Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • The one habit that I think will change your life is time travelling.

  • By time travelling, of course, I mean writing.

  • Writing is thinking, and thinking is a form of mental time travel.

  • You're already pretty good at it.

  • For example, Twinkle, twinkle, little _____.

  • Most of you probably filled in my silence with the wordstar”.

  • Your mind is always traveling through time to determine the most likely future that will come to be: this is called a prediction.

  • Think about what it actually takes to catch a baseball.

  • You have to imagine the future position of the ball and make sure that your hand intersects with that position.

  • If you can already time travel, why do you need to write?

  • Our minds aren't perfectthey routinely predict futures that never happen.

  • For example, I could have said, Twinkle, twinkle, little car, instead of star.

  • But based on your past experiences, you knew that the most likely future was the one where I said star.

  • This brings us to a very important point: your capacity to predict the future, or time travel effectively, is malleable.

  • Prophecy is a skill that you can get better at, and I claim that writing is one of the best ways to do it.

  • There are an infinite amount of things you could write, but I don't want you to get overwhelmed by too much choice.

  • Instead, I'll share one simple practice with you: mood modelling.

  • Every morning, write down how you feel and what's going on at the moment.

  • 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.

  • As your start to collect more data, you should notice some patterns.

  • Does the weather affect your mood?

  • What about certain foods or people?

  • Do you feel better when you perform certain activities and feel worse when you do others?

  • As you hone in on what makes you feel better, you can actively start shaping your life to reproduce these moments more often.

  • Your time travelling skills will improve, and you'll become better at predicting the next move you should make in life.

  • Mood modelling is powerful because it utilizes the two principles of effective time travel: patterns & predictions.

  • When you record notes on how you feel, where you are, and what's going on around you, you have a set of data.

  • You can analyze this data and look for patterns.

  • Patterns are just the relationship between causes and effects, or actions and outcomes.

  • You can use these patterns to make predictions about the future.

  • I might notice, for example, that on days that I play the piano, I feel good.

  • 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.

  • If it does, I know that there's a link between the pattern of playing the piano and my mood.

  • Writing is a good way to collect data, look for patterns, and make predictions on how certain actions can lead to specific outcomes.

  • Knowing the right actions that lead to the right outcomes is the gift of prophecy.

  • When you can accurately predict the future, you become an effective time traveler.

  • So, pick up the habit of writing because your future literally depends on it.

The one habit that I think will change your life is time travelling.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it