How do I actually become the person I want to be in ten years?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau answers with a question: “What did you do today to change the person you will be in 10 years?” Everyone has a vision of being successful and healthy a decade from now, but because ten years feels like forever, “today feels irrelevant.” Another day passes, and another, and another.
What nobody sees, he explains, is that “a decade is just days. Thousands of them. Each one is either building or destroying the person you’re set to be.”
He cites the Mishnah: “The day is short, the work is much, the workers are lazy.” Notice, he says, it is “not a decade, the day. This one.” There is “no neutral day.” The ten-year vision of you “is just accumulation of what you did today.”
Related concepts: Another year has to be for something · Discipline
In A Soul at Peace: The Day Is Short, the Work Is Great
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
The person you will be in ten years is built out of what you do today.
Fear, vulnerability, or tension
Because the vision is far away, today feels irrelevant, and the days slip by one after another.
Deepest human truth
Why does the Mishnah say “the day” and not “life”?
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that the Sage stresses “the day” because “a decade is nothing but days,” and the future “is only the sum of what is done today.”
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Purpose, Character, and Masculine Leadership · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz