Be your future self now

The Boy Who Filmed His Future

On October 4, 2015, a seventeen-year-old in North Carolina ditched his eleventh-grade history test and locked himself in a bedroom. He had an idea that sounded ridiculous even to himself. He set up a camera and recorded four short videos addressed to people who did not exist yet: himself six months later, twelve months later, five years later, ten years later. Each video was about two minutes long. He scheduled them to publish automatically on the exact future dates. At that moment Jimmy Donaldson had eight thousand subscribers and one and a half million lifetime views, and his goal for the six-month video was a number he thought was insane: fifteen thousand subscribers. Twenty thousand, he said to the camera, would be crazy.

When the five-year video unlocked itself in October 2020, MrBeast had more than forty million subscribers, a thirty-person team, annual revenue past a hundred million dollars, and a stunt list that included counting to a hundred thousand on a livestream over forty hours and giving ten thousand dollars to a homeless man. The five-year video, recorded by a boy who had skipped a quiz, ends with that boy hoping he has one million subscribers when he watches it. The version of him who watched it had forty-four times that.

This is the engine of Benjamin Hardy's book, and it is doing more work than it appears. Hardy is not making the point that visualization is powerful. He is making a stranger point: that the future does not arrive at the present, the future pulls the present toward it, and the person you will be in twenty years is already shaping what you do right now whether you have introduced yourself to him or not.