A Brief History of Tomorrow

Why I Replaced Goal-Setting with Story-Setting

Happy (almost) New Year!

Along with my gratitude, I wanted to share one last article with you before January arrives. 2023 was a wild ride for me, as I know it was for many others. I want to thank you for allowing me into your life along the way. It means a lot and I hope my words have encouraged you.

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A Brief History of Tomorrow

About ten years ago, the goal-setting methods I’d relied on for much of my adult life no longer resonated with me. It wasn’t an intentional choice; it happened naturally as my relationship to cultural ideas around success, achievement, and the Good Life shifted.

The things that once motivated me felt less meaningful and fulfilling so I needed a new way to imagine my life, what I wanted to create, and how to act with clear purpose and intention.

Then one December, after mindlessly staring at a blank legal pad for days with “New Year Goals” scrawled across the top, my answer came in the form of a question that got me unstuck:

“How do I live a story worth telling?”

That one question would come to re-frame my view of goal-setting, and replace it with “story-setting” and a process I now use every year called A Brief History of Tomorrow.

Traditional Goal Setting vs. Story Setting

Traditional goal-setting is, for the most part, forward looking. I’m standing Here and envisioning where I want to go: There.

Then, I mark out the steps—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, of course—to get from Here to There. It’s an intellectual, rational, linear process.

The challenge I ran into ten years ago was that I was unable to clearly envision or get excited about There anymore, which made deciding which path to take impossible.

I didn’t know where I wanted to go or even what I wanted to do, mostly because I wasn’t clear on why I wanted those things to begin with. This is still the case with me sometimes.

Story-setting, on the other hand, is about imaginative time travel.

It is a non-linear perspective shift that quickly gets at the heart of who I want to be instead of just what I want to do or accomplish. It tells the story of my life in reverse, using an unfair advantage: imagination.

Imagination harnesses thought and emotion. Its language is possibilities rather than probabilities. It brings What Could Be into the Now as a felt reality, and utilizes perfect 20/20 hindsight as if I have already become what I set out to be.

It’s become a simple and powerful process for me.

How Story Setting Works

Every December, I use a process called A Brief History of Tomorrow, which brings the future into the present moment as if it has already happened. Here’s how it works.

1. Set aside 30 minutes uninterrupted for this exercise. Don’t give yourself more than that at this stage. It’s important not to think too much, but to instead trust your initial intuitions and first responses.

2. Close your eyes and imagine you are exactly one year in the future, and you are looking back on the year just completed. From this vantage point, you can see the whole path, from where you began at the start of 2024 to now, December 2024. With perfect 20/20 hindsight, you realize and deeply know this was the year you finally felt fully alive, fully yourself.

3. Now, ask yourself:

“What does fully alive feel like, right here and right now, as I look back on my year?”

It’s important to go beyond intellectual thinking to full-body knowing here. The power lies in moving beyond just ideas and concepts to a felt sense in your body. What does it feel like in your body to know you’ve lived a life true to yourself in 2024? See if you can feel that sense of aliveness.

4. Now, as quickly as you can, write the story highlights of this fully alive version of your life. What happened? Describe the choices you made along the way, the person you became, and the parts of your life that transformed as a result. You can write it out as a story or, like I’ve done below, in bullet points. Either way, remember you are looking back in time so use past tense as if it has already happened and you are right now living the reality of being fully alive.

Here is a short snippet of my own list:

This year, I felt the most fully alive I ever have because:

• I shared my creative gifts with commitment and consistency.

• I was intentionally present and fully here, now.

• I prioritized getting heroic doses of nature, stillness, and awe.

• I learned to follow my excitement and intuition.

• I became aware of, and stopped rehearsing, the limiting stories I tell myself.

• I followed through and kept my promises to myself and others.

• I “put my oxygen mask on first” which gave me the energy to show up for others.

• I lived generously and compassionately.

• I trusted myself fully.

• I learned and applied one new thing to my life every day. 

• Shifted my identity and purpose from self to SELF (collective)

  …

Can you see why this question—What does fully alive feel like?—is an important starting point?

It reveals the Why behind every one of your What’s. It also reveals what you truly value and desire in your life. This is an important point.

Isn’t feeling fully alive the very reason we set goals, create vision boards, and hold intentions in the first place? At the heart of all our visioning and goal-seeing, we just want to feel fully alive through our experiences, relationships, and pursuits.

I’m reminded of the often quoted line from Howard Thurman:

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

I would argue that this is all any of us has set out to do. Think of any goal you’ve ever set in the past, no matter what it was. What did you really want if not how that person, thing, or accomplishment would make you feel more alive?

Take money, for example. No one wants to be rich for its own sake. They want the experience of how being rich will make them feel: safe, powerful, meaningful, worthy. Alive.

More precisely, they want to be the kind of person whose life naturally produces these outcomes.

It’s the same reason we seek meaningful work that matters to us, a soulmate, or the freedom to control our time and energy. We want these things for the happiness and sense of aliveness we believe they will bring us, and the person we become along the way.

5. Now that you have your story points, go back and see what your story reveals about how to bring those things into reality, and any connections or patterns you see.

Using my list as an example, here are two related story points about consistency:

• I shared my creative gifts with commitment and consistency.

• I followed through and kept my promises to myself and others.

Looking back in time, how did this fully alive version of myself share my gifts with commitment, consistency, and follow through? The answers will begin to emerge on their own.

I can then begin to flesh out the specific how’s: the habits, actions, and choices I made along the way:

• I committed to a clear, scheduled, daily practice for creating.

• I shared my daily practice/plan with an ally who can help me keep my promise of showing up for myself.

• I set clear, daily/weekly milestones and rewards for reaching them.

• I gave my best energy every day to the work I was most excited about.

At this point in the process, I get practical and specific about what actions brought me to this place of feeling fully alive.

The Power of an Anti-Story

What if you can’t envision a year that’s fully alive, though? I’ve run up against this many times in my life, often when I’m disillusioned or feeling depressed. The simplest approach I’ve found is to tell what I call a Neti Neti or an Anti-Story.

“Neti, neti” is a Sanskrit expression meaning “not this, not this”. In the non-dual philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, neti neti is a form of investigation into the essential nature of reality by first understanding what it is not.

Essentially, you’re following the same process as above, but telling the story of what you DON’T want, like this:

This year, I felt completely drained of life because:

• I started many things and didn’t follow through on most.

• I isolated and waited for others to reach out to me.

• I didn’t know CLEARLY what I was working toward.

• I let other people’s agendas dictate my own.

• I let the past define me… again.

I’ve often started by writing an Anti-Story as a way to begin gaining clarity on what I truly wanted and how to begin taking steps toward it.

Remember, the mind creates time.

Always, use this to your advantage. In reality, there is no such thing as past or future, except when we create it in our imagination. Whether you’re remembering a memory or imagining a future, you’re doing both Now. It’s inescapable.

If you must use your imagination, use it creatively instead of to tear yourself down. We are always telling ourselves (and others) stories. Harnessing that is a powerful move.

By approaching vision and goal-setting through story, I’ve been able to bypass the analytical mind, even if just for a few moments, so what I truly want can shine through.

Hopefully this will be helpful to you. No matter how you approach the dawn of a new year, I wish you great joy, peace, and a year of being fully alive.

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