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The one habit that I think will change your life is time travelling.
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By time travelling, of course, I mean writing.
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Writing is thinking, and thinking is a form of mental time travel.
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You're already pretty good at it.
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For example, Twinkle, twinkle, little _____.
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Most of you probably filled in my silence with the word “star”.
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Your mind is always traveling through time to determine the most likely future that will come to be: this is called a prediction.
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Think about what it actually takes to catch a baseball.
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You have to imagine the future position of the ball and make sure that your hand intersects with that position.
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If you can already time travel, why do you need to write?
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Our minds aren't perfect — they routinely predict futures that never happen.
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For example, I could have said, Twinkle, twinkle, little car, instead of star.
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But based on your past experiences, you knew that the most likely future was the one where I said star.
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This brings us to a very important point: your capacity to predict the future, or time travel effectively, is malleable.
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Prophecy is a skill that you can get better at, and I claim that writing is one of the best ways to do it.
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There are an infinite amount of things you could write, but I don't want you to get overwhelmed by too much choice.
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Instead, I'll share one simple practice with you: mood modelling.
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Every morning, write down how you feel and what's going on at the moment.
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Record everything: your physical environment, your social environment, what you're eating or drinking, what you have planned for the day, so on and so forth.
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As your start to collect more data, you should notice some patterns.
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Does the weather affect your mood?
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What about certain foods or people?
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Do you feel better when you perform certain activities and feel worse when you do others?
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As you hone in on what makes you feel better, you can actively start shaping your life to reproduce these moments more often.
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Your time travelling skills will improve, and you'll become better at predicting the next move you should make in life.
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Mood modelling is powerful because it utilizes the two principles of effective time travel: patterns & predictions.
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When you record notes on how you feel, where you are, and what's going on around you, you have a set of data.
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You can analyze this data and look for patterns.
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Patterns are just the relationship between causes and effects, or actions and outcomes.
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You can use these patterns to make predictions about the future.
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I might notice, for example, that on days that I play the piano, I feel good.
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Because of this, I might try to find more time to include playing the piano in my schedule, and I'll see if this makes me feel better.
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If it does, I know that there's a link between the pattern of playing the piano and my mood.
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Writing is a good way to collect data, look for patterns, and make predictions on how certain actions can lead to specific outcomes.
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Knowing the right actions that lead to the right outcomes is the gift of prophecy.
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When you can accurately predict the future, you become an effective time traveler.
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So, pick up the habit of writing because your future literally depends on it.