Design Your Future

To Design Your Future You have to Let go of Your Past

Our future is unwritten and can be designed to our own liking. But often what we do is we let our past determine the design of our future. And as a result, it looks quite similar to our past. We repeat the same mistakes because we bring our baggage from the past into the next chapter of our lives.

Sure we want to learn from the past and from our mistakes. But when that learning turns into so much baggage that the future looks exactly like our past, the value of that learning diminishes. The future is a blank slate that is completely open for invention.

If we’re going to effectively design our future, at some point we have to let go of our past. We have to let go of all the pain, all the agony, all the grief, and all the bullshit that’s in our heads.

1. Forgive the People Who Hurt You

Our forgiving depends solely on us, regardless of how the other party responds or doesn’t. — John Certalic

Bob Goff once said to me in a conversation on the Unmistakable Creative “everybody is doing the best they can with what they have.” When I think about the people who have hurt or betrayed me in some way, I try to remember that.

If you hang on to rage, disappointment, and ill will towards those who have harmed you, it’s effectively letting them control your future. As Zig Ziglar once said “just because somebody screwed up your past, it doesn’t mean you should give them permission to screw up your future.”

There’s a difference between forgiving and forgetting. Pain engraves indelible wounds, that turn into scars, and deeper memories. We won’t ever forget. But forgiveness is our choice and often our pathway to freedom and a brighter future.

3. Write Everything You’re Feeling Down

There’s something about writing things down that is incredibly healing. The work of James Pennebaker even shows that there’s actually research to back this up. When I was going through a really dark period, constantly ruminating on everything that was going wrong, my therapist encouraged me to write it all down. This way you get it out of your head and onto the page.

If we are constantly thinking about the past, we take up mental energy and space that could be used to design our future. When we are thinking about the past, we live in a sort of suspended reality, in which we don’t move forward or backward. Write it down, leave it behind, and let it go.

3. See a Therapist or Counselor

For a while, I thought therapy was only for crazy people until I found myself in the office of a therapist. A therapist can be a guide to finding your way out of the darkness and back into the light. And as you find your way back into the light, you’re more easily able to leave the past behind, and focus on the future. If Brene Brown, whose work is a form of therapy, and who has rocked the stage at TED has no issues seeing a therapist you shouldn’t either.

4. Describe Your New Life

To design your future you have to see the world as malleable, something that can be shaped to your own liking. And you have to see yourself as the kind of person who has the ability to take the world in your head and impose it on the world around you until the world around you looks like the one in your head.

In his collection of essays, The Life and Times of a Remarkable Misfit, my friend AJ Leon has people do the following exercise:

The greatest opportunity cost you have as a human is not taking your own ideas seriously. Write a 500 word description of what you want your life to look like in 2 years. This will act as your signpost. Then (and here’s the kicker) post it on your blog or email it to someone who will “get it”. It’s hard to go back on a revolution that you’ve already announced.

I return to this exercise at least once a month.

Through simple daily actions, and designing environment conducive to the person you want to become, the future you’ve designed eventually becomes your new present.

Destiny has a way of creating chain reactions in our lives. And sometimes this chain reaction occurs when the shit hits the fan or we hit rock bottom, setting in a motion a series of events that you couldn’t have planned for or predicted. Friends we’ve yet to meet, opportunities we’ve yet to receive, and lovers whose stars have yet to cross with ours. And with each of these events our destiny unfolds into a journey worthy of our heart and soul, a life worthy of living, full contact, in full color. Remember this through fortune and misfortune, joy and grief, good times and bad ones.

Carry it with you. Let it guide you in the direction you’re destined to go, along with the path that you are destined to take. The future is an unpaved road and a destiny that is yours to shape.

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The weeks since the 2016 presidential election has put Facebook under the spotlight for its role in the circulation of fake news articles, which included President Barack Obama weighing in during a press conference earlier this week. While CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made an effort to sidestep the blame leveled against his company for the rise of these articles, he had said that the company has more work to do in combatting misinformation.

In a post to Facebook last night, Zuckerberg outlined the steps that Facebook is taking to limit the spread of false information, but reiterated his belief that the company should not become the "arbiters of truth."

Some of the projects currently underway at Facebook include new systems that will help flag false information, better ways for people to report misinformation and flags to users once fake articles are reported, better recommendations when an article is clicked on, and updating its ad policies to discourage spam sites, which profit off of the exposure. He also noted that Facebook would be working with journalists and "respected fact checking organizations" to understand how they work to verify information, so that the company could learn from their efforts and experience.

While Zuckerberg outlined a number of fairly straightforward steps to limit fake articles, he did not indicate any sort of timeline for when — if ever — these stories are rolled out to regular users, noting that "some of these ideas will work well, and some will not." He also explained that the company has utilized user feedback and other sources to weigh the content appropriately so that it doesn’t spread as quickly through user news feeds.

However, Facebook has had numerous problems with these sorts of automated systems in the past: after firing its entire Trending Topics editorial team earlier this summer, the site subsequently picked up a number of false stories, which gave false content considerable visibility. While Zuckerberg tries to avoid putting his company in the midst of a philosophical argument, it’s clear that the automated systems that it presently uses are flawed and the spread of false information over the course of the election shows that there are considerable challenges ahead for the company.

Letter to CEOs

A powerful trade body for big publishers sent a letter to Google and Facebook's CEOs imploring them to tackle fake news.

Digital Content Next (DCN), a US trade body that represents premium online publishers, has sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, calling on the two companies to do more to tackle the fake news being discovered and shared across their sites.

The letter, obtained by Business Insider (which you can read in full below) was written by DCN CEO Jason Kint, says both companies "bear a special responsibility, one that you sometimes appear naive to" to clean up the "garbage littering the digital media ecosystem."

Both Google and Facebook are facing increased scrutiny about their efforts to tackle fake news following the US presidential election.

False stories claiming Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to ISIS were widely shared on Facebook. Meanwhile, the top Google News result for "final election count" was at one point surfacing a fake story from a Wordpress blog, incorrectly claiming Trump had won the popular vote by a margin of almost 700,000.

After first dismissing the notion that fake news on Facebook could have swung the presidential election as "crazy," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged a "small amount" of content on the site is hoaxes and said the company has more work to do in order to rid the site of fake news. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, on the other hand, was immediately more open to the suggestion that fake news might have affected the election and said the company has been looking at how to fact-check articles and promote stories from trusted sources. This month,both companies also moved to ban fake news sites from their ad networks.

But Kint of DCN says these efforts, while "encouraging and constructive" are not enough and that they should apply themselves to ridding their services of fake news with the same "excitement, investment, and vigilance as their sexier forward-thinking technology projects, often referred to at Google as "moonshots."

Kint writes:

"However, to paraphrase a recent New York Times editorial, we believe you owe your users, and democracy itself, far more. Your companies make it a point to celebrate 'moonshots' that require extraordinary vision, resources and engineering prowess. Your capacity to pursue these projects is built on your extraordinary dominance over the digital media landscape.

"Wouldn't it make sense for you to pursue cleaning-up the garbage littering the digital media ecosystem with the same excitement, investment and vigilance with which you pursue these huge, visionary projects? We don't see that in your public statements or actions. Over the years, you have claimed repeatedly that you are not media companies; instead, the word "utility" has been used, occasionally by your own executives. But if even 1% of the water in our local utility was polluted, wouldn't it be right to move heaven and earth to clean it up?"

DCN represents more than 70 media brands including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Viacom, Business Insider, The Financial Times, Time Inc., Hearst, Gannett, Bloomberg, ESPN, AP, and BBC.com.

Kint says in the letter that these publishers - who do sometimes get things wrong but are trusted by consumers to provide accurate and fair coverage and admit when they have made mistakes - are willing to "devote time, resources, and energy to help clean up this mess."

Spokespeople for Google and Facebook were not immediately available for comment.

Here is the letter from Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai in full:

Mark Zuckerberg
Chairman, Founder and CEO
Facebook
1 Hacker Way
Menlo Park, CA 94025

Sundar Pichai
CEO
Google 
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
November 22, 2016

Dear Mark and Sundar,

As the trade organization representing brands that seek long-term consumer trust through the creation of high quality news, information and entertainment, we feel compelled to provide our perspective on the dangerous proliferation of "fake news" throughout the digital ecosystem. Digital Content Next (DCN) members include companies that have earned the trust of consumers for more than a century to companies born in the digital era.

The common thread that weaves these companies together is the trust they seek to earn every day by providing the highest quality content. We're not suggesting that our members always "get it right," but accuracy, depth and fairness are core to their mission. And transparency is vital when things go wrong. Your services succeed or fail depending on the efficacy of our work. We are writing this letter to offer our help in fixing the issue. We are the only trade association that exclusively represents more than 75 premium publishers - arguably the world's experts at creating real and trusted content.

To be clear, our plea is not that you somehow attempt to evaluate bias or censor legitimate speech. Moreover, your recent statements about potentially identifying "fake news" for what it is, and depriving the providers of this noxious material the economic sustenance to create it in the first place, are encouraging and constructive.

However, to paraphrase a recent New York Times editorial, we believe you owe your users, and democracy itself, far more. Your companies make it a point to celebrate "moonshots" that require extraordinary vision, resources and engineering prowess. Your capacity to pursue these projects is built on your extraordinary dominance over the digital media landscape.

Wouldn't it make sense for you to pursue cleaning-up the garbage littering the digital media ecosystem with the same excitement, investment and vigilance with which you pursue these huge, visionary projects? We don't see that in your public statements or actions. Over the years, you have claimed repeatedly that you are not media companies; instead, the word "utility" has been used, occasionally by your own executives. But if even 1% of the water in our local utility was polluted, wouldn't it be right to move heaven and earth to clean it up?

Our members serve the public across the political spectrum. The last thing we would want is a litmus test for truth. We celebrate the fact that new, trusted brands can emerge online and truly allow the First Amendment to flourish. No one wishes to go back to a world of "gatekeepers" and distribution scarcity. It is for precisely this reason that you bear a special responsibility in society, one that you sometimes appear naive to. Our brands are proxies for the kind of accuracy that your users deserve. We won't reprise here the many examples of untruths that were propagated during the recent election campaign. We will simply state that our brands exist to guard against these outcomes, and that we all win when advertisers and consumers are served the highest quality content.

In a world where ever-increasing numbers of people get their news and information through globally scaled, algorithmically determined "feeds," it is simply unacceptable to tolerate the blatantly false and misleading "fake news" that has come to litter the digital landscape. We regard our relationship as symbiotic; we all want the citizens of our societies to have access to the best possible information. We are in this together and regard our companies as essential partners in this effort. We are ready to devote time, resources and energy to help clean up this mess and welcome the opportunity to collaborate on solutions.

Yours truly, Jason Kint CEO Digital Content Next