This talk by Dan Gilbert (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_you_are_always_changing) describes how we believe that our present self will remain essentially the same 10 years into the future — and how we’re wrong. Dan’s talk explores how we often make decisions now thinking that we’ll be happy with those decisions 10 years from now. This stems from an illusion that who we are now is who we are meant to be; That we have arrived at the end of our development.

One of the biggest barriers I have seen in getting people to open up to big dreams and goals in the future is that they restrict that future based on this illusion. They govern their future based on their current fears and constraints. It’s hard to imagine a time when those blocks and anxieties won’t be in our way. It is also difficult to deal with the fact that if you’re going to realize a big dream that you have not yet realized, you’re going to have to be a fundamentally different person. That is what growth is about.

In a certain way growth requires the death of the present-self and our present-self likes being alive, no matter how messed up we may feel. The devil you know and all that… The challenge here is to build comfort with change, growth, and loss. Perhaps that means we should both celebrate who we are now, because we’ll only have a brief opportunity to know this version of ourselves, and that we should embrace the person we are going to be and try to make our decisions based on our future reckoning rather than our present one.