Carpe diem

Can you picture, in your mind, how much you have changed (your character that is) over the past 10 years?

Go back and meet yourself in 2015, and then compare that person with the person that you are today in 2025.

How different were you back then when compared to the person you meet in the mirror today?

Certainly you feel wiser and that the amount of personal growth you have experienced in this time makes the 2015-version of yourself almost feel like a stranger.

Now...project your mind towards the year 2035 and try to imagine how much more wisdom and life experience you will have further gained by then.

Can you anticipate how much you are still going to change?

Is it easy to do? Are you struggling to clearly envision your own character transformation from here?

End of history illusion

The tangible challenge you are probably facing in this mental exercise is what is termed the 'end of history illusion'.

Although you can see how much you have developed from the past until now, it's far harder to accept that even more personal development (no matter how old you are BTW) is on the horizon in the future.

This psychological phenomenon has a critical influence on our decision-making - effectively neutralising our urgency to seize opportunities as they arise in the moment, because we wrongly assume that we will be the same person in the future.

Practically this implies, for example, that if you have the desire to travel somewhere today (you know to go see that band you have always loved, or to eat at that restaurant that you have always wanted to experience) then seize the day and do it.

Don't put it off and assume that you will have the opportunity again in the future. You will change...things will change...the world will change and the moment will slip away into the murky haze of the past.

Carpe diem...seize the day.