The Third Chair
Years after he’d last been there, Henrik Karlsson stopped by the public library where he used to spend countless hours alone, struggling to write, wrestling with the seemingly impossible dream of becoming a writer. Approaching the chair he used to sit in, Karlsson writes, “The sensation that he, my previous self, was still sitting there was so strong that I pulled out the chair next to it.” As he sat down in that second chair, feelings of loneliness, doubt, and despair—what his younger self felt each time he returned to that chair to write—suddenly resurfaced. Now a successful writer, as Karlsson looked at that struggling version of himself who endured those feelings and kept at it, “I felt a deep gratitude to him,” he writes, “for all he has given me, all the experiences and friendships that make my life better than his, and which his willingness to persevere brought into existence. ‘If you only knew,’ I said out loud in the empty library, ‘how thankful I am for what you have done.’” Then he looked around, “and noticed, behind me—a third chair.” Though he couldn’t go back to express his gratitude to his past self, he could commit to paying it forward to the person sitting in the third chair: his future self. “It’s the commitment to embracing a little discomfort, a little short-term pain, in pushing my limits and staring at my flaws,” Karlsson explained. “By putting a few of my hours every week into doing that, I’m giving a gift to my future self. Because if I’m able to overcome this limitation or that flaw, some future version of me will bear the fruit of that…It could be small things too—I can clean the dishes tonight so that tomorrow-Henrik doesn’t have a terrible morning. So with small things and big things, it can be quite useful to visualize your future self and then ask, ‘What kinds of things would make their life better?’”
Making choices, sacrifices, commitments, and gifts for your future self—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Person Who’s Emerging From The Person You Are Now
When he started seriously considering pursuing poetry full time, the poet David Whyte said, “I made a kind of promise or vow to myself that, before I went for it, I would do one thing every day for a year towards my going full time as a poet.” One day, it might have been writing a letter to a magazine editor to submit a poem. The next day, it might have been memorizing a Shakespeare sonnet, “so I had it in my repertoire.” The day after, it might have been reaching out to a company to see if they’d be interested in having him speak to their team. And the day after that, it might have been practicing the talk he might deliver if he were ever given the opportunity. “But every day,” Whyte said, “I would consciously do something. So in a year, that’s 365 contributions. And it builds attentiveness.” After that year, soon after Whyte went full time as a poet, he was invited to speak at a conference at the Asilomar Center in California. It was exactly the kind of opportunity he’d been dreaming of and preparing for, Whyte said, “and therefore, the big fear was, ‘Who would you be if you fail at this now? Who would you be if you’re given the opportunity to be the poet you want to be and you can’t do it?’” Terrified by that possibility, “I went through this incredible physical undoing where I literally couldn’t get out of bed for days. I was just absolutely drained.” The night before he was scheduled to speak, Whyte was too tired to rehearse his talk. The next morning, he was shuttled from his hotel room to the conference center, and on the way, “I felt as if I was being led in front of a firing squad of 600 people.” When he got on stage, however, he received a gift from his previous self. Thanks to those 365 contributions, those hours and hours of writing, practicing, memorizing, and building attentiveness—“within a few minutes of being on stage,” Whyte recalled, “all of my symptoms dropped away. I got into this fierce, attentive state. My memory was flawless. And at the end of it, I was given a standing ovation.” Reflecting on that experience, Whyte observed that when we imagine that which we think we can’t do, a common mistake is to “think the person you are now is going to do it. No, it’s your future self that’s going to do it. It’s the person who’s emerging from the person you are now…And the beautiful question that comes out of that is, What could I do today that my future self would come back and thank me for?”
Something About The Idea Of Unrealized Dreams
In 1975, Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay for “Rocky.” He shopped the script to every producer and studio in Hollywood, but he was repeatedly rejected. Eventually, one production company, Chartoff-Winkler Productions, expressed interest. But there was one condition. They didn’t want Stallone to play Rocky. They wanted a “more marketable actor” for the leading role. In fact, they were so desperate for Stallone to not play Rocky that they kept offering him increasingly large sums of money to go away. “It went up to $360,000,” Stallone said, “to go away, to ‘get off my lawn boy.’” When later asked why he didn’t take the money, he said, “There was something about the idea of unrealized dreams.” “I always wanted to see if I could act,” he said. “And I knew that if I sold it—even for $500,000—I knew that after the money was gone, I would have become very bitter if I never realized my dream.” And he simply couldn’t do that to his future self. So Rocky, starring Stallone, released in 1976. It was the highest-grossing movie of the year, earning $225 million at the box office. Stallone was paid $35,000 for writing and starring in the film, but he negotiated a percentage of the profits, which ultimately made his future self over $25 million. (In every Rocky-related interview I’ve read or watched, Sylvester Stallone talks about the “idea of unrealized dreams” and “wasted potential.” It was his fascination with that idea, he said, that inspired this scene).
