The most Important Letter Youll Ever Write

in times that we may

feel stuck or unsure about the future i

found that visualizing for ourselves the

future we’d like

can help us get out of any stuck

situation

when i was in college i found myself in

a pretty stuck situation

i was cleaning porta-potties i would

clean for about 15 hours a day

rain snow or sun i was always at work

my job was so bad that one day i showed

up to work and

there were two young convicts there

apparently they had put a dry

ice bomb inside of a porta potty and the

whole thing exploded

and so their punishment was to do my job

for a week yeah the government decided

to use

my job to teach convicts a lesson as

much as i wanted to quit that job

i couldn’t really do that i had an

incident where i had backed the truck

into a garage door completely destroying

it in the process

and so my punishment was to either pay

one thousand dollars to have the garage

door fixed

or be incident-free for a year and since

i didn’t have the money another year of

cleaning porta-potties was my

sentence i realized that if i really

needed to quit that job

i could have borrowed the money and paid

for the garage door

but i was having this conflicting

feeling that

maybe staying in that job a little

longer was the exact place that i needed

to be

so you can imagine the conflict and the

despair that i was feeling

i literally was stuck in a crappy

situation

in an act of hope i got out a pen and

paper

and wrote my future self a letter

dear stuart this letter is from someone

who knows you quite well

you’re cleaning porta-potties right now

and you have no idea how you do it

and you wonder where you’ll be in six

months i explained some of my hopes and

dreams and

visualized for myself this future that i

would like to have

i put that letter away and planned to

read it in some future date

and then got back to work i did make one

change

instead of listening to talk radio and

music i

began listening to inspirational

podcasts one of these podcasts inspired

me to buy a video camera

and start making videos a friend of mine

saw me with this camera

and he offered me an internship at a

video marketing firm

i gladly accepted and by a miracle alone

i was able to

quit the porta-potty job and work out a

deal with my employer to not

have to pay for the garage door after a

few months i decided to put my newly

acquired video skills to the test

and made my own youtube video titled

mistletoe prank

where we went to a college campus and

asked people if they celebrated the

tradition of the mistletoe

we edited the video together and i

uploaded it to my youtube channel

which at the time had 9 subscribers

within an hour of being awake the video

had 300 views

and then continued to grow the rest of

that day receiving

millions of views that week those

nine subscribers grew by the hundreds of

thousands and my life

as a youtuber began looking back it’s

easy to see

how one thought and one idea led to the

next but at the time it was a lot of

steps into the unknown but it was that

process of

visualizing for myself a better future

which gave me the hope

to move forward in fact brain researcher

tally sherrod has done research on this

and shown that the more concrete our

visualization can be

for the future the more momentum it can

give us

out of tough times recently i came

across that letter i had written myself

and i looked at the date june 12 2012

and then notice the line you wonder

where you will be in six months

december 12 2012 exactly six months

from that date was when i uploaded my

mistletoe video

now that may be more of a coincidence

than it is an exact science but for me

it was an important sign that the path i

was on was the right one

i think that’s what may have worked in

my situation

as dire as the situation was i had

visualized for myself some things that i

wanted

and all day that’s all i could think

about i spent my time listening to how

other people got out of their situations

and continue to solidify

this vision for the future today

my collective following is over three

million people and my videos have been

seen over

1 billion times across various platforms

i’m so grateful for the optimism that my

younger self had

in that moment of despair when he was

cleaning porta-potties

i believe that hope for the future does

work and one way that i have found to

make that hope tangible

is the process of writing myself letters

but you can also do it through vision

boards or

meditating on the future that you would

like hope

for the future may not change the entire

world

but i do believe it will change an

individual

and that may be just as significant

thank you

you