Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Or as Michael Jordan says, “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”

In 2005, my friend Roz Savage became the first woman to complete the Atlantic Rowing Race solo. That’s right—one woman, one boat, 103 days of rowing across three thousand miles of open ocean. Her cooking stove failed after twenty days and all four of her oars broke, but she made it. But that’s just for starters. Roz later became the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean. She did it in three stages. In 2008, she rowed solo from San Francisco to Oahu in Hawaii; in 2009, from Hawaii to Tarawa in Kiribati; and in 2010 to Madang in Papua New Guinea.

Roz wasn’t always an adventurer. She insists that before her rowing adventures, she led a normal, comfortable, mostly sedentary, middle-class lifestyle like many of us. She was a management consultant and project manager at an investment bank in London, with a steady income and a house in the suburbs.

Sometime in her midthirties, she did an exercise writing her own obituary. What would people say about her after she died, she wondered. She wrote two versions of her obituary. The first version reflected how things would turn out given her then-current life trajectory. The second version reflected the life she aspired to live. She made a very important discovery during that process. She realized that writing the first version drained so much of her energy, she could not finish it, while she was so energized while writing the second version, she did not want to stop. That was her life-changing insight. She eventually gave up her old life, her job, her steady income, her house, and her marriage to pursue her dream of rowing across oceans.

Some people think Roz must have been wealthy to be able to let go of everything to pursue her dreams. Actually, she wasn’t. She told me that when she started rowing across the Atlantic, her entire net worth was her boat and everything inside it (including the cooking stove that eventually broke).

What led Roz to her life-changing insight was an envisioning exercise. It helped her to discover her deepest values and motivations and, at the same time, allowed her to envision her desired future and to consolidate that future in her mind.

“Man, writing my obituary’s tougher than I thought.”

Discover Your Ideal Future

In Search Inside Yourself, we teach an envisioning practice similar to what Roz did for herself. The basic idea is to envision, discover, and consolidate our ideal future in the mind by writing about it as if it were already true. This is a very powerful practice I learned from my friend Barbara Fittipaldi, president and CEO of the Center for New Futures.

Here are the instructions. Kids, do try this at home; you are experts.

DISCOVERING MY IDEAL FUTURE

This is a writing exercise. We will do this over 7 minutes, which is longer than our usual writing exercises, and there is only one prompt. This exercise can be very fun and fulfilling.

The prompt is:

If everything in my life, starting from today, meets or exceeds my most optimistic expectations, what will my life be in five years?

The more detailed the imagery in your mind, the better this exercise will work. Hence, consider these questions before writing. In this future:

• Who are you and what are you doing?

• How do you feel?

• What do people say about you?

Let’s spend a minute in silent contemplation before writing.

(1-minute pause)

Start writing.

There are variants to this exercise. You can spend more time on it, such as an hour or two instead of seven minutes. Or you can change the destination date; if five years in the future does not work for you, try ten or twenty years. Yet another variation is to pretend you are already living in your ideal future five years from now and to write diary entries from the future. This is the variation we used in Barbara’s class.

There are at least two other major variations. One is to write your own obituary, as Roz did, and if you like, write two versions like Roz did. Another is to visualize this scene:

You are attending a talk as part of a large audience. Everybody in the audience, including you, is deeply touched and inspired by what the speaker is saying. That speaker is your future self twenty years from now .

Questions to consider:

• What is the speaker saying and how is it touching and inspiring you?

• What about the speaker makes you look up to him/her?

Talk About Your Ideal Future a Lot

If you find yourself inspired by your ideal future, I highly recommend talking about it a lot to other people. There are two important benefits. First, the more you talk about it, the more real it becomes to you. This works even if your dream is highly improbable or impossible. My own dream, for example, is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime. I envision a world that is peaceful because inner peace, inner joy, and compassion are widespread, and those qualities are widespread as a consequence of ancient wisdom practices being made accessible to the modern world. I envision myself as a person who makes wisdom practices accessible by making them understandable, practical, and useful in the corporate world and beyond. When I started thinking about this, I knew my goal was impossible, but I talked about it to a lot of people anyway. The more I talked about it, the more it went from being impossible to implausible, and then from implausible to possible, and more importantly, it went from possible to actionable. I reached a state in my mind in which I felt there were actually things I could do to move it forward.

The second important benefit is the more you talk to people about your ideal future, the more likely you can find people to help you. This is especially true if your aspiration for the future is altruistic in nature because people will rush to help you. If your wish is to drive a nice Lexus, nobody will care. However, if your wish is something altruistic—for example, you want to feed every hungry person in the world, or you want to make sure no homeless person in San Francisco ever dies from the cold, or you aspire to help disadvantaged kids in your community learn better—and you are sincere about your wish to serve others, I guarantee the most common response will be, “How can I help?” When you are genuinely moved to help others, you inspire people with your altruism, and when you inspire them, they want to help you.

Truth be told, I was actually surprised by how well it worked. When I first started talking to others about my aspirations for world peace, I was pleasantly surprised how few people thought I was crazy (only two, so far). As it became more real to me, I began speaking about it with increasing confidence and, after a while, I noticed that people wanted to help me or introduce other people to me who could help me.

Soon, I was building a network of allies (whom I jokingly call the “grand conspiracy for world peace”). I found myself befriending many luminaries of the contemplative world such as Matthieu Ricard, and luminaries in the peace-making world like Scilla Elworthy. Richard Gere and the Dalai Lama gave me hugs. Owen Wilson and will.i.am said they wanted to help me. I was invited to deliver a TED talk on compassion at the United Nations. Many hundreds of strangers tell me that I have inspired them. I am amazed by how much my simple aspiration for world peace has resonated with so many people, and I am humbled by all the friendship and kindness I have experienced.

I learned that people want to be inspired. Every aspiration of service we have and every act of charity we perform inspires others. Hence, if you have altruistic aspirations, especially if you are already acting on them, I very much encourage you to share them with others so you can inspire more goodness in the world.