A Night When I Went, “Shut It Down, We Got Work To Do.”
John Mayer makes a distinction between the work of bringing a song to life and the work of finishing a song. “Bringing a song to life is always the fun part,” he said. “But then you have to put on a lab coat and cancel everything—you’re not going out tonight, you’re not seeing your friends, you’re not going to dinner—there’s work to do.” He says he commonly meets artists who bring to life a lot of songs that they never finish. “They have a hard drive full of minute-and-a-half ideas that were just the spark and then they go out and have a good time with their friends. And then they move on to another spark and then to another spark and then to another spark.” Whereas, he said, “All the songs I play on stage now represent a night when I went, ‘Shut it down, we got work to do.’ Even if it takes three days of massive excavation, of 800 different takes on a verse, of wearing the same hoodie and sweatpants—it’s going to be over at some point. And when it’s over, you never have to do that work again, but you have that song for the rest of your life.”
An All-Powerful Instinct
When she was a teenager, Marie Curie began thinking about pursuing a career as a scientist. But from a poor family in Russia-controlled Poland, the necessary education was beyond her parents’ financial means. Considering her limited options, Marie struck a deal with her older sister Bronya: Marie would get a job as a governess, using her wages to help Bronya pay for medical school in Paris, on the condition that once Bronya became a doctor, she would in turn help pay for Marie’s education. The pact would require Marie’s present self to make some serious sacrifices—five years of loneliness and work she didn’t really want to do—for the sake of a better life she hoped her future self might get to live. Beginning in January 1886, Marie worked for a wealthy family in the rural countryside, sixty miles north of her home in Warsaw. She looked after and tutored the family’s children during the day, and in the evenings, she prepared for entrance exams to the Sorbonne, the university in Paris she dreamed of attending. At a time when women were largely excluded from higher education, Curie would have to get to a place where her application was undeniable. “It was indeed an all-powerful instinct,” Marie’s daughter Eve Curie writes in Madame Curie: A Biography, “that made her sit every night at her desk, reading volumes of sociology and physics borrowed from the library, or perfecting her knowledge of mathematics by correspondence with her father…All alone in that country house, she was without direction or advice. She felt her way, almost by sheer chance, through the mazes of the knowledge she wanted to acquire.” After five long, lonely years working as a governess, true to their pact, Bronya became a doctor in Paris and was at last able to fund Marie’s travel, exams, and the next steps toward the future she wanted. “By small imperceptible stages,” Eve writes, “the tragic immobility of the young girl’s existence was beginning to stir.” After studying independently without formal instruction for all those years, in 1891, Marie received a letter from the admissions offices: “Faculty of Sciences—First Quarter Courses will begin at the Sorbonne on November 3, 1891.” “From that moment,” Eve writes, “Marie’s fortune, starting from zero, began to increase.” The gift her younger self had worked so hard and endured so much to create was finally materializing. Curie would be one of a small number of women to earn a degree from the Sorbonne, graduating at the top of her class in physics and mathematics, before becoming the first woman in France to earn a PhD in physics—and later, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
The Fruit Of An Accumulation Of Preliminary Work
In Roman mythology, Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare, was famously born fully formed and fully armed from Jupiter’s head. “A great discovery,” Marie Curie wrote, “does not issue from a scientist’s brain ready-made, like Minerva springing fully armed from Jupiter’s head; it is the fruit of an accumulation of preliminary work.” Every gift to one’s future self—having realized dreams, cleaned dishes, confidence on stage, finished songs, a life with more opportunity and mobility than one’s past self had—is the fruit of an accumulation of preliminary work, choices, sacrifices, and commitments. The beautiful question that comes out of that is, What kinds of things can I do today that my future self would come back and thank me for?