There is a version of you that does not exist yet, and will never exist, unless you spend a great deal of ordinary time building it out of decisions no one else will see. I want to start there, plainly, because most of what is written about becoming begins somewhere gentler — with discovery, with destiny, with the comforting idea that the person you are meant to be is already complete somewhere, waiting only to be found.
I no longer believe that. I believe the person you have not become yet is not hiding. She is not lost. She has simply not been built, and building takes longer, and costs more, than finding ever could.
The future self is not a discovery. It is a construction project, and most of us are working from no blueprint at all.
This distinction matters more than it first appears to. If the better version of you is something to be found, then the task is essentially archaeological: dig carefully, uncover what was always there. But if the better version of you is something to be built, then the task is architectural, and architecture requires materials, labor, and — most uncomfortably — the willingness to tear down structures that no longer serve the design.
I have spent a great deal of my adult life watching people, myself included, avoid this second, harder truth. We prefer the archaeology. It is less frightening to imagine that our best self is buried somewhere beneath our anxieties than to accept that she does not yet exist and will only come into being through years of unglamorous decisions.
So this book begins with a question rather than an answer: what if the discomfort you are feeling right now is not a sign that something has gone wrong, but a sign that something is finally, correctly, under construction?
We will spend the next eleven chapters taking that question seriously.