The Person You Could Be Is Watching the Person You Are — Meet Your Unlived Self

There's a version of you that you are meant to become, and right now

they're watching you waste them

This is going to be such a good message.

I love this one.

You can tell in my voice I'm excited about it.

Let me give you this conceptual framework that, uh, I think is really powerful.

Can I suggest-- I wanna introduce you to what I call the unlived self.

Can I suggest to you that there is a version of you, a possibility of

who you could become that at least exists in the conceptual realm?

What do I mean?

There is a you that has the optimized health, the optimized psychology, the

optimized spirituality, the optimized intelligence, the optimized health,

body, career, relationships, finance.

Can we agree at least conceptually and intellectually, rationally,

there is such a thing?

Now, we, we can never identify it perfectly, right?

Because we don't exactly know what any of us is truly ultimately capable

of, all the things we could do.

But can we at least agree together at the start of this short message that there

is some kinda pretty cool version of you that you can at least have some idea of?

Look, lately, I, I've said this quite recently in a few podcasts,

I've been training very hard.

Like, I, I've been-- I love it.

I love my training.

I've always been gym rat, always been a ultra-marathon runner.

But at the moment, I'm really, my, my nutrition's dialed in perfectly, my

sleep, my supplements, all these things.

And look, I'm 52 years of age, and I am on track to be in so much better

shape than I was at, like, 17.

There is a photograph of me in my downstairs, uh, office at home.

I've got a bathroom in there, and there's a photo of me.

I must have been maybe about 21, 22.

Sun's out, guns out, six-pack.

And I'm training at the moment, I'm like, "Ooh, boy, I'm actually catching."

I'm like so gonna be in better shape than that, that 20-year-old.

Oh, it's cool.

I love it.

I love working hard and, and, and just, it's a good thing, right?

It's not like my, my, my idol, but it's like it's a big part of

my life and I'm proud of the hard work and it encourages people.

And so there's this version of myself, like I'm 52, right?

I could be like 30 kilos overweight right now.

I could just be in terrible health, but I'm not because I made a whole bunch of

choices and decisions to keep optimizing.

Now, I get that I'm 52, and maybe at 72 or 82 or 62, it's

gonna get harder and harder.

But I've, I've shared on the s- on the podcast before, in my neighborhood, there

is this old guy, and he's like, he must be in his late 70s, 80s now at least,

and he just, every single day I see him.

I saw him this morning coming back from my run.

He's like out there every day doing his power walk.

He can't run anymore.

He's got too old, but he's out there every day doing it.

And I look at him and I think, "Brother, like you are phenomenal. Like you're

in your like 80s, and you're out here every day. You will not stop."

You know, he's probably not going as far as he once did, but what I'm getting

at is there's a version of him that could be in a nursing home completely

incapacitated, but there's not.

Like, he's out there in the cold training every day in his 80s.

So you see what I'm saying?

There's all these versions of ourselves that we could be, and there is a version

of you that you can become if you want to.

And that version of you, can you try this mind-bending concept out?

They're watching you.

Imagine that they're somewhere, like floating around you, looking at you

going, "Do you have any idea what you're capable of? You could be me.

I want you to get here." And we're going through our days not doing this.

So it's basically the gap between who we are and who we could be, and this

was the basis of my kinda academic for- formation in Aristotelian metaphysics

and, and classical Greek philosophy.

Give you the short version.

Had this idea of, well, Aristotle used to talk about a daemon,

kind of this inner software code that defined who we could be.

And for the, for classical philosophers, they had this

idea of the good life, right?

They called it the good life.

The, the life that you needed to live to bring about the

fullness of who you could become.

Hear that again.

The life that you needed to live to bring about the fullness

of who you could become.

It's like, was it yesterday's message on discipline?

That discipline isn't a cage, it's the key.

If you-- go back and listen to that if you haven't heard it, 'cause it's

a really powerful message that as we live our disciplines and as we try

things and, and try and become what we can, we, we just live this-- we bring

all this potential out into the world.

So what's the problem?

Can I offer you this?

This is uncomfortable.

You may wanna be seated for this.

Do not operate heavy machinery for the next 30 seconds.

I shared this in a message last week.

Every small surrender, hitting snooze on the alarm clock, wasting 15, 20, 30

minutes on a doom scrolling, saying yes to something you didn't wanna do, it's a vote

against the person you could become It's a vote against the person you could become.

They're not a fantasy.

Yes, they, they're not instantiated yet.

They're not physically present yet, but they are a real possibility for

you, and you gotta be super careful that you don't kill them by increments.

That you don't kill them by increments.

What's the increment?

The extra food you didn't need, the walk you didn't take, the

call you didn't make, the service of somebody you chose not to do.

Can you, can you sense the weight of every human decision at this point?

I just got so dialed into this now.

Am I perfect?

Absolutely not.

But I'm on the path, the path of realizing that what, you

know, what decisions matter?

All of them.

What decisions matter?

All of them.

Every decision is shaping us.

What we eat, what we wear, where we go, what we do, what

we say, all of it matters.

And a lot of it's hard, but we're bringing into reality this most extraordinary

possibility of who you could become, the greatest… So was this-- Who was it?

Paul-- Was it Paul Blondel, the French philosopher, who said that the only true

suffering in life, the only irredeemable loss, is not to become a saint.

He said, "You can have all these other losses and setbacks in life,

all these other things can go wrong, but the only true loss that you can

never recover is not becoming all that you could have reasonably become."

I've heard it said many times that, that, that the greatest experience

for people at the end of their life is the experience of regret.

The things they wish they had done or said, and they didn't do them.

I, I hope I don't have any of that.

I'm trying.

I'm sure maybe I'll have a couple, but I'm just like, "I wanna get to the end and go,

'Man, I really gave that a red hot go.'

I had challenges, I had setbacks, I had challenges at the start, but I,

by the grace of God and faith and prayer and good people and good books

and trying and cooperating, I just kinda did the best that I could with

what I had." So my friends, there is a version of you that you can become,

and right now they're watching you.

So you don't magically find that person.

It's not like someday in the future, you just click your fingers and,

you know, you're magically there.

You become that person by one decision point at a time

And try this.

Conscience is the voice of that person in the future.

Conscience is their voice in the future.

What does that mean?

When your conscience tells you that you are operating way below, that you're

not doing something, that you've just s- you've settled, that you've contravened

your own standards, that, that thing that you feel where you're like, "Hmm, that

wasn't great, was it?" That's the future voice of who you could be going, "What

are you, what are you doing right now?

What are you doing?" It's like they get a vote, right?

They get a vote.

G.K. Chesterton, one of my favorite writers, used to talk

about the democracy of the dead.

It was this idea that, uh, we shouldn't just refuse people a vote simply because

they're not alive, which by… which he means that our ancestors, those who

built our cultures, should also get a vote in our present because if they

built it, they-- we should look back at them and say, "What did they believe?"

That they, they should still have a voice in what we're choosing now.

But maybe we could take that Chestertonian concept and go,

"Does the person of-- Does, does the you in the future get a vote?

Does the person you could become get a vote?" They're

screaming at you going, "Come on.

Come on.

There's so much we can, there's so much we can become."

I love this.

Housekeeping.

Come and say good day on Instagram, jdoylespeaks, one word.

Website, jonathandoyle.co.

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I would love more people to be on this journey with us.

Friends, when you think about that person in the future, stop disappointing them.

Make the next choice the one that they would make