Dr. Celeste Vega: What if I told you that failing as the person you want to become is better than succeeding as the person you are right now?

Lijian: That’s a really counterintuitive idea, Celeste. Most of us are conditioned to avoid failure at all costs. Success, even small success, feels like progress.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Exactly. It feels like progress, but it might be the very thing holding you back. That's the core question we're exploring today as we dive into Dr. Benjamin Hardy's book, 'Be Your Future Self Now.' It’s this radical idea that our future isn't something that just happens to us; it's something we can, and should, actively build.

Lijian: Like an engineering project for the self. I like that.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Precisely. And that's why I'm so glad you're here, Lijian. With your background in technology and your analytical approach to mindset, you're the perfect person to help deconstruct this. Today we'll tackle this from two perspectives. First, we'll explore the hidden threats that sabotage our future, almost like bugs in our personal code. Then, we'll discuss the powerful truths that act as a blueprint for engineering intentional growth.

Lijian: Sounds great. Let's debug.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Alright. So, before we can build, we have to find the bugs. The book identifies several 'threats' to our future self, but the first one is fundamental: being trapped by a reactive narrative about our past. The story we tell ourselves about where we've been dictates where we think we can go.

Lijian: So our personal history becomes a kind of legacy code. It works, but it might be preventing us from building new, better features.

Dr. Celeste Vega: That's a perfect way to put it. The book shares a powerful personal story from the author, Ben Hardy. When he was 16, he was in a serious car accident. It was nighttime, raining, and he was driving his mom and two brothers. He hit a patch of rubble from a poorly marked construction zone, lost control, and the car flipped. He was knocked unconscious.

Lijian: Wow, that's terrifying.

Dr. Celeste Vega: It was. When he came to, his mom had been thrown from the car and was severely injured. At the hospital, a police officer pulled him aside. Now, you’d expect the officer to be interrogating him, right? But instead, this officer looked at him and said, "This wasn't your fault. But you're the oldest, and your brothers are going to look to you. You need to take ownership of this situation for them."

Lijian: That’s an incredible reframe. The officer shifted the narrative from blame to responsibility. From victim to leader.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Exactly. In that moment, the officer gave him a new story to tell himself. He could have been the kid who crashed the car, a story of trauma and guilt. Instead, he became the young man who stepped up for his family in a crisis. As someone who thinks in systems, Lijian, what does that story tell you about the power of our internal 'code'?

Lijian: It tells me that our internal narrative is the foundation of our operating system. In software development, we have a concept called 'technical debt.' It’s when you make easy, short-term coding choices that create problems down the line. A reactive narrative about your past is like accumulating massive technical debt. You’re constantly working around old, inefficient code, and it slows down any new development. That officer helped him do a 'strategic refactor'—it was a painful, difficult process to change the core code, but it was absolutely essential for any future growth. Without it, he'd be stuck debugging the past forever.

Dr. Celeste Vega: I love that analogy. And that reactive state, that constant debugging of the past, often keeps us focused on the wrong things in the present. This brings us to the second threat: getting stuck in 'urgent battles.' The book uses a great metaphor from the sci-fi movie 'In Time.'

Lijian: I know that one. Where time is literally money, and the poor have only a few hours to live at any given moment.

Dr. Celeste Vega: That's the one. In that world, the poor can't think about next week, let alone next year. Their entire existence is an urgent battle to earn enough minutes to survive until the next day. They are so consumed by the immediate that they have no capacity for long-term, strategic thinking. They're trapped.

Lijian: That's the ultimate 'firefighting' mode. In tech, if your team is only ever responding to server-down alerts or critical bug reports, you're never building a more resilient, scalable system. You're just patching holes in a sinking ship. You feel busy, you feel important, but you're not actually moving forward. You're succeeding at your current self—the firefighter—but you're failing as your future self—the architect who could have designed a better system in the first place.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Exactly. So if we've debugged the reactive code and escaped firefighting mode, how do we start writing the new program? The book argues it starts with an incredibly vivid and detailed vision of your Future Self. A vague goal is a recipe for wandering.

