I love it when a bizarre idea turns out to be true.

That was the case for me recently when I read the book 10x Is Easier Than 2x, by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. I almost skipped it, because it’s a business book, and I often find these kinds of books feel more like a marketing pitch than a source of insight.

But the topic of the book aligned well with an area I’ve been researching lately: our collective relationship to struggle. I’m interested in the ways that high-achieving people have a tendency to make things more difficult than they need to be, and how our cultural mythology has taught us to see struggle as a prerequisite for meaning and purpose.

So the premise of this book — that big leaps in growth and productivity actually come through less effort, not more — spoke to me. The book’s thesis is that doubling a business requires more effort because you’re doing the same things you’re already doing, but you have to work twice as hard. (Perhaps even harder if you run into diminishing marginal returns.) But if you want to scale a business 10x, you can’t just do ten times as much work. You probably don’t have that many hours in the day, nor are you likely to be able to deliver the returns you need with your existing methods.

To scale a business (or any endeavor) 10x, you have to think radically differently about it. You have to serve different customers, or create a different offering. You simply cannot scale at this multiple by doing more of the same.

And this leads to a strange realization about time.

The Future Creates the Past

Our conventional sense of time is linear, progressing from past to present to future. The past, consisting of things that have already happened, feels fixed and unchanging. The future is mysterious and unknown. Our past shapes our mindsets, our skills, our relationships. It is the source of our story, and in those ways, it seems to determine our future.

Yet Hardy and Sullivan claim that actually we have this backwards. Yes, we experience time as moving from future to past, but in actuality, it is not our past that determines our actions in the present, but our expectations about the future. For example, imagine two young writers, Mary and Alice, who have just completed their first novels. Mary sends her novel to a handful of agents and gets rejected. She thinks that she must be a terrible writer, sticks her manuscript in a drawer, and goes to law school. Meanwhile, Alice sends out her novel and gets the same set of rejections. But Alice thinks, I just must not have found the right agent yet. So she sends the manuscript out again. And again. And after a hundred rejections, she finally gets published, going on to write many beloved novels over her long career.

For Mary, the rejection became a pivotal part of her past, one that changed the course of her life, while Alice hardly remembers the initial rejections because of what she has gone on to experience. Both Mary and Alice had the same experiences of rejection, but the difference in their beliefs about the future changed how they responded to it, which in turn influenced their views of the past. Alice believed she would eventually be successful, which kept her going. Mary believed she wouldn’t, and gave up.

Our beliefs about what is possible for us in the future determine how we act in the present, and our present choices determine the lens through which we view our past.

Breaking free from your past

If you think about anyone who has broken a barrier in the world, whether shattering a glass ceiling or inventing a previously unthinkable technology, their accomplishment was shaped by a belief that something impossible in the past could become reality in the future. For example, Thomas Edison went through thousands of failed attempts in his attempt to create an electric light bulb, drawing mockery and ridicule in the process. There was nothing in the past to suggest he would be able to to do it. He persisted because of his expectation that he could do it in the future.

What would you do if you believed you could do anything? What would you do if you didn’t feel bound by the struggles or failures of your past?

This idea was liberating for me. Suddenly, I became aware of all sorts of stories that I believed were true about myself based on my past experiences. On closer inspection, these weren’t actually facts; they were memories that I had unwittingly allowed to define my expectations about what I was capable of in the future.

Let’s say I had made a naive money decision in my twenties. Over time, I grew cautious with money, seeing myself as fearful and risk-averse. By allowing this belief to persist, I was allowing one bad experience in the past dictate every future decision. If, on the other hand, I decided I was not a risk-averse person, but someone who takes smart risks, then I could craft a plan to become such a person. I would read up on finance, study stories of people who took good risks to understand how they did it, and perhaps find a financial mentor to bounce ideas off of and learn from. My decision to become a good risk-taker in the future would change my present actions. And as my confidence grew, my past story would change from being a cautionary tale to one of outgrowing an old fear.

How to use this idea in practice

The first step to putting this into practice is to identify your desires for the future. If you visualize, set goals, or manifest, you know how powerful it can be to clarify what you want. By creating a clear picture of a desired future, you’re turning your focus to what is possible, rather than what has already been done.

Many people go wrong by stopping there. It’s great to know what you want, but to really work backwards in time this way, you also need to identify what would need to be true for this future vision to be real. What does this future you believe? What do they know? What fears have they overcome? Once you know this, you can decide what actions in the present will bring about this future state.

At the same time, this future picture can help you reinterpret your past as a springboard, rather than a hindrance. For example, let’s say you’ve struggled through a series of bad relationships. One story you might tell yourself is “I must not be good at relationships.” And it would be easy to mine your past for evidence to support the truth of this story.

But if you maintain an expectation that you will find a loving relationship in the future, and you continue to take actions such as broadening the places you meet people and going to therapy to work on your own feelings about loving and being loved, you can start to find other interpretations for the same data. They might be, “Wow, I’ve learned so much about what I don’t want in a relationship. I know I’ll be able to recognize the real thing when it comes.” Or, “I’ve learned a lot about give and take in relationships. It will be exciting to one day be in a relationship with someone who wants to grow together.”

Hardy and Sullivan talk about reinterpreting your past, especially your failures, through a lens of what you gained from each experience. By doing this, you’re less likely to see an experience as a failure or a setback, and more likely to view it as a stepping stone to future success or growth.

Disrupting past patterns

It can also be helpful to consider the ways in which unconscious behavior patterns keep you stuck in a past you no longer want. For example, in Becoming Supernatural, Dr. Joe Dispenza describes how waking up and looking at a feed curated by your past self (and an algorithm trained on your past behavior) can unthinkingly lock us into our past selves. Even if you want to grow, the structures you’ve already created shape your behavior to reinforce continuity.

To change, question what patterns were established by a past version of yourself, and whether they support your future ideals. Do you need to change your follow list on social media apps? Make space for new people in your routines? By setting behavior patterns, even small ones, from a future-focused perspective, we break free from the inertia of the past.

The joy of backward time

The more scientists learn about time, the more mind-bending it gets. Relativity suggests that all moments — past, present, and future — coexist in a four-dimensional space-time. Ultimately the linear sense of time is a human experience, not a cosmic one.

I find this idea comforting. We may not be able to actually go back and relive our past, but we can release its hold over our lives in the present, living from a space of possibility rather than constraint. Yes, we go from younger to older, our opportunities turn into memories, and our most solid footing is in the present. But at any moment, we can change our orientation to time, allowing our dreams of the future to reshape our ideas about what has come before. There is joy in flipping the timeline backwards.