Future MindFraming

According to Marty McFly in the classic 1985 movie Back to the Future, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”

Now that we live in the future, in a world where there is more information available at your fingertips than you could ever consume, at a time where it only takes a click to pick the brains of the most brilliant experts of our era, it can indeed seem like anything is possible. One just needs a bit of imagination and determination.

Why is it then that we struggle so much to accomplish our goals? That we start many projects but only finish a few, if any? That we spend so much time procrastinating instead of learning and creating?

And why do 92% of people never achieve their New Year’s goals while others seem to more easily manage to stick to their plan?

Some will sign up to an online course and finish it in a few months, then build their first web application, while others will announce every six months that they are going to start studying Spanish again.

Some will take some cooking classes and invite you every week to try their new, improved recipes, while others will get a gym membership and stop going after a week.

My theory is that it’s all about having the right or the wrong mind frame—sometimes called “mindframe” in one word or “frame of mind”—for the task. You can have the best tools and strategies, but if you don’t have the right mind frame, things are not going to work.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a mind frame is a mental attitude or outlook. It’s more than just a mood, it encompasses the particular way someone thinks or feels about something, and deeply influences one’s behaviour.

What I find interesting is that mind frames are always presented as states in which the individual is bound to be. A mind frame seems to be a passive state.

It influences how the individual thinks and acts, but we rarely discuss how the individual can influence their mind frames.

And this may be what is wrong with our approach in setting, managing, and achieving our goals. Instead of shaping our mind frames in a way that plays in our favour and makes it easy for us to progress and feel fulfilled, we see positive mind frames as lucky aids, and negative mind frames as inevitable obstacles.

There are three main frames to consider to become a “master mindframer”:

• Future Me
• Agency
• Pathways

Having clarity around your own personal Future Me means having the willingness to experiment and the deep belief that growing happens through small, incremental steps, rather than big overnight victories. 

It also means embracing failure as part of the process—knowing that even though you have ups and downs, even when learning something new or building a product takes longer than expected, or doesn’t go as planned, you are able to trust the process and keep on adding new building blocks to your Lego castle every day.

The second mind frame is agency. The word agency is shorthand for our perceived ability to shape our lives every day. As "agents" we know we can make things happen or stop them from happening.

We know we can take responsibility for determining our future and then making it happen. Over time, we can develop our ability to shift our identity by building our capacity for persistence and long-term effort.

Consider the challenges of your job, your career or even you life. What do they have in common, psychologically? In each case, success requires high-functioning human agency.

In the psychological sense, agency entails a category of beliefs, a mindset. More profoundly, genuine agency includes the strategies and actions that accomplish what we want and bring us what we need.

We seek out and identify multiple pathways to our future by picking the most appropriate routes for our situation and monitor our progress over time. These are the plans that carry us forward, but at the same time we're aware that obstacles can arise at any time. So we remain curious and open to finding better paths to our hopeful future using tiny experiments.

Pathway thinking is all about optionality, knowing that there are many different routes we can take to reach our future. When it feels like there’s only one path we can take to see hope happen, it feels like we’re walking a tightrope. One wrong move and we’re toast. But when we know there are countless paths we can take to reach our destination, it’s easy as a Sunday drive. Doesn’t matter if there’s some road construction along the way, because there are plenty of other streets we can take to get there.

Having clarity about your future, agency, and pathways are crucial to mindframing so you can  have confidence about where you are going and when you have clarity, you have courage. 

What I like about mindframing compared to other learning frameworks I’ve tried is that it really encourages you to make—to produce content, build applications, and in short apply what you learn as soon as possible to solidify it. It’s more of a making framework.

First, let’s have a look at the tools you need. Many frameworks “require” to buy this special notebook or whatever tool will make you more productive. For mindframing, you just need something to write. I use a combination of a notebook and just my text editor.

There are four steps to the mindframing method:

1. Pact
2. Act
3. React
4. Impact

Which, you may notice, conveniently spells out PARI, which means “bet” in French. Now, let’s go through each of these briefly.

First, you create a pact, either with yourself or with others. I’m personally a big proponent of learning and building in public, but if you feel like you have the mind health to keep yourself accountable without sharing your goals with others, that’s fine too. There are also cases where you may not want to build your product in the open for other practical reasons.

A pact means in this case that you are committing to regularly spend time working towards your goal. It does not define the nitty-gritty of what you will do, or how long each session needs to be, just that you will be dedicating time on a regular basis to actions that will make you progress towards that goal.

Second, you need to act. This is usually the hardest part in most learning frameworks, which are complex and require you to go through lots of content in a specific order, study for a predetermined amount of hours per week, then complete some specific assignments. Way to feel discouraged.

With mindframing, you are in control of your learning process. The only thing you could do wrong is to do nothing. Open a book and read one page? That’s progress. Watch a tutorial video? That’s awesome. Listen to a friend sharing their thoughts about a coding event they attended? That counts too. There is no small contribution towards your goal. Each step you take brings you closer to the person you want to become.

Third, you need to react. This is when you start really internalising the concepts you have previously engaged with by creating your own content. I know it can sound daunting to start producing content at this stage. You feel like you’re such a newbie—who are you to share your thoughts about a topic that’s so new to you?

But this is one of the most efficient ways to learn, with the added bonus of helping you connect with people who are also interested in the topic. This could take many forms: a blog post, a short podcast, a live stream, a thread on Twitter, an email to your list. This article is actually me consolidating lots of the stuff I’ve been learning in the past years. Reframing and explaining your thoughts to someone is a great way to consolidate yours.

Finally, you need to work on a project with impact. Once you feel familiar enough—which means that you can grasp the concepts and can articulate them, but still feel very uncomfortable using them—you should start creating something bigger. If you’re learning how to code, time to try building your first complex application. If you’re studying ancient history, time to write longer essays about a little-studied topic and submit them to relevant publications. If you’re studying music composition, time to create a collection of original pieces.

These will probably not be very good at first, but you will learn an incredible amount by pushing yourself to not only be able to explain concepts, but by having a deep enough understanding to create something of your own.