Daily Inspiration: “Stop trying to get back to where you were ‘before’: invest your time in where you are going to be ‘after!’”

“Stop trying to get back to where you were ‘before’: invest your time in where you are going to be ‘after!’” Futurist Jim Carroll

It’s a fascinating time to be a futurist – you get to spend a lot of time researching how this once-in-a-lifetime disruption will change everything going forward.

From a corporate perspective, there hasn’t been much of a focus on this, quite obviously. And yet, I’m starting to notice executives within my client base start to move beyond the necessary triage to save and reinvent their companies, to the next phase: “now what?” There has been precious little time for long-term planning when you are performing CPR on the patient – but now that we are in the recovery room, there’s a little bit more time to think about the plan for rehabilitation and reinvention.

The same holds true for individuals – the personal crisis that many millions have been launched into has taken all of their efforts and consumed their entire working day. You can’t have a plan for your future if you won’t have a future to plan for! But as we slowly begin our climb out of the abyss of despair and destruction, people are finding time to take stock of their future circumstances.

If that is you – don’t look back! Fix your gaze forward! Stop thinking about how wonderful it was – put in the effort to create a platform for how wonderful it will be. Don’t dare for a moment to think about your opportunities before – define a unique set of opportunities for who you will be after.

Don’t dare for a moment to think that ‘we are going to back to the way it was’: there’s not a chance of that.

There’s only a chance for something entirely different.

Once you accept that, the rest will start to come to you through what you do next – because you’ll have a better idea of what to do right now!