’s been trying to figure out what his bigger future looks like. Sure, he can wake up every day, do the same things, and get the same results, but he’s looking for the next big challenge—the next uncomfortable stretch that will allow him to apply his talents and build on what he’s already accomplished in more meaningful ways, so that he can create not just wealth and jobs and opportunities for others, but a legacy.

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Because of this burning need to find what’s next, Dan notices things that he might not have seen before. He hears an ad on the radio about cremation versus burial and wonders who will end up with the urn, or if there’s a more significant legacy he can leave for his family. He thinks about the volunteer work he does for an environmental group and questions whether that might somehow hold the key to what’s next. He’s trying different things and opening himself to seeing in different ways. This, in itself, is growth.

As he continues to run his businesses and live his life, he’s also applying his creativity and ingenuity to trying to figure out this one big question: if everything I’ve done so far is just the beginning, what’s next? Dan’s quest for what his bigger future will look like is causing him to grow in ways that go beyond what his businesses and all his accomplishments to date have done.

Well, fine, you may say. Dan’s a successful entrepreneur and he’s used to growing. He has lots of money and resources and he’s his own boss, so of course he can think about a bigger future. What if you’re poor and no one has ever told you that you can do anything better than what you’re doing now or what your parents did? Or what if, no matter what you do, you can’t seem to get ahead? Our answer is, even in those circumstances you can still have a vision of a future that’s bigger than your past, and make it real.