Decision Making Frameworks: Operating from the Far Side of Time
- Isaac Lester
- Oct 22
- 12 min read
From below deck of the Fleet Sailing Vessel: Matilda, I write to explain my concept of "long term planning." and what it means to "Operate from the Far Side of Time".
It Is A Map...
The Future-First Framework
There are no hard decisions.
Only heavy ones.
I've come to notice that many people treat decision-making like standing at a crossroads while paralyzed by uncertainty, bargaining with themselves until opportunity expires. They ask, "Which path is right?" when what they truly mean is, "Which path hurts less?"
I don’t stand at crossroads anymore.
When I make decisions, I try to step outside the noise of the present and think from a vantage point decades ahead. I place myself out past the novelty and distraction, where only what truly matters is in front of me.
Over the years, I’ve learned to mentally walk to the end of a road, see where it leads, and trace my steps backward to the point where the next move begins. It’s this way of thinking that’s kept me from drifting, helped me make sense of heavy choices, and moved me forward when I otherwise would have remained stuck.
It’s a practice. And I want to share it with you, so you can get unstuck if you are, and ahead if you aren't.
I. The Observation
How many people do you know personally right now that are trapped in the present while remaining utterly overwhelmed by the noise of now, reacting to circumstances and optimizing for comfort instead of actively charting the course of their lives?
Much of my progress in life has come from this simple practice: thinking far ahead, running mental simulations, and adjusting course when reality demanded course correction. Less "predicting the future", more "preparing for as many possible outcomes as realistically possible".
The benefit that follows is calm when the world turns chaotic. When you’ve taken the time to slow down and pour deep thought over a situation, you don’t have to scramble when the moment comes. You've already explored possibilities as fully as possible, with patience, from multiple angles. You can move with quiet certainty, because the work of decision-making was already done in advance.
Existence begins to feel exciting and familiar in an oddly-comforting kind of way when you've explored enough possibilities and managed to hit close to a few of your favorite outcomes. I've always wanted to reach and help others through a blog :)
I appear confident only because I’ve already lived through the consequences in my head. When I decided to leave everything behind and buy a sailboat, people only saw reckless action. I'd been thinking deeply about that plan for months and running mental simulations on repeat while testing out different ideas.
While others get trapped in the noise of now, I work intentionally to think from the far side of time, at a vantage point where the present has already become memory, and the question is no longer What should I do? but What will have been required?
That shift changes everything. Weaponized Neurospicy, yo'
II. The Method: How To Think In Reverse
The framework is simple. Deceptively so.
Step One: Inhabit the End
Go decades forward. Not five years. Not ten. Go far enough that the person you are now wouldn't recognize who you become.
See that future self with absolute clