Episode
The question to ask your younger self
- Podcast
- AGING with STRENGTH®
- Published
- Dec 21, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 394
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Summary
TRANSCRIPT In this audiocast, I invite you to join me on a slightly provocative thought experiment: Imagine you could reach back through time to ask your younger self a simple question: What do you want for me? Not what did you want for me, but what do you want for me now. Because this conversation is happening in the present — and because that vision your younger self had remains alive — and actionable — in you today. That’s my argument….and here’s why. I came across this quote recently. “Discipline is remembering who you said you wanted to be.” There are four important parts to that idea: 1 | You had a vision for yourself One is simply that you had a vision for who you wanted to become. It was specific, ambitious, thoughtful and achievable. And it came from you. Decades ago, for instance, I had dreams of becoming an oceanographer, a literary travel writer, a jazz bassist and a spy. 2 | It was about who, not what, you wanted to become Second, your vision is about who — not what — you wanted to be. We often default to defining ourselves by what we are, professionally. But for many of us, what we do for money is a superficial proxy for who we are, really, if or when our jobs disappear. When I left The New York Times, I began the uncomfortable exercise of figuring out who Paul von Zielbauer — no longer from The Times — actually was. 3 | You spoke your vision The third important part of this idea that “Discipline is remembering who you said you wanted to be” is that verb — said. You spoke this vision. You expressed it to family, friends. And speaking it put life into it, whether or not you knew it at the time. Back in 1993, I’d talked about traveling the world so much that, after a Chicago taxi smashed the front end of my trusty Mazda 626, I used the insurance money to in…