Design your dream life by first figuring out your anti-vision, or the nightmare scenario, of what you hate.

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I remember quite vividly my trip to the emergency room with chest pains.

Long hours, nonstop travel, lowball pay and unrelenting stress resulted in a panic attack that had me in the hospital.

I wasn’t taking care of myself, how could I? 

Eating whatever I could whenever I could so the next email would not go unanswered. 

Sitting at my cubicle for hours with little to no exercise because when I did have the time, I lacked the energy or drive to do anything but just sit and veg. 

Client lunches and travel dinners and the pressure to be “On” at all hours almost led to my undoing.

I was 40 pounds overweight. Suffering from chest pains due to the massive weight of anxiety. Being told by a cardiologist that I “could stand to lose a few pounds.”

Corporate lifestyle almost killed me. 

One day, I decided that this was not the life I wanted to live for myself.

I left my job working in marketing and public relations to pursue my own adventure. 

It was time to set my own hours, follow my own passions. Control my own destiny and paycheck.

Every day I’m grateful for escaping that hellscape. 

But, I’m also thankful that I went through it. 

Why am I thankful for this? Because it showed me a life that I no longer want to live. 

I cannot go back to that overweight, out of shape, stressed-out-of-my-mind state of constant panic. And I’ll do whatever it takes to avoid it.

That past life is now the tool that keeps me motivated with my health and business on those days when I “just don’t feel like it.”

We call this the anti-vision.

It’s the antithesis of what you’d like to do with your life. The nightmare you are running away from. 

It’s like what life would be like if the Thanos snap really happened.

And today, we’re going to explore how to make this work for you.

Let’s get into it.

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Crafting an anti-vision makes your actual vision so much stronger

When January 1st rolls around, everyone has a goal or a resolution that they’d like to achieve.

And as a coach in the fitness industry, I spend a lot of time asking my clients about their own goals.

• Where do you want to be 12 weeks or even 12 months from now?
• What are your short term fitness goals?

I’d ask them to paint a picture of what life will look when they reach that goal:

• How do they feel?
• How do they move?
• What kinds of things can they do that they couldn’t beforehand?

You’ve likely done something similar. But, how often has your goal-setting stopped right there?

You get moving for a few days to start the new year fresh and then you drop everything by Valentine’s Day?

Unable to develop the true habits it takes to create a new lifestyle.

And then you blame lack of motivation for the reason behind your failure. Only to come back 365 days later and try this exercise in futility again.

With an anti-vision you’ve added a powerful motivating factor.

You know the consequences of your actions (or inactions) and where they will lead.

There’s a pathway towards victory, which is always important, but now you have a demon chasing you and keeping you on your toes.

Unlock the ability to realize your goals by creating an anti-goal

The anti-vision is nothing new.

There’s a Latin phrase called Via Negativa, or the negative way, used by early theologians to define God by essentially determining what God was not.

Basically the idea here was that God transcended so many qualities that it was easier to figure out what God was by determining the qualities that did not define God.

It’s like creating an indirect definition by subtracting the negative to figure out the positive.

“We cannot explain everything. We know more about what something is not than what something is. If there would have been no word for the color blue, it would still have existed in reality. It would only have been absent in linguistics. But since we don’t have a word for it, we couldn’t find or comprehend it. But we still could say what it is not. It is not orange. It’s not an elephant, etc. This method of knowledge is truer and more rigorous than positive knowledge.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

In present day practice, Via Negativa, or your anti-vision, is a focus on what to remove from your life, the negatives that you are running away from, in order to make space for the positive additions.

As we know from studying some human psychology, it’s much more difficult to overcome a loss than it is to celebrate the wins.

Ask any football player that’s both won and lost a Super Bowl, and they’ll tell you that the loss is the one that sticks out the most.

The agony of defeat is stronger than the thrill of victory.

In other words, your dream, goal, resolution, is simply not a strong enough motivator to keep you going.

You need an anti-vision that scares the living bejeebers outta you.

The anti-vision allowed me to find more clarity

My dream vision is a lifestyle of minimal work and maximum learning. Exploring new ventures and writing about those experiences in a way that allows me to help others do the same.

I want more time with my family. More time to play and travel.

I want to eat well, go on long walks daily, improve my mobility, and enjoy minimalist style strength training that allows me to workout anywhere (without a gym).

My long-term goal is to continue coaching fitness and nutrition, but to expand my offerings into other areas that I’m truly interested in and passionate about.

I’m going to lean in on being my own, new age, digital Polymath that excels in multiple passions and interests.

Topics like minimalism in general, but executed in a practical way … or habit formation for busy parents and entrepreneurs … or productivity for fellow moms, dads and content creators.

I want my days to be focused on writing more and working less.

And I’m determined to build that lifestyle for myself.

It was important to me to get super specific about my entire lifestyle design process.

My anti-goal is the opposite of that lifestyle I’ve designed

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”

— Charlie Munger

I want to avoid a future where I am doomed to repeat the past from my corporate office jobs. Overweight. Out of shape. Unable to keep up with my kids, or with my grandkids, as I get older.

A life where I’m confined to a rocking chair or couch all day, chained down by a juggernaut of prescription drugs required to keep my body “technically” alive.

But in reality, I’d just be waiting to die.

