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