Who is in charge of your future?

Dear friend,

There is one sentence I hear more than any other.

I hear it after keynotes, in workshops, in coaching sessions, over dinner. It comes in many versions, and underneath it always has the same shape:

When the new government comes in. When I find a better job. When the right person finally shows up. When my body is back to how it used to be. And, more often than you would ever guess: when the weather gets better.

I have watched people make decisions about their lives based on the forecast. And it is not only the weather. This year, some people who had planned to visit us here in the Santa Cruz Mountains canceled because of the government. We had been looking forward to those days, and so had they. Governments change. The days we could have spent together do not come back.

I know this room from the inside. Two weeks ago I told you about the ride across the Alps that my friends and I missed this summer, after nine years in a row. Nobody decided against it. I was waiting too: for someone to plan the route, send the itinerary, put the dates on the calendar. So was everyone else. Waiting rarely announces itself. It simply sits down next to you.

And I know the other side of the door as well. When it was time for me to move on from Google, I did not wait. I walked through before I could see everything behind it.

Most of us spend more of our lives in a waiting room than we realize. It is a comfortable place. The chairs are soft. The magazines on the table are full of advice. And there is always the hope that soon, someone will open the door and call our name.

There is no shortage of people ready to tell you how to live a better, happier life. I have probably been one of those voices more often than I would like. But after ten years of teaching at Stanford and many years at Google helping people create what did not exist yet, I have come to believe something simple. Most of us do not need more advice. We need a better relationship with our own future. That is the work I have chosen to give this chapter of my life to, and this letter is where a growing community of us practice it together.

That relationship begins to change the moment you notice who you have been waiting for.

First, the weather. A team of researchers followed more than a thousand people, comparing their daily moods with sunshine, temperature, and rain. On average, the weather barely moved them.

Here is the part that surprised me. The sentence that keeps us in the waiting room is also one of the most powerful tools psychology knows. The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer calls it an implementation intention: a plan in the shape when this happens, I will do that. Across nearly a hundred studies, people who made plans like this were noticeably more likely to follow through on their goals.

The whole difference lives in the when. When the government changes, I will hands your future to someone else. When I pour my first coffee, I will write one page keeps it in your hands.

On my birthday I began Mindstate Moments, a free daily practice: every morning, one thought, one shift, and one small ritual that begins with the words Today, I choose to. (You will find how to get it at the very end of this letter.)

When people joined, I asked each of them for one word. How do you feel right now, when you think about your future? You wrote back.

Worried. Scared. Anxious. Nervous. Overwhelmed. Excited. Hopeful. Free. Optimistic. Ambivalent. Conscious. Optimistically uncertain.

I read every one, more than once. Almost half of the words you sent me named some form of fear. Several of you held two feelings at the same time: excited and anxious, overwhelmed and excited. I recognize that. It is often how the future feels when it truly matters to us.

And then there was one reply I keep coming back to. You started with scared. Then you wrote excited anticipation. And a line further down, you landed on hopeful.

Three words. One reply. A few seconds of honesty with yourself.

Nothing around you had changed. Only you had moved, and your future moved with you.

If you try it, reply and tell me your old "when" and your new one. I would love to read both.

Every waiting room has a door. Most of us just sit facing the other way.

This week I am opening thirty of them. Where to Start gathers the best of four seasons of The Future Is How, and every door begins exactly where you are sitting right now, in the chair you are in, with the feeling you have today. You only need to recognize yours.

Behind each one waits a person who has spent their life on that question, and one practice you can try today.

If your word was worried or anxious, door 30 opens onto a future that has not arrived yet. If you are still waiting to be ready, door 19 has been waiting for you. It is the only thing in this letter allowed to wait.

You know the feeling when someone holds a door open for you. You walk through a little lighter.

Think of one person who is sitting in the waiting room right now. Waiting for the right job, the right moment, the right weather. You already know who it is.

Send them this letter and add one line of your own: I thought of you.

Forward this letter →

Nobody has to leave the waiting room alone.

Whatever your word was today, it is yours to change. And the door is closer than it looks.

P.S. As promised: Mindstate Moments arrives every morning with one thought, one shift, and one small ritual that begins with Today, I choose to. It is free, and your first one comes the morning after you sign up. Tomorrow starts with what you practice today. Start tomorrow's moment →

P.P.S. More and more parents have been telling me the same thing. Their kids, somewhere between 18 and 24, look at their future and ask: und jetzt...? And now what? They do not know what to do, or where to start. So together with Maks Giordano and his daughter Luca, who is leading the whole project, we created an afternoon for exactly them. On Sunday, October 25, und jetzt...? opens at Fotografiska Berlin, free for anyone between 18 and 24. I will bring an art installation from Burning Man and close the day with a Zukunftsgeist experience. The event is in German. If someone you love is asking "and now what?", please send this to them. Details and free registration →