I think about this sedentary and unhealthy hellscape any morning when I don’t want to go for my 5:00 a.m. walk, and I’m immediately grateful that I have the opportunity to prevent that from happening.

Professionally, I no longer want to work in a cubicle or in an office setting where I’m not the one in charge to set the overall vision and direction (and paycheck).

I no longer want to worry about random KPIs (key performance indicators) or annual reviews where I have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to try and convince some rando supervisor that I deserve a raise or a promotion.

No more stupid ass webinars from HR.

No more company team-building “voluntold” bullshit.

No more unnecessary travel when that meeting could’ve been a damn email.

I wrote all of this out.

And I look at it almost weekly.

Every single thing I do now is to avoid that situation.

It’s the motivation you never knew you needed.

Because lack of motivation is not your problem; it’s a lack of clarity.

Mapping out your anti-vision helps bring clarity to your goals.

Now use the anti-vision exercise to flip this script

You know where you want to be, but having these goals so far out from now can be a bit deflating.

It feels like forever from now when that dream home and lean physique will be realized. And as a result, the motivation can start fading away.

To combat this, you must paint the picture of what happens when you do not take action.

• If you do not start that business, what kind of life confined to a cubicle will that lead?
• If you do not start taking care of those healthy habits, what kind of life will that lead?
• What if you don’t get in shape? Start that business? Write that book?
• How does this scenario affect the big three pillars in your Health, Wealth and your Relationships?

Get super specific about this.

Simply listing out goals is great, but when you have emotion behind them, that’s the extra credit that puts you in the rarified air of those who actually conquer their objectives.

Write it all out.

Include how you’d feel if you didn’t achieve those goals.

Because sure, you could just say, “Yeah if I don’t start that business, I’ll just be here in my usual 9-to-5, and I’ll be okay.”

Just being “okay” sucks. That’s not growth, it’s slow death.

Here’s how we make this even more effective.

Go down the rabbit hole of suck to create your own anti-goal

For example:

Not starting that business might mean more stress.

More stress leads to randomly lashing out at your loved ones.

Lashing out at your loved ones leads to even more compounded stress that starts to affect your overall health: Lower energy, lower libido, poor sleep and terrible eating habits.

Now you’re spiraling and losing control of everything.

Your health is suffering, relationships are in the tank and there’s no way you can perform optimally in your career with this kind of unrelenting stress and poor physical health.

It’s the same recipe of suck that led to my trip to the ER. Don’t do like I did.

But what you must understand is that this spiral won’t happen overnight.

Of course not.

It’s more of a slow drip that happens over the course of a decade.

Then you finally step back and look at what happened and realize that you should’ve trusted your instincts and started that business when you had the chance.

How to create your own anti-goal or anti-vision

We’re going to break this down into bite-sized steps so you can create your own anti-vision and tap into this motivational powerhouse.

Realize

The first step is a little market research.

There are plenty of examples in your everyday life of people who are living a painful, overstressed, miserable life.

So … notice the people around you.

The people you sit next to on the train. Or the folks standing in front of you in line at the store. Your coworkers a few cubicles over.

• What are they doing that you do not want to do?
• Why are they doing it?
• What are they leading towards with those actions? Is it positive? Negative? Unhealthy?
• Are they incredibly overweight and out of shape?
• Is this someone that you’d like to intelligently imitate and be more like in your own life?

Take note. All of this is useful feedback that will allow for more self exploration.

Experiences

Think less about the materialistic things that bring you cheap hits of dopamine.

Instead, think about those experiences that have left core memories for you (both good and bad).

• What are the events that you never want to experience again?
• What are some of the lowest of the lows throughout your life? And what do you think caused them to happen?
• What have you learned from them and what have you done to prevent history from potentially repeating itself?

List all of these events out. Write them all done.

It’s throughout the actual exercise of writing things like this that we get deeper clarity through introspection.

Write down everything that you do not want in life.

Visualize

Now it’s time to really imagine the hellscape.

Where will you be five or 10 years from now if you do not make positive habit changes? Is this something you’d enjoy?

Again, get real clear on this visualization in all aspects.

How would continuing to neglect your health with poor exercise and dietary habits eventually affect your relationships? Your career?

What would happen if you keep burning yourself out by working long hours, being on-call 24-7 and never taking time for yourself?

Where would you be in five or 10 years if you never take that one step towards creating your own thing (writing a book, starting a business)?

Once you’ve created this anti-vision, you’ll start to see clear pathways to escaping this personal dystopian future.

Now that you know where you’re running away from, it should be easy to define the steps necessary to avoid it. Via Negativa in action.

List out the habits you will need to develop and practice in order to avoid this anti-vision.

Congrats, you’ve just created an actionable To Do List.

The final step towards avoiding your anti-goal is to take action

As with any goal, it will not be easy. It will require consistency and patience.

But, motivation should no longer be a challenge because you will have this exercise to refer back to whenever you question why you are doing it in the first place.

You’re doing this to get far away from the dark future where you’re stuck in a spiral of suck.

Now … go forth and spend some time going down a completely terrible and absolutely negative rabbit hole.

Embrace Via Negativa so you can finally figure out how to live your dream life.

If you found this newsletter helpful, please share with your friends.

And of course if you have any comments or questions, feel free to reach out to me and start a conversation.

I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “creating my anti-vision” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

Until next time,
Pete