Lijian: That makes sense. A system without a clear spec is just a collection of random features.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Precisely. There's a fantastic story in the book about the author's son, Kaleb, a 14-year-old tennis player. He was practicing a ton but losing all his tournaments. He was frustrated, and his motivation was tanking. His coach gave him a piece of advice: stop thinking about winning matches and start thinking about playing tennis in college. He introduced him to the Universal Tennis Ranking, or UTR, a clear, measurable score of his ability.

Lijian: Ah, so he gave him a key performance indicator, a KPI.

Dr. Celeste Vega: He did. Suddenly, the goal wasn't a fuzzy 'get better.' It was 'raise my UTR from 1.4 to 3.0 to get into a high-level academy.' Kaleb and his dad researched colleges, looked at the UTRs of their players, and built a vivid picture of that future. The result? In the next two months, Kaleb won nine matches in a row. His practice became more focused, his strategy more intentional. The vivid, measurable goal changed everything.

Lijian: That's a perfect parallel to A/B testing in technology. A vague goal like 'improve the website' is useless. But a specific, measurable hypothesis like, 'Changing this button from blue to green will increase the click-through rate by 5%' is testable and drives real progress. Kaleb's UTR was his KPI. You also see this with the historical figures I admire. George Washington at Valley Forge didn't just have a vague hope for 'freedom.' He had a vivid vision of an independent, self-governing nation, and that crystal-clear blueprint guided his brutal, day-to-day decisions through the absolute worst of times.

Dr. Celeste Vega: A powerful connection. But having that vivid goal isn't enough. The path there is often paved with what the book calls 'investment in loss.' This brings us back to our opening hook. It's about deliberately putting yourself in situations where you will fail, for the sake of learning. The book references Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy who later took up the martial art of Taiji Push Hands.

Lijian: From 'The Art of Learning.' A phenomenal book.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Yes! So, as a beginner, Waitzkin was constantly being thrown around. Instead of avoiding the toughest opponents, he sought out the biggest, most aggressive guy in the class. For months, his only goal was to train with this guy and get crushed, over and over. He wasn't trying to win; he was trying to learn how to relax and adapt under extreme pressure. He was investing in loss. And one day, after months of this, they were paired up, and Waitzkin defeated him, almost effortlessly. He had failed his way to mastery.

Lijian: That's such a powerful concept. It reframes failure from an outcome to a strategy. In the startup world, they call it 'failing fast.' You launch a minimum viable product not because you think it's perfect, but because you know it's not. You need the market—the real world—to show you the flaws so you can iterate. Each 'failure' is just data acquisition.

Dr. Celeste Vega: So, Lijian, how do you see this 'investment in loss' playing out in the lives of the historical figures you admire?

Lijian: Oh, constantly. Abraham Lincoln is a prime example. He suffered a string of devastating political and personal failures. He lost multiple elections for Senate, for the House, for Vice President. He had a business that failed. Each one of those would look like a failure to an outsider. But in reality, they were investments. Each loss honed his political skills, deepened his understanding of the nation, and forged the resilience he would need for the presidency. He was failing as his current self to succeed as his future self.

Dr. Celeste Vega: That's it, right there. It's a two-part process. First, you have to debug the reactive, short-term thinking that traps you in the past and in a state of constant urgency.

Lijian: Right. You have to analyze the old code.

Dr. Celeste Vega: And second, you engineer growth with a crystal-clear blueprint—that vivid, measurable vision—and a willingness to fail strategically to get there.

Lijian: It's about shifting from being a passive user of your own life to becoming its lead developer. You have to analyze the old code, and then write, test, and deploy the new.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Beautifully put. So for our listeners, here's a challenge from Lijian and me. A small experiment in becoming your own lead developer.

Lijian: For one week, identify one 'urgent but unimportant' task you do. Maybe it's checking emails first thing in the morning or scrolling a news feed.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Replace that time with just 15 minutes of deep, focused work on a single, long-term goal. Learning a new skill, working on a side project, anything that serves your Future Self.

Lijian: And here's the key: don't judge the outcome of that 15 minutes. Just log the data. At the end of the day, just write down one sentence about how it felt. After a week, you'll have a data set on what it's like to actively invest in your Future Self.

Dr. Celeste Vega: It’s a small investment, but as we've learned today, those are the ones that compound into a future you can't even imagine. Lijian, thank you for helping us engineer this conversation.

Lijian: It was a pleasure, Celeste. Thanks for having me.