Our trip to Hollywood a few days ago reminded me of something. It gave me a possible answer to the question: “Who will you become?” Anke and I already live our desired future in many moments today. And for that to happen, we need to have a pretty clear idea of how that future version of ourselves thinks, how they act, and what their life looks like as a result.
Tobi Lütke, founder of Shopify, once put it this way: “At the end of my life, I will meet the person I could have been. My life’s task is to make the difference between that person and me as small as possible.” So what does that mean for all of us? Everything new we want to create in our lives requires us to act differently. New actions come from feeling differently. And feeling differently starts with thinking differently. So an incredible amount depends on how you think, feel, and act.
I know, this isn’t exactly a new idea. We’ve talked about it many times before. And if you’ve been following me for a while, I know you probably already think differently about certain things. I also know that this has changed the way you feel about some of them. But now comes the interesting part: Are you actually taking action? Or are you still telling yourself everything that could go wrong if you chose a new path?
We flew to Hollywood with a new pitch book. Because if the people who matter to our project haven’t caught the fire yet that we know they could, then maybe it’s up to us to light that fire differently.
So I created a book that invites the reader into a story instead of immediately telling them what we want from them. They can read the words, think about them, and through the story, actually feel what we want to create with the screenplay.
Could I have simply sent it as a PDF? Of course. But would my future self have done that? I don’t think so.
So it had to be a real book. And not just any book, but one that feels different because I AM GRÄTER is different. We found a format where the front opens to the left and right like a gate.
Would a standard Amazon print have worked? Maybe. But I wanted to see Phil holding it in his hands for the first time. I wanted to watch him flip through the pages and see whether it had the same effect on him that it had on me when the finished book arrived from the bookbinder.
Could I have simply mailed the whole thing to Hollywood? Of course. But again, the same question came up: What would my future self do? So we “quickly” flew from New York to Los Angeles and then back to the ship.
“And did it work, Norman?” Oh yes. Phil is “very, very, very excited.” He now has a master plan, and since our meeting, a new writer has joined the project as well. I also rewrote parts of the screenplay myself first, so the new material is included and someone coming to the story from the outside can immediately understand where the focus needs to be. If I had continued waiting for something to happen on its own, we would probably still be sitting at: “Yes, we need to do something.”
Instead, I asked myself a different question: How would my future self think and act right now? And suddenly, some decisions became surprisingly easy. Maybe that’s exactly the question you can take with you today. Who is the person already living the life you want to live? How does that person think? And most importantly: What would that person do today?
We don’t simply experience life as it is. We experience what we focus on. You can focus entirely on everything „that´s not perfect yet“. Or you can look back at today through the eyes of your future self and ask: What can I do today to make the distance between us just a little smaller?
And that, by the way, is something we experience together every week in our German Caribbean Rebels community. You get to be a bit of a fly on the wall and look over Anke’s and my shoulders. Not only when things work out. You’re also there for our questions, decisions, detours, and those moments when we ourselves need to stop and look at things from a different perspective. After all, we’re walking this path ourselves, too.
Maybe you don’t need even more knowledge. Maybe it simply helps to have people around you who keep reminding you who you want to become—and who you can already start being today.
If you’d like to get to know us, you can simply take a look around our community first. And if at some point you’d like to come closer, you’ll also find our Gamechangers and Caribbean Rebels there.
Sending you lots of love from the high seas and keep shining.
