Write Yourself a Birthday Letter

I’ve always embraced the concept of “R.O.T.” I first heard about it from Somers White, and I don’t know from whom he may have heard it.

The idea is that your only truly non-renewable resource is time. Well, time might be slightly stretchable if not renewable if you kick into a very healthy food/exercise phase of your life. The one thing you may count on is the incessant progression of those grains of sand through your own hourglass neck.

So, rather than emphasizing your pursuit of a higher-paying career move or hustling your butt off founding a business, I recommend deciding what activities will give you the biggest long-term return on your investments of time. Decide what experiences you want to be having. What steps will lead you toward having them.

Make sure you do those things.

One of the very best investments I’ve ever come across is the hour it takes to write yourself a letter on each birthday. The trick is to save them someplace where they won’t go astray into the recycling bin.

I cherish my old letters to myself. They wouldn’t be of much interest to you or anybody else. They are my records of who I am and what’s going on at any particular stage in my life.

Because of the huge value you’ll feel when you read your own birthday letters, I strongly recommend that you carve out an hour each year and write to yourself.

I know a lot of people get hung up about their writing. They make consistent grammatical gaffes with embarrassment, or aren’t sure of their vocabulary or spelling. It doesn’t matter. This is for you. You don’t get graded. The important thing is to push aside any obstacle that could prevent you from writing this letter. Fearing that your writing won’t be good enough is one of the most common delaying tactics. Don’t fall for it.

There are also abundant personal benefits that accrue from your investment of time to write the birthday letters. For one, entertainment. I find my writing to myself twenty or thirty years ago quite funny.

For another, a macro view of the main trends of your life. I find many of the same issues that currently concern me are present in my letters separated by decades. That at least gives me the choice to either alter the techniques I employ to change a particular behavior I think is bad, or to accept the behavior.

For example, I’m amazed at how consistently I make various pronouncements about cleaning out my garage and letting loose of my detritus of the past.

When setting out to write one of these letters-to-self, the point-of-view I always take is a little interview with myself. I answer my own questions, like:
· So, what are you most proud of in your life this particular year?
· If you review the personal goals you told yourself you’d work on in years past, which are the ones you be able to say you’d made the most headway in accomplishing?
· The least? Is it better to change tactics, or simply accept reality without struggling to change it?
· What life stage are you moving out of and into?

Breaking the ice can be freeing with these letters. Reveal something really secret that’s your own personal latchkey of authenticity. Something you’d hope nobody would ever find out about. Writing about that tender subject will set up a connection between yourself and your writing. Sort of a “Dear Diary” phenomenon where you write to yourself as if to another. It makes the writing private and yours, so that you’ll guard and cherish it as an important and intensely personal record of your life. After all, what’s a bigger deal?

Anyway, the point is this: I’ve just had my 57th birthday, and when I think about the many things I treasure, not one of them is materialistic. Except, maybe, those old letters I wrote myself. I’m sure glad I have them.

I know that if you take the time to write your own birthday letters to yourself, kicking aside whatever delaying tactics you’ve been using, you will be very glad you did.

You’ll receive an excellent Return On Time. The investment will pay off profoundly.

In fact, the R.O.T. payoff is so great that you’d be missing a great deal if you waited until your birthday to write your first birthday letter to yourself.

Maybe your last delaying tactic will be a quick trip to a quality stationery store to invest in yourself by buying a fine quality, well-bound blank book you can keep private and safe during you next life phases.

Have fun enjoying your new best-ever R.O.T. investment.