Making The Most Of Your Past, Present & Future

In the book Die with Zero Author Bill Perkins articulates the concept of a memory dividend. The following excerpts from the book elaborate on this idea:

"Your Life Is the Sum of Your Experiences."

"Unlike material possessions, which seem exciting at the beginning but then often depreciate quickly, experiences actually gain in value over time: They pay what I call a memory dividend."

"The payoff from an investment does not have to be financial. When you teach your daughter to swim or to ride a bike, it’s not because you think she’ll get a better-paying job with those new skills. Experiences are like that: When you spend time or money on experiences, they are not only enjoyable in the moment — they pay an ongoing dividend. Experiences yield dividends because we humans have memory."

Should We Live In The Past, Present Or Future?

You might say, I don't like or want to live in the past. I only care about the present and future. While that is reasonable, let's consider the following.

An interesting experiment you can do with yourself for a day/week is to study your own mind and answer the following question:

What percentage of your thoughts in a day are about the past, about the present and about the future respectively?

Do you find yourself spending majority of your time thinking and reliving memories from the past? If so, you might be living your life on rewind ⏪.

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”― Karl Lagerfeld

Or, do you find yourself in a constant "do do do..doer" mode with no time to pause and reflect on the past or dream about the future? If so, you may have hit the play ▶️ button and forgotten all about the rewind and fast-forward buttons.

"I just don’t believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories. No regrets. No people. No trips. Nothing. A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present." - Naval Ravikant

Or do you find yourself spending excessive time dreaming about your future that doesn't seem to come fast enough? If so, you may be living your life on fast-forward ⏩.

"Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what is was." ― Zora Neale Hurston

If you did the experiment, one central idea becomes apparent - it is not easy to categorize our thoughts into neat buckets of the past, present or future. The mind seems to have a will of its own in navigating almost effortlessly across time.

While it is true that the "present" is all we've got and we should live "mindfully", the reality of it is that our mind tends to navigate seamlessly across time.

What if instead of forcing a pattern on the mind, we embrace its nature of living simultaneously in the past, present and future? Perhaps, this is how nature intended it to be?

“Unless we manipulate our surroundings, we have as little control over what and whom we think about as we do over the muscles of our hearts.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Optimizing Memory Dividends

While there is plenty of current emphasis on living in the moment / mindfulness with constant reminders about building your future, there is not enough value being given to optimizing your past.

Memory dividends is a handy concept to embrace and prioritize experiences that don't necessarily have a financial value but can have enormous untapped memory value over your lifetime.

With memory dividends, you invest in an experience in your present so that you can relive those past memories at a future time. And not just once, you can relive those memories as many times as you'd like thus paying you a "dividend" with a growth rate much like a financial investment pays ongoing dividends over time.

So, what are some ways to optimize memory dividends?

• Always have a bucket list of "experiences" you'd like to have in writing.
• Get creative with your list. Don't hold back. Look deeper within yourself. Examples of experiences can be travel goals, learning a new language or skill, starting a business, writing a book etc. The possibilities are endless.
• Trade-off time vs money. Not all experiences need to be about spending money. Some experiences can be free if you give your time.
• Start early in knocking off the higher priority experiences from your bucket list. Don't wait for an opportune time to arrive like retirement.
• Take time to reflect on your past experiences and identify "peak experiences" that have been the most memorable and impactful to you. Going forward, prioritize these kind of "peak experiences" over others.
• Minimize regret. Ask yourself, "At the end of my life, will I regret not having done this?". Prioritize those experiences for which you answered "YES".
• When feasible, act sooner rather than later. Remember that time is your enemy. The sooner you invest in your preferred experiences, the longer you have to reap the benefits of memory dividends with your loved ones.
• Use advances in technology to capture and preserve precious memories in the form of photos and videos using various devices.
• Ensure that you have multiple backups of all your valuable digital memories. If not, in the worst case you may have to forgo your memory dividends forever.
• Use the "memories" feature of photo apps to automatically remind you of past memories thus paying a "memory dividend".
• Share your memories with friends, family & on social media.
• Optionally, you can treat social media platforms as a public cloud platform with builtin backups that provide a convenient way to share and organize your memories.
• Try to use all your senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch) to relive experiences. For example, don't just watch pictures. Learn some basic photo/video editing skills to create musical slideshows/customized videos from all your media sources. Then watch your memories come alive on your large screen TV with friends and family. This is your movie playing...amazing isn't it?
• You may find that over time, reliving some memories may actually bring more enjoyment than the original experience itself due to the compounding nature of memory dividends.

What experiences are you going to prioritize this year?

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.” - Seneca

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