3 Things Your Future Self Will Thank You for Starting Today

Good morning.

Forty days and forty nights we've been doing these journals.

And the timing on this one is perfect. We're at the end of December 1996, just about to turn into 1997... and I still can't quite believe we've gotten forty episodes out of a single year.

Doing this has felt like time travel.

I'm reading pages I wrote at thirty. I've just turned sixty. And here's the strange part.

I feel exactly the same.

Same reactions. Same core nature. Nothing about who I am has really moved.

There's no internet in these pages yet. I haven't met most of the key people in my life yet.

But the seeds are all in there.

So before we open journal number four, let me pull out the three things I'd tell you to start today.

Number one. Start the journal.

April of 1996, journal number one. Of everything I've done, that decision has been the greatest gift.

I kept pretty good notes, and that's the whole trick. I read a page and I'm immediately transported back to where I was and what was going on.

Your 2056 self will thank you for starting in 2026.

Number two. Have the dialogue with yourself.

Most of what fills these pages is me talking to me. Thinking about my thinking.

We're pretty smart, you know. Our intuition is right more often than we give it credit for. If we just dig into it and explore it on paper, we come to pretty good conclusions.

I can see hunches brewing in these pages that turned into everything.

There's one coming up in 1997 I can't wait to show you. A question written at the top of the page... what am I going to do about the internet?

The pages are also where I try out my life. The architecture of the days. Lifestyle design, before I had a name for it.

I'd just moved to Florida. Wake up, go for a walk, come home, make some breakfast... and then watch Regis and Kathy Lee.

There was one segment where they followed Regis around for a day. He lived right across the street from the studio. Coffee with Joy, got dressed at home in whatever he was wearing that day, walked over.

Music comes on. And he spends the first ten minutes of the show just recounting everything he'd been doing.

Live on television. The rest of it was just being Regis.

That stuck with me. Because at sixty, what I'm completely bought into is just being Dean Jackson.

Look at my Facebook bio. I'm Dean Jackson. Period. Professionally, period. That's the whole thing.

And that gives me room to do whatever it is I want to do.

There's never been a better moment to just be you. Look at the reach you have now. The community. The options sitting there for the taking. We had none of that in 1996.

Number three. Go a mile deep on one thing.

The biggest impact I've ever had came from marketing and real estate. And these journals are filled with me playing the same game over and over, getting better and better at the micro elements of it.

Then I paired it with Michael Gerber's idea. Build the thing as though you're going to duplicate it five thousand times. Extraordinary results with ordinary people. Systems somebody can plug straight into.

Once I got bit by that bug, that was it. Thirty years of continual practice on the same thing.

That's the whole compounding secret and it isn't complicated. One thing. A long time.

Next up is journal number four. 1997. The transition to Florida.

So let's have a simultaneous sip, to toast the first forty days and forty nights.

And here's your nudge for today.

Get a notebook, and put one page in it... a dialogue with yourself about the thing you can't stop thinking about.

Then keep it for thirty years.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/055-3-things-your-future-self-will-thank-you-for-starting-today/

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