Stop Pretending You'll Magically Become Someone Else

Most people have an unspoken belief that, in the long term, they'll be a completely different person than they were today.
The guy with a dead-end customer service job says one day he'd "like to work in IT" but didn't spend even one minute today learning about computers, or yesterday, or the day before. He hasn't signed up for a course or made plans to. He just has a vague notion that in 10 years he'll be at a desk with a well-paying computer job, with the unspoken assumption that at some point during the nebulous haze of the intervening decade, he'll have evolved into the type of person who devotes a lot of energy to learning computer things.

But every obese person imagines themselves a decade from now having become thin, every coward imagines they'll be brave, you get the idea. There's never a defined plan for how to get from Point A to Point Z, and never an acknowledgment of the unbearable truth, which is that who you're going to be 10 years from now is just who you are today times 3,652. If you spent a good part of today playing Android games, then 10 years from now you'll be a person who's super good at Android games.

That's not a judgment;  but the point is, if you're kind of a laid-back, low-energy type today, you're not going to suddenly turn into a human dynamo next year or the year after, unless you start doing something today, now. If you have anger issues today, you'll have them 10 years from now. If you don't know kung fu today, you won't know it in 2035.

But if you're learning kung fu today, well, then we've got something. You should be a kung fu guru in 10 years if you learn and practice ardently.

"But I do want to learn kung fu! I just don't have the time!" Nope. Stop.  If you had a gun to your head, you'd goddamned well find the time. If you can't make yourself start in the next 24 hours, you wouldn't do it even if you had 24 lifetimes.

But you get my point right?