Connect to your past selves

According to LessWrong contributor Patrick Farley, connecting with your past selves—through journaling, email, photos, or goal tracking—reveals surprising patterns about how you've changed and why. The practice serves three purposes: reflection on your growth, accountability for the present, and consistency between past intentions and current actions. Farley notes that many people struggle with perpetually starting new plans but never finishing them. Bridging that gap between past and present selves helps. Your sent email folder is a time-stamped record of what you once prioritized. Old photos and calendar entries show what you were actually doing. Past goals and life timelines map your evolution. His favorite technique is visualizing how your core ideas have influenced each other across years—seeing which values appeared early and shaped everything that followed. The payoff: understanding not just what you've changed, but why, and learning from your own history.

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