Good morning,

How are you today? What’s been going on since I wrote you last week?

Here’s what I have for you today:

• One big thing. It’s 2028 and I run into you in a coffee shop and ask, “How have you been?” ☕

• You have to check this out. Notes to myself and super-agers. 👓

• Tools and tech. Illustrated AI storybooks. 📔

Are you ready to jump in? 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

The best three years of your life.

I want to buy land in Montana where I can eventually build a house.

I want enough acreage to have no visible neighbors, wide open grassland, and mountains in the distance.

Imagine along with me. Let's say I've owned this land for a few years, and the time has come to design and build the perfect house for me.

I have a lot of ideas for my house. The size and style, orientation on the land, and essential features I want included—huge outdoor space, garage/workshop, big windows, and plenty of guest rooms.

Now, imagine I meet with a home builder and hand them two pages of bullet points detailing what I want my house to have and look like. As he reviews my wish list, I say, "Please build me this house." I walk away saying, "Let me know when you're done."

What would the house look like when it was completed?

Would it be the exact house I had been imagining? Of course not.

Why? Because I didn't take the time to think through the exact details of my dream house. I merely jotted a few of the core ideas.

Building your life.

Houses are wonderful metaphors for life.

Too often, the closest we get to designing our dream life is to have a few core ideas floating around in the dreamy part of our minds.

If you don’t know specifically what your dream life looks like, you won’t be able to build it. And if you don’t get the details of your dream life out of your head and written down, you won’t be forced to get into the specifics.

Research backs this up. In one relevant example, scientists compared asking people to "do their best" on a task to asking them to achieve specific performance goals. People with specific goals did much better—sometimes nearly doubling their performance.

“In short, when people are asked to do their best, they do not do so. This is because do-your-best goals have no external referent and thus are defined idiosyncratically. This allows for a wide range of acceptable performance levels, which is not the case when a goal level is specified,” the researchers explained.

A second research study found an even more fascinating result. It showed that asking students to spend time thinking about and writing down the details of goals in any part of their lives improved their academic performance. For example, some students in the study focused on non-school goals, and yet this still enhanced their academic performance.

It was the act of (1) thinking about and writing down goals, (2) creating strategies, and (3) engaging in the process that improved outcomes in all aspects of their lives.

The big point is that engaging in purposeful, written goal-setting produces results that abstract dreaming does not.

I am never going to be able to invite friends over to a dream house that only exists in my mind. I mean, it gets cold in Montana. We are going to need a real-life house.

(Please keep reading, today’s letter continues below this rowing interlude…)

The best three years of your life.

Let’s shift from academic research to a practical (and fun) exercise.

Imagine it is 2028. I run into you in a coffee shop and ask, “How have you been?”

You reply, “Kevin, this has been the best three years of my life.”

What would you be telling me about?

The beauty of this exercise is that it allows you to jump into the future. The exercise is not about whether the next three years were the best years of your life—the idea is that they were! It already happened. There is no room for doubts or yeah-buts.

It happened. It is 2028, and you just had the best three years of your entire life.

Write down what you would be telling me about. Don't overthink it. Just start writing everything down.

Write things in past tense. It is 2028. They already happened.

If you get stuck, consider these areas of your life: romantic relationships, other relationships, work, other projects, time, finances, physical health, mental health, and adventures.

After your first brain dump of ideas, look at what you have. If some broad-brush ideas capture your attention, spend some time making them as specific as you can.

Remember my dream house scenario—you want to articulate all the fleshy details.

Here's the exciting part: If you spend time on this exercise, if you yank and pull ideas out of your mind and get them on paper, the chances of these things happening go way up.

This is not magical manifestation and this exercise by itself will not get you there.

But without this kind of contemplation, articulation, specification, and writing down, your dreams will remain just that.

~~~~~~~

This exercise (and the house-building analogy at the start of this letter) comes from the book Rebel: Find Yourself by Not Following the Crowd by Graham Cochrane. Curiously, I did not expect to like this book (it felt a bit too fluffy and rah-rah at first blush), but there is good value in it.

I hope you’ll try the “best years” exercise. If you are willing to, let me know how it goes for you. Just reply to this email.

See you next Sunday,

Kevin

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