The One Action You Need to Take Today

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I hope this finds you well.

Welcome to another edition of The Matt Viera Newsletter.

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In late 2010, I sat down and wrote a letter to myself.

I read the completed letter, put the letter in an envelope, sealed the envelope, and wrote on the outside, “Do not read until December 31, 2011.”

Then, I put the letter in a safe place and did not touch it again until December 31, 2011.

I have been writing a letter to myself nearly every year since. Truth be told, I missed a few years. But I haven’t missed a year since 2019.

On December 31, 2024, I read all the letters I wrote to myself.

Gosh, what a journey I have been on.

When I started writing those letters, I was a practicing attorney (with one week of vacation per year), with thousands of dollars in student loan and consumer debt, and living in a small 1-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.

Today, I am an educator (with ~3 months of paid time off per year), with a significant increase in my net worth, and a homeowner in (arguably) one of the best neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

I was single when I first started those letters. I had a couple of decent (yet failed) relationships in those early years. But, in a few weeks, I will have been with my current life partner for 12 years.

In 2010, I was in the embryo stage of a practicing law career.

In 2025, if all goes well, I should retire from my current career in the next 4 - 5 years.

In all that time, I have spent a significant amount of time off-grid, taken several cross-country road trips (driving to, through, and exploring Wyoming never gets old), and experienced four mini-retirements in Europe.

Like I said, it’s been a journey.

I can’t say whether writing those letters to myself almost annually positively influenced the outcome of my journey.

But I am a bit superstitious and have no reason to believe otherwise or stop now.

I do believe this exercise is powerful as it “forces you to both look inward at your present self and consider your future existence.”

One action I encourage you to take today is to write a letter to yourself for your future self to read.

It doesn’t have to be fancy or long. You don’t have to follow a specific format. It’s just a letter to yourself, for yourself, to be read at a date in the future.

Write your letter similarly to how I started: just laying out where you are today (physically, professionally, financially, etc.) and where you would like to be in a year’s time.

If you want to go a bit deeper, here are a few things you can consider reflecting upon and writing about:

• How am I?

• Where am I?

• Greatest hits

• Greatest misses

• What did I learn this year?

• What created energy this year?

• What drained energy this year?

• What do I want to accomplish in 2025?

• What did I change my mind about this year?

• Who/What were the boat anchors in my life?

Once you’re finished, put that letter in an envelope, seal the envelope, and write on the outside of the letter, “Do not open until December 31, 2025.”

If you find this exercise helpful or fun (and I am willing to bet good money that you will), write a new letter to yourself after reading the old one (and save the old one).

And then again the following year.

You’ll be surprised by how far you’ve come, where you came from, and the possibilities of where and how far you’ll go on your journey after reading not only one of your letters, but after reading several.

Quotes that caught my attention:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” —Buckminster Fuller

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.” —Noam Chomsky

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” — Steve Jobs

You can find the collection of financial tools & resources that helped me grow from a 6-figure debt to a 6-figure net worth by clicking here.

Thanks for reading!

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