Praise of Future Past: Goal-ticking letters sent backwards through time

Our lover-of-books leader Donna Kramer reads a book a week – sometimes more – and loved The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. It’s one of the books in Aruga’s brand-new book club.

It’s early days but the Aruga team is already changing habits in our personal lives to find more time for books.

We know, dreamy right?

We have been able to pick a professional development book from the snazzy library Donna has curated for us.

And we’ve pinky-promised to finish it in one month so we can then loop back with our peers to share what insights we’ve learned.

This is one way our team can continue to improve.

Donna was the first to loop back and after reading The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, set us all a challenge of writing ourselves a three-minute letter.

We picture ourselves in the future, look back, and report on some of the insights we’ve rounded up and the amazing milestones we’ve attained during the year.

We write the letter in past tense and the idea is that we’ve given ourselves an outstanding “A” for all our amazing accomplishments in three things.

We focus on one area of our home life, one area of our professional life and one area of our relationships.

The goal is to give us a laser focus on not just what we want to achieve but how we will go about achieving it.

It’s a strategy developed by two smarty pants: cutting-edge psychologist Rosamund Stone Zander and her partner Ben Zander.

Rosamund is clever at creating innovative paradigms for personal and professional gain and we benefit from her sharing her secrets to success.

Her easy-peasy practices are based on the idea that life is just a story we make up and with new definitions, you can achieve much more than you thought you could.

One of her ideas is penning this letter to our future selves where we give ourselves an A.

We explain in our letters why we’ve given ourselves such a high score so that we can develop a road map for our next 12 months.

We ponder big questions like: ‘what goals do we need to make today to get these amazing A grades a year from now?’

It’s about working out what we personally need to be responsible for to achieve the outcomes of our letters.

Because the truth is, nobody is responsible for our success – personal or professional – but us.