Why Your Future Self Arrives Quietly, Long Before Your Old Self Ends
Why transformation starts long before you recognise you're changing
Sometimes, when calamity hits, your gut tells you: “This time is different.”
I’d just started my last job as a software engineer. A few months in, around the time my probation was due to finish, I met with my line manager.
“We appreciate your contributions…”
Sure.
“But we feel like your improvement has plateaued…”
A few more polite lines about me being a bright and pleasant person…just not the right fit for the company.
And then, finally, the line I knew was coming. “We’ve decided not to pass your probation.”
And to think just a few weeks before that, things had been going swimmingly.
I didn’t realise at the time. But this moment wasn’t when things changed. It was just the moment my life finally caught up with something my mind had already decided.
Everyone goes through a moment where a future version of themselves quietly arrives and waits for them to notice.
And the sooner you recognise it, the less damage comes from following choices you didn’t realise you’d already made.
In my case, this wasn’t the first time I’d left a job involuntarily. The first time, I wasn’t brought along in a company acquisition. The second was a near-miss when my company had to downsize. But this third and final time, something in me knew; it wasn’t just another layoff.
It was the end of my career.
The reality? I’d spent the last few months working harder than I ever had in my life. Only…most of my energy wasn’t going to the job.
It just happened that in the previous year, I’d decided to become an entrepreneur. I was waking up early and sleeping late, devoting myself to building a business. Then, when I’d trudge into work each day, I’d be exhausted, and my mind would be somewhere else.
I did still take work seriously. I was proud of the code I delivered. Where I lost time during the week, I made it up at weekends. I stopped seeing friends and hoarded my time and my energy.
In those months, I pushed myself more than I ever had before. But ultimately, I had a limit. And the first thing to give? It was the thing I wanted least: my job.
Which does mean, being honest, that their assessment was entirely correct. The fit wasn’t right, because I wasn’t the same person I’d been just a few months earlier.
The 2 narratives that mislead us
The odd thing is, until the moment the hammer dropped, I was convinced I’d be working full-time for at least another year.
But as soon as I got off that fateful call, I thought: I could scramble to get another job. Or, I could take a bet on myself. And within me rang a kind of “now or never” tone.
We tend to imagine change in one of two ways. It could be a sudden moment of perfect readiness and clarity. Or, it could be a “burn the bridges”-style jump into the unknown. In reality, most changes—such as my own—are somewhere in the middle.
#1: Waiting to feel completely ready
Here’s the thing: we might spend our entire lives waiting for the right moment. The hope is that, one day, everything will fall into place and it will all suddenly be really easy.
And if that moment even does come? If we aren’t prepared for it, we might not notice.
Most preparation happens in the background. It can happen without you realising, like it did for me. You build habits. You change your environment. You see the world differently. Then, a while later, you notice: you’ve been practising a new identity without meaning to.
The quiet arrival of “future you” is not the opposite of a dramatic moment where everything suddenly changes. But the dramatic moment only works if the quiet arrival has already begun.
#2: The leap of faith
An improv teacher once taught me something I’ll never forget:
“Step forward before you have an idea.”
Improv beginners tend to walk out onto the stage—only after they have fully formed ideas. And, it being improv, even the greatest ideas fall apart almost instantly. In the time it takes you to plan something out, things move on and the plan becomes irrelevant anyway.
But it’s those who step out with even a vague idea of what they’re going to do who succeed by figuring the rest out over time.
In the words of the immortal Tony Stark, “Sometimes you have to run before you can walk”.
And you know what? Between these two extremes, I massively prefer this one. But, as ever, there’s compromise to be had.
Maybe Tony Stark of all people can one day decide to build an Iron Man suit and take it for a flight along the Malibu coastline. And similarly, an experienced improv comedian can walk onstage with nothing prepared, where most greenhorns wouldn’t dare.
There’s a huge element of picking your own destiny. But we shouldn’t underplay the importance of preparing for it.
Neither path works on its own
These shifts, in reality, follow a pattern:
Identity moves first. You’ll start seeing the world through the eyes of the new you, even if you don’t realise it.
Capability goes next. You learn the skills and build the habits that let the new identity function.
Life catches up last. The world realises a change that’s already happened.
After I finished at that last job, I turned to my partner and I asked her something.
“Couldn’t I have just gone into business after I finished at my previous job? Why did I have to waste a few months, then fail a probation before trying to make it on my own?”
Her answer was simple: “Well, a few months ago, you weren’t really ready for it.”
And, she was right.
I’d known for a while I’d be an entrepreneur. But when I accepted that last job, it wasn’t clear to me how I was going to make it work.
In the intervening months, I’d put my roadmap together. I chose Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as my direction. I’d even put together some projects and lined up my first few clients.
By the time I was at the crossroads? I saw the opportunity and I took it.
And that’s the crux of it.
Identity can change…and fast. Our capability and our habits change much more slowly. That’s why sudden reinventions are a fantasy.
But waiting “for the moment” to take action is equally useless because that still isn’t laying the groundwork, either.
Big changes are much better if they are not sudden.
We can slowly start putting parts of our lives in place. Over time, the way the world sees us will start reflecting the way we see ourselves, so long as our actions, our habits and our capabilities are an honest representation of it.
Sometimes you leap. Sometimes you reach the cliff edge.
But when you do get pushed into a new lifestyle, the future version of you is the person who catches you, even if you hadn’t realised they were there.
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