Don’t mix your past with your present!!

If your present is not better than your past, then you’re not living your life.

Everyone holds terrible things from the past inside them, but that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking positively or simply quit.

Whatever we go through in our past, we learn something from it, and it helps us improve our present and fill our future with happiness.

Some people, when asked to share a bad memory from the past, simply say they struggled a lot.

One thing we should all be clear about is this: struggling has no relationship with a horrible past walking alongside you. If you struggled in your past, it means you learnt a great deal.

The two are not the same thing

I think a lot of people conflate a difficult period with a wasted period, and they are not remotely the same.

A wasted period is one you came out of exactly as you went in. A difficult one usually changes you, sometimes profoundly, and the change is rarely visible while it is happening. You cannot feel yourself getting more capable. You only feel tired. The evidence arrives two years later when a situation that would once have flattened you turns out to be manageable.

Yes, you have to face problems during that stretch. But it was not some horrible experience to repent over. When you are able to see things differently, you become able to think more broadly, and most importantly, you realise how to live life better.

In that struggling period, you work hard. You learn to be calm. You give 200% to everything.

Later, when you think back on that period, you will feel proud rather than regretful.

Where the mixing actually happens

The title is about not mixing the two, and I want to be specific about what the mixing looks like, because it is subtle.

It is not thinking about the past. Everybody thinks about the past.

It is using the past as evidence about the present. It sounds like: this always happens to me. I know how this ends. People like me don’t get that. Every one of those sentences takes something that happened once, under specific conditions that no longer exist, and quietly promotes it to a law of nature.

That is the contamination. Not the memory - the conclusion you drew from it, still running years later, still making decisions on your behalf without ever being reviewed.

The past is a record of what happened. It is not a forecast. It gets treated as one constantly.

Nothing arrives by sitting

Everyone struggles for something in life. We all think about making our future better. But if we are going to sit and just hope things turn out well - I am sorry, that is not how it works. It is not a miracle. It is not something you achieve sitting down.

You need to work hard and wait patiently. Patience does reward, but only the kind that is doing something while it waits.

Just remember never to quit, as it is said: “WINNERS NEVER QUIT AND QUITTERS NEVER WIN.”

And for your present to be better, stop replaying and regretting the past. Whatever happened, let it stay in the past - and let it stay there as a lesson, not as a verdict.

A test worth running

Here is a small test if you suspect the past is running your present.

Take one belief you hold about yourself - I’m not good with people, I always mess this up, that kind of thing never works out for me - and ask when the evidence for it was collected.

Nine times out of ten the answer is: years ago, under circumstances that no longer exist, about a version of you that has since changed considerably.

You would not run a business on data that old. It is worth asking why you are running your life on it.

-kashish