I’ve been experimenting with two complementary techniques for influencing the quality and direction of my life. In this post I’ll write about one of those methods: imagining and describing best case scenarios.

While it’s easy and natural for most people to imagine and try to mentally prepare for worst case “what if” scenarios, it’s less intuitive to imagine what life would be like if everything went amazingly well.

I’ve been experimenting with some variation of this technique for at least ten years. In 2009 I wrote a “vision essay” and then wrote a follow-up post about my results three years later. While I did have some cringe moments reading my original 2009 essay, I later realized that about 70% of my best case scenarios had materialized. And now, ten years later, practically everything I had hoped for back in 2009 has come to pass (especially becoming a published science fiction author).

More recently I decided to expand and develop this technique, adding time intervals, and more formally defined life categories or aspects. Using a spreadsheet grid, I wrote a brief description of what my best case scenario would be within a particular area of my life within several weeks, within several months, within a year, within five years, and within ten years.

The life areas I defined were health/fitness, family/household, fiction/writing, author career, music/Loöq Records, financial, friendships/social, adventure/novelty, civic/local, and political/global.

In describing my best case scenarios, I tried to avoid both goal-setting and “miracles” (or highly unlikely events). Instead, I tried to imagine outcomes that were highly optimistic but still plausible.

Challenges

This exercise was harder than expected, and took me at least eight hours to complete, spread out over the course of a week.

Even coming up with the categories was difficult. Life does not arrange itself into discrete packages; everything is connected and intertwined. My relationship with Kia influences my relationship with our daughter (and vice versa); all my relationships influence my emotions (as does my health), which in turn have a strong effect on my creative process, etc. At the same time, if I ignored categories altogether I might overlook something big, like the importance of long-term friendships. So I did the best I could, accepting that my selected categories would be imperfect and imprecise, and would probably change over time as my values and priorities change.

Another obstacle was my own growing sense of cynicism and pessimism about the direction of the world, especially when trying to imagine best case scenarios for the political/global category. I had to remind myself that despite the current bleakness of our political and environmental landscapes, there are still best case scenarios. In this category I tried to imagine some plausible positive outcomes in ten years time, and then work backwards to the present. For example, I would consider universal healthcare in the United States to be a highly positive outcome (both personally, as a self-employed person with outrageous insurance premiums that are used to pay for fucking sports stadiums, and nationally). So what does it take to get there?

A third challenge was imagining long-term highly positive outcomes in areas of my life that I had deprioritized. I gave up DJing years ago, and producing music has become more of something that I enjoy doing with friends, no longer an ambition that I pursue with singular focus. At the same time, I still love making beats. Producing music adds a ton of value to my life, and the music label is a profitable business that doesn’t demand a lot of time. I had to reimagine best case scenarios for this part of my life, letting go of old ideas and fantasies that no longer seemed plausible or even desirable, and imagining new possibilities in sync with the reduced bandwidth.

Immediate Effects of the Best Case Scenario Exercise

There were a few immediate effects, including actions I took even before completing the exercise.

Imagining a best case financial scenario for the next few weeks, the easiest way I could imagine to make a few extra thousand dollars without a great deal of additional work would be to license music from our record label catalog. Music licensing is a long-shot, highly competitive game, but as Wayne Gretzky said, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” So I pinged some music supervisor contacts and sent off reels of some of our best tracks.

In other life categories, there were some immediate steps I could take to improve my chances of a great outcome. The best case scenario exercise framed the probability spectrum of my life in such a way that it made it easy and effortless to take some next step actions, even though some of those actions were drudgework (completing our daughter’s passport renewal application, for instance).

There was also a feeling of mental freedom and lightness once I completed the exercise. I hadn’t set a bunch of ambitious goals that compelled me to get all nose to grindstone. I had merely defined, for my own edification, what those best case scenarios might look like. The exercise sharpened my sense of direction without adding pressure or expectations.

What About Worst Case Scenarios?

I can’t help but sometimes think about worst-case scenarios as well: a loved one getting injured or killed, a freak accident, an unexpected serious illness, a second term for our narcissistic criminal president, unchecked carbon emissions leading to a mass extinction event, etc.

But the actions I can take to lessen the probabilities of these events are relatively straightforward, and don’t demand a great deal of thought. I can drive safely, make sure we get our flu shots, stay insured, eat well and exercise, get regular checkups, vote for a candidate I believe in, etc. And if I let my worries dominate my mind, it’s quite possible that I will suffer more from anxiety than I will from bad things actually happening.

Ultimately, we all die. There’s no getting out of this game alive, and the end is usually a little messy and ugly. I’d rather focus on having the best possible experiences and having the most positive impact rather than spend my time, attention, and energy focusing on bad things that will either 1) probably not happen (asteroid impact extinction, killer bee apocalypse, etc.) or 2) will happen for sure (death and taxes).

Next Steps and Possible Long-Term Effects

I’ve just recently completed the exercise, so I’m not sure how I’m going to use this new tool. Since the shortest time category is “within a few weeks,” I’ll probably take a look at what I’ve written and update my best case scenarios every few weeks. If that feels like too much work, I might get rid of the shortest time category and take a look every few months.

What I won’t do is wait for three years, like the first time I did something like this. I think it’s important to include both short-term and long-term possible positive outcomes in your thinking. Some things, like developing a new career, take years. But sometimes big wins are just around the corner, and I want my mind to be open to those immediate opportunities as well as the “steady progress” outcomes.

I’ll write a follow-up post when I have more to share.

Next post: Effective Use of Negative Visualization

New release: My sci-fi novel The Guardian is out now on Flame Tree Press. Read some early reviews on Goodreads.