Recently I read an article about Earth 2.0. Earth’s bigger brother (or sister) has been discovered after about 20 years of searching. While actual life still needs to make an appearance there were other great similarities – it orbits its “sun” in 385 days; its atmosphere is similar to ours and it is slightly larger than our Earth. The biggest difference in my opinion is that Earth 2.0 should be called the “original” – it’s possibly 6 billion years older than our Earth. It’s almost like looking at a much older version of ourselves – the question arises, once more is discovered about Earth 2.0, will we like what we see?

Most of the time we are trying to imagine a different, “newer” us which makes sense considering we cannot go back and change anything (yet) – time travel will happen I tell you. But imagine an “older” you? One that already existed and who had already passed the ages you still have to get to. What would you want that person to look like? Who would that person have been? How different would today’s You be if you could see your life before this one? Do you think your decisions would be different? Do you think your life would be different? And if so, how?

One of the biggest problems we face is that we do not believe that we can change how we live or rather, we believe that once we make a decision we need to live with it forever. We believe that the life we are living now is the only one we have and we take it so seriously that we forget to have fun and be ourselves. By wanting to live our best lives we become so severe that we end up not living at all. We put so much pressure on ourselves that we end up focussing more on avoiding making wrong decisions than we do about truly making right ones. What we always forget though is that life really is about failing and succeeding and you cannot really succeed if you do not know what failure is nor can you fail if you do not know what success is.

Having said this and really thought about it, it makes me realise that everything we do and think and say is what creates us and that there is no defined version of us. The person we are today may not be the person we will be in 20 years’ time nor will it be the person we are tomorrow. There is no one version of You, or two or three; there are many and it really just depends on which version you choose to repeat or live as. Will you pick the optimistic You or the pessimistic You? Will you pick the believer in You or the sceptic in You? Maybe that’s what being the best You is really all about and accepting that being able to make that decision daily and knowing that it has to be made so often is what will drive you to the best version of You.