You Are Exactly Where You Are Meant To Be
The Power Of Staying In The Present, And The Perils Of Focusing On The Past Or Future.
“Usually, people have a tendency to be caught in the worries concerning the future or in the regret concerning the past. There is some kind of energy that is pushing them to run, and they are not able to establish themselves in the present moment.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh
You, yes you, are exactly where you are meant to be in life. This moment, this circumstance, the overwhelming bad, the overwhelming good, or the mediocrity that makes up your current life — it is all perfectly suited to get you to the place you want to be. Admittedly, this is a rather presumptuous sounding statement, so how can I be so certain of it?
In short, my certainty comes from the fact that there’s no other alternative. The only way for you to get where you want to go is by first graduating from your current situation. Like it or not, this is your starting point.
Make no mistake, your present circumstances make up the most important chapter in your life. Your past, with all its successes and failures, is already decided and it’s unchangeable. The future is fiction — the only predictable aspect of life is that it will make a mockery of most of our plans. But the present and how you respond to the here and now will forever alter your existence. Usually, it redirects your life in small, almost imperceptible ways, but occasionally moments arrive that change the entire trajectory of your life.
How will you respond to the moment in front of you? Most of us perform better than we could ever imagine when we have our entire focus on the present moment. But all too often we are preoccupied with two of the biggest distractions from the here and now: thinking about the past and thinking about the future. Past and future thinking can both serve a purpose, but they also provide unique perils.
The Past
When it comes to thinking about our past, most of us make two big mistakes.
The first mistake is about timing.
“How did I get here?”
This is a question that many of us find ourselves asking over and over again. It can be very useful when asked at the right time, but when you’re starving in the desert, it’s best to put all your attention on finding food.
Your brain can only do one thing at a time. By keeping your thoughts on the present, and putting your entire attention on solving the problem, you greatly increase your chance of succeeding.
I can assure you that LeBron James is not worried about why his team is down by two points when he has ten seconds left to go in the game — instead, he’s 100% focused on winning the game. He’s in the present. After the game, he can look at the film and find out why they were losing, and plan for how they can do better in the future.
We’re not NBA stars, but our process should be very similar to LeBron’s. Maybe we made a mistake, but it does no good to beat ourselves up about it. When we’re knocked down, we have to get up off the mat and do our best to avoid the next haymaker that’s coming our way. Once we’ve regained our footing, we can look back and think about what we could have done differently and adjust the game-plan accordingly.
The second mistake many people make when thinking of the past is repeating lessons we’ve already learned. Once we’ve survived the desert, we should learn everything there is to know about it and then move on.
In math, once we understand that 2 + 2 = 4, we don’t continually repeat the same problem over and over. Instead, we move onto harder addition problems, and we learn subtraction, multiplication, division, algebra, and sometimes even calculus.
But many of us obsess over our mistakes well after we’ve learned the lesson. Maybe we burned a bridge with a friend, maybe we were too trusting, maybe we didn’t trust enough, maybe we were too lazy, or maybe we worked too hard. We have to learn the lesson but if we obsess over the mistake, we are doing nothing but abusing ourselves. There’s nothing gained from this type of negative thought-loop and it often leads to paralysis by analysis.
So instead of ruminating on past mistakes, go out into the world, make new mistakes, and learn new lessons. This would be far more useful to our long term success and happiness than continuing to think about past events and mistakes.
The Future
Some people have been tricked into believing that if they think hard enough about the future, they’ll magically achieve their dreams and goals. To be fair, I have experienced the power of visualization, but only when paired with a heavy dose of action.
When I played baseball in college, I had an awful habit of standing in the outfield and imagining myself making a costly error. Guess what: I often committed errors on even routine plays when I was thinking like that. And the more often I committed an error, the easier it was to imagine myself making errors. It was a vicious cycle.
When I was older, playing in a recreational league, I found myself imagining those same negative outcomes. But this time, when I had these negative images in my head, I did something different. I would force my mind to visualize myself making unbelievable plays: diving as far as I could to snag a line drive, throwing out a runner at home, or robbing a home run. Guess what: as a much poorer athlete than I was in my college years, I made all the routine plays but also made numerous plays that I could never make in college. The only thing that changed was my mental routine.
Visualization and thinking about the future are clearly powerful. But many people, myself included, waste time visualizing themselves in roles they will never be in. If I wasn’t playing centerfield, there would be no reason to visualize myself making diving catches. If I’m visualizing myself as an academy award-winning actor without working on my acting skills, then I am simply daydreaming.
If I want to be a great musician or actor, I should visualize myself having a successful performance, but I should be spending far more time practicing my craft and booking auditions. If I want to be a successful entrepreneur, I can visualize myself giving a lights out pitch to an investor, but I better spend even more time building a compelling product and making sales. In short, I should be focused on the present.
Visualization is powerful, but only when paired with action. So set your mind on your desired destination, and visualize success, but don’t spend your time daydreaming of a fictional future.
The Present
So what does that leave us? It leaves us with the only true reality there is: the present. Our only medium we have to affect the world around us is the here and now.
The present is so valuable that it deserves our fullest attention. In fact, some of the greatest joys in the world are often found by focusing deeply on the present moment: an engaging discussion, a challenging competition, a captivating art project, an enlightening educational experience, or even a beautiful sunset.
To fully appreciate the immense value of the present we first have to embrace our present circumstances. That is why I say “you are exactly where you are meant to be”. No matter how hard our here and now is, we have to embrace it to move through it. We often want to turn our eyes away from the hardest parts of our life, but a wound that goes untreated festers and the same thing happens when we run from our challenges. But when you focus on the present, with all of its challenges, the future takes care of itself.
When you embrace the idea that you are exactly where you are meant to be, you realize that if you are meant to be there, you are also up for anything that comes your way — the good and the bad.
In my personal life, I spend almost exactly 6 minutes each day meditating on the words, “I am exactly where I am meant to be.” Once I’m done, all the problems I am facing are reframed. I see new ways of solving issues. I find common ground in uncomfortable conversations. And I realize that even if the worst-case scenario plays out, I am going to be okay. Why? Because I am exactly where I am meant to be.
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