​What Do You Believe?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between knowing what you want and knowing what you believe. We spend a lot of time thinking about what we want. What we want to accomplish, where we want to live, what we want to earn, what we want to experience, and who we want to become. Those questions matter. I’ve spent a good part of my life asking them. But there’s another question underneath all of them that I’m not sure we ask often enough: What do you believe?

I’m not talking about what sounds good, what someone else told you to believe, or what you think the answer is supposed to be. I’m talking about what you believe so deeply that you’re willing to build your life around it.

While writing The 10-Year Letter, we eventually put our answer to that question on paper. We called it The 10-Year Letter Creed. It wasn’t a list of goals. It wasn’t a vision for the next ten years. And it wasn’t a prediction of what life would look like. It was simply what we believed.

We believe life is a gift and time is not promised. We believe authorship is ownership. When you author your future, you live it now. We believe identity shapes destiny. Clarity creates alignment. Alignment creates action. Action creates a life you can’t wait to wake up to. We believe gratitude is strength. Letting go is freedom. Vision expands possibility. Faith lights the way. Adventures make the story unforgettable. We believe there is a Higher Author. Even if His plan is different than ours, writing your 10-Year Letter ensures we live awake, aligned, and courageous in the time we are given. The blank page is the most powerful invitation of your life. Pick up the pen. Author your future. Live it now.

I’ve read those words a lot, and the more I sit with them, the more I realize that writing down what you believe is one thing. Living it is something entirely different. It’s easy to say life is a gift. It’s different to treat today like one. It’s easy to say time isn’t promised. It’s different to become intentional about who and what gets yours. It’s easy to say gratitude is strength. It’s different to choose gratitude when things don’t go exactly the way you hoped. It’s easy to say adventure matters. It’s different to actually go. And it’s easy to say faith lights the way. It’s different to keep walking when you can’t see very far ahead.

Maybe that’s what a creed is really for. It isn’t there to describe the life you already have. It’s there to remind you how you’ve chosen to live it.

I obviously believe deeply in the idea of authoring our future. I wrote an entire book about it. But authorship has never meant control. You can be incredibly clear about the life you want to create and still have no idea exactly how the next ten years will unfold. Plans change. People change. Circumstances change. We change. That doesn’t make the vision less valuable. I think it makes knowing what you believe even more important.

When you know what matters, you have something to come back to. When the path changes, you still have direction. When the answer isn’t obvious, you still have something to guide the decision. When an opportunity shows up, you can ask whether it belongs in the life you’re building. And when life looks different than you imagined, you can adjust the story without losing yourself in the rewrite.

Maybe clarity isn’t knowing exactly what happens next. Maybe clarity is knowing who you want to be regardless of what happens next. I think there’s a lot of freedom in that.

And maybe your creed looks nothing like ours. Good. It shouldn’t. Your life is yours to author.

So here’s something I’d encourage you to do this week. Take out a blank piece of paper and start with two words: I believe... Then keep going. What do you believe about your life, your time, the people you love, your work, your health, adventure, faith, contribution, and the person you’re becoming? Don’t worry about making it sound good. Write what’s true.

You may discover that some of the decisions you’ve been wrestling with become a little easier when you remember what you actually believe. Because knowing what you want can give you a destination. Knowing what you believe gives you a compass.

And if this question has you thinking a little differently about your own future, keep going. The 10-Year Letter was written to help you slow down, get clear on what matters, and put the future you actually want on paper. You can [get your copy here] and work through the process at your own pace.

If you’d rather experience the process with us, you can [join an upcoming 10-Year Letter Workshop]. We’ll walk through the process together and give you the space, questions, and guidance to write your own letter. There’s something powerful about actually setting aside the time to do the work instead of promising yourself you’ll get to it someday.

Whichever path you choose, start somewhere. You don’t need to have the next ten years figured out. You just need to be willing to get honest about what matters and intentional about what comes next.

So this week, I’ll leave you with one question: What do you believe strongly enough to build your life around?

Write it down. Then live it.