Are you the same person you were ten years ago?
I’m not. The interesting thing is we believe that how we see ourselves today is how we will always be, but I don’t think that is true.
Matthew McConaughey, in his 2018 Oscar acceptance speech, puts it this way… “When I was 15 years old, I had a very important person in my life come and ask me ‘Who’s your hero?’ I said, ‘… it’s me in ten years.
So, I turned 25 ten years later, and that same person comes to me and goes, ‘Are you a hero?’ I said, ‘Not even close!’ She said why, and I said, ‘My hero is me at 35.’
You see, every day, and every week, and every month, and every year of my life, my hero is always ten years away. I’m never going to be my hero. I’m not going to obtain that, and that’s fine with me because it keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing.”
To some extent, I agree with this view. But not at the cost of failing to acknowledge the experiences in our journey.
I believe that at our core we remain the same, in terms of our values and beliefs, but no matter how you look at it, you are not the same person you were ten years ago, five years ago or maybe even five months ago.
I am very different from how I was ten years ago. Ten years ago, I wanted to live and work abroad, but that is not so important now. I was less accepting of myself and what made me angry, and intolerant has been replaced with a new set of understanding and non-judgement.
As they say, hindsight is a beautiful thing, but if I had the foresight to think of the person I wanted to be ten years in the future and lived my life that way, the road less travelled would have been different – not necessarily better but different.
How different do you think your life could be if you lived your life today as if you were ten years older? What would you do differently now?
