Letter to your future self

Where do you want it delivered?

My son is completing 8th grade, and our school district here in New Hampshire has each child fill a “time capsule” that they will open in 4 years, when they graduate high school. They ask parents to write letters to our kids—letters the kids themselves won’t see until they graduate high school in four years.

It’s a thought-provoking exercise. What kind of man will my son be in four years? What will he want to read from me, his mom from back when he was still a kid?

In some ways, this is an exercise in creating a vision for the future. As leaders, we should be forward-looking. We can figure out where and how we want to be in those future years, and then figure out how to move from where we are now to that new-and-improved version of reality. As a parent, this is wrapped up in all the emotions of “my baby is growing up!” and working to avoid having “Cats in the Cradle” playing on an endless loop of regret in my brain. But in our professional lives, we can look at ourselves, our staff, our team, our firm, and even our industry and think about where we will be in a few years.

We don’t have to consider all of them at once, but if we continue to look forward, see what could be, and then plan and develop and grow and strive, we can make our future into one we don’t mind growing into.

(Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash)