Try This to Get Advice from Your 95-Year-Old Future Self

Today I’m excited to share with you an exercise I created that helped me get a clear, specific way to work on overcoming my biggest current challenge, plus the exact steps you can follow to try it yourself.

I Don’t Wannabe a Wannabe

Am I just another wannabe self-help guru who has no idea what to do with his life but thinks he can help others figure out what to do with theirs?

The evidence isn’t promising:

Exhibit A: This newsletter subscribership is shriveling like South Korea’s population.

Exhibit B: It took me a month to recruit five beta testers willing to pay minimum wage (Brazilian minimum wage – greetings from Florianópolis!) for one-on-one guidance in my “revolutionary” ARC beta program.

So, what do I do?

Do I risk my mental health by diving into social media in hopes of growing my audience? Start a podcast? Write a book? Or feed the self-help Ponzi scheme by hiring a coach myself?

Or maybe… I need to follow my own advice. Not deluded guru Chris’ advice, but a wiser source.

The Long-Distance Call for Help

Instead of spinning in circles with scattered worries, I dumped everything out of my brain:

1. My situation: where I’m at, what’s working, and what’s not.
2. My specific Zag credibility and audience problem, along with what I’ve tried and what I’m considering.
3. My vision (aka dream) of how life would be even more extraordinary if I could go from wannabe to… um… legitimatelyam?
4. My top values – aka my soul’s nutritional requirements.

Then came the fun part. I prepared detailed instructions for the person I decided to share this information with to help me gain clarity:

My 95-year-old self. Well, a proxy in the form of artificial intelligence. 

I actually asked multiple artificial 95-year-old Chrises: ChatGPT’s, Claude’s, DeepSeek’s, and Gemini’s. And since they don’t get annoyed and nod off like organic 95-year-olds, I asked each of them multiple times. 

The Letter(s) Back

The advice from my artificial 95-year-old selves was clear and consistent:

• Forget audience growth for now. 
• Forget this newsletter for now, too. 
• Forget podcasts, social media, and a book.
• Focus entirely on your three to five ARC beta testers. 

Simple as it sounds, I hadn’t considered such complete dedication to ARC’s guinea pigs. But it made sense. 

I like working one-on-one with people. I legitimately believe I can help them as a sort of “cable guy” for installing clarity-enhancing, energy-optimizing, true-success-filling personal operating systems. And I’m in no rush. I just want to observe progress.

Update

That was a couple of weeks ago. 

I just about have my teeny stable of guinea pigs up and running. While it’ll be months before I can say for sure if any emerge supercharged with alignment, resonance, and clarity (ARC), I’ve already seen some promising progress:

• Improved Systems and Frameworks: Working hands-on with real people has forced me to refine my approaches.
• Fresh Questions and Ideas: The experience has sparked new insights that I can’t help but research, write about, and share with you. (Sorry, 95-year-old me, for not entirely heeding your “forget the newsletter” advice.)

Whether you stick around or abandon me in the meanwhile, it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t bother my 95-year-old advisors, either. For now, it’s all about those brave ARC guinea pigs.

That said, I still care about helping you, my precious non-guinea pig reader. So, I encourage you to try the exercise yourself.

What’s Your 95-Year-Old Self Dying to Tell You?

If you’re curious about what your 95-year-old self would say to you right now, here’s how you can find out:

1. Answer Four Questions:
   • What’s your current situation?
   • What’s the problem or goal you’re focused on?
   • What’s your vision for the future?
   • What are your top values?
2. Attach Custom Instructions:
   • Download the 95-Year-Old Self Guidance Instructions and attach them to your answers. These instructions ensure your 95-year-old self provides specific, actionable, and personalized guidance.
3. Input into an AI Chatbot:
   • Copy-paste your answers and the instructions into an AI chatbot of your choice (ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, or Gemini).
4. Get Your Advice:
   • Receive a letter from your 95-year-old self with clear, actionable advice tailored to your values and vision.

Here’s a PDF with more detailed instructions:

The whole process takes about 15 minutes—roughly 0.00005% of the time you have left until you turn 95.

How’d It Go?

Please let me know how it goes for you. And if it works as well for you as it did for me, share it with friends who could use some artificial advice, too.

Until next time,

Chris

P.S. If you’re curious how this exercise fits into the bigger picture of engineering an extraordinary life, check out the ARC program. It’s all about building a personal operating system that feeds your values, harnesses your gifts, and keeps you on track toward true success.

Related Reads

• What Would Your 95-Year-Old Self Say? – Create an extraordinary life by aligning today’s actions with what would make your future self proud.
• Don’t Just Be True to Your Values – Stop adopting cultural default values and discover what truly drives your personal fulfillment through systematic experimentation.
• Watch Yourself, Win – A simple system for tracking your actions, reviewing patterns, and making better decisions based on real data instead of fuzzy memories.
• The Next Best Thing You Can Do Is Broaden Your View of Time – Escape short-term thinking traps and make better decisions by zooming out to see your life in decades instead of days.