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For Successful People, Yesterday Doesn’t Exist
I’ve never known a person focusing on yesterday who had a better tomorrow.
You know this already but: the past doesn’t exist anymore, the future will never exist, and so, really, all you have is right now. This present moment.
But if I had to choose between living in the past, and living in the future, I’d take the future every time.
Sure, I mean learn from the past, extract its lessons and look back on all the great times you’ve had with fondness, but you can’t live there. As executive coach Dan Sullivan says, you have to always make sure that your future is bigger than your past.
Successful people are always analyzing what they could have done better in the past, looking for the lesson and crystallizing the wisdom, but they don’t stay in the past. They use the past to set themselves up for a better future.
Your past is what it was, but your future is what you’ll fashion it into.
A legendary business leader who understands this more than most is John C. Maxwell, author of Success is a Choice, the book where the subtitle of this articles comes from.
It’s a fantastic little book (it’s shorter than 200 pages, and so you can probably finish it in a day), and I’ve written a complete breakdown that you can read much faster (and for free), but I’ll just lay out a few of the Key Ideas right here to give you an idea:
#1: Change Your Beliefs, Change Your Life
“Personal breakthroughs begin with a change in your beliefs. Why? Because your beliefs determine your expectations, and your expectations determine your actions. A belief is a habit of mind in which confidence becomes a conviction that we embrace.”
#2: When You Think of Limits, You Create Them
“Your potential is really up to you. It doesn’t matter what others might think. It doesn’t matter where you came from. It doesn’t even matter what you might have believed about yourself…
