When you want to learn or build something new, it’s tempting to just get going. Read as much as you can, do some tutorials, work on some related projects. Short-term, this gives you a motivation boost. You feel like you’re moving forward. But, after a while, you notice that you’re not progressing as fast as you expected. You may even start burning out. Turns out, cramming content inside your brain is not the most effective way to grow. Instead, you need to develop your agency.

Michelangelo, perhaps history’s greatest sculptor, understood this concept to his bones. Two of his more famous quotes speak directly to it:

• Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
• I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free

For Michelangelo, his agency was already there, inside the hunk of stone, whether by divine providence or his own imagination. His eyes and hands were merely the vessels by which that idea—the art—was brought forth into the physical world as he or God (or both) originally intended.

Discover Your Future Mindframe

Discover the 6 areas of your Mental Health

The Benefits of a having a Future Me Mindframe?

A Future Me Mindframe can help you maximize your potential to think, learn, and create, all while taking care of your mental health. Beyond the elevated self-awareness and consciousness you’ll experience by applying metacognitive strategies, scientists have investigated some of the many benefits of expanding your metamind.

• Learn better. Research shows that high-meta learners identify challenges much faster and change their tools and strategies to better achieve their learning goals. Knowing your Future Me Mindframe can even compensate for IQ and lack of prior knowledge when it comes to solving new problems.
• Make decisions faster. Monitoring and controlling your ongoing cognitive activity can make you aware of your cognitive biases and help avoid mistakes, or at least not reproduce the same mistakes twice. In addition, because of heightened awareness, metacognition leads to a reduction in response time, which reduces the time to solve a problem or complete a task.
• Be more creative. According to Dr Markus Lång, all narrative works of art can be defined as metacognitive artifacts which are designed by the creator to anticipate and regulate the cognitive processes of the recipient. Intrinsically speaking, creativity is thinking about thinking.
• Improve your mental health. A Future Me Mindframe gives you the ability to understand your mental health and to adapt your strategies to cope with the source of any distress. As such, researchers defined metacognition as the process that “reinforces one’s subjective sense of being a self and allows for becoming aware that some of one’s thoughts and feelings are symptoms of an illness.”

As you can see, having a Future Me Mindframe is really the mind’s Swiss Army knife. That one ability can help you learn better, make decisions faster, be more creative, and improve your mental health. So, how can you experience those benefits?