Everyone has a story like this; I’m guessing that you do!
Just before finals, a hot band comes to town on a concert tour—and enough friends are going to the concert—and who wants to miss out on an evening of fun?
What was the catch? Easy–there is a French final coming up, there was not much time to prepare, and to no one’s surprise, there is a lack of motivation to study. The result is a lot of fun with friends enjoying a concert, along with a barely passing grade and a poor grasp of basic French!
Who hasn’t experienced a similar choice–and made the same choice?
Part of the problem is that we often lack a strong emotional connection to our future selves. The person we will be in another year, or even in another three months, can seem like a stranger to us. That’s why we have a hard time choosing to do something to benefit the future self—say, studying for an exam—when there’s a more fun option right in front of us. Our future self might wish they spoke better French, but our current self wants to play video games or stay up late watching Netflix or go see Taylor Swift!
This lack of connection with our future selves can have a lot of impact on the decisions we all make today.
I want you to take a minute and imagine your future self on the cross country team during the 2023 season:
- Imagine your future self on the first day of practice as 50 runners jog out to the railroad tracks for the first time this season.
- Imagine your future self getting on the starting line for the Watermelon Run.
- Imagine your future self getting off the bus for the Lagoon Valley race.
- Imagine your future self at the finish line of the league championship with teammates–and friends.
What can you do today that your future self will thank you for?
Clearly, thinking about the future matters for summer running. It can be hard to roll out of bed for a 7am run day after day in the summer. There are a lot of distractions and other things you can be doing. But getting in touch with your future self can help keep us on track. Experienced runners all know that feeling at the end of a season, wondering what might have been achieved if we had run another hundred miles more in the summer. If we can get in touch with that future self, maybe that is the motivation we need push a little harder in the summer–run a few more miles, to try the Monday or Wednesday evening training sessions, whatever might make our future selves more successsful.
Having a connection with our future selves is not only important as athletes. Research finds that young adults who lack a sense of closeness with their future selves perform worse in their classes in subsequent semesters. So this habit of thinking about what our future selves will value, or will regret, about what we choose to do today can help us become the best students, athletes and people we can be.
Look, we all are going to have these choices during our lives–almost every day. We should have fun lives! But, but…we can make time for our running day after day, and for our studying day after day, and balance that with also having fulfilling and happy lives and relationships with our teammates and friends. If we always prioritize fun over effort, our lives will be worse off in the long run. We can balance fun and effort (and in running we can often, with friends, make the effort fun).
You can get a lot of running in during July, and enjoy yourself along the way…and in August, you will be ready to start a cross country season that will be enjoyable and rewarding and memorable. Your future self will thank you for the miles you run in July!
(This posting borrows heavily from the work of Hal Hershfield, a professor of marketing at UCLA, and Angela Duckworth’s Character Lab. If you are interested, check out Dr Hershfield’s book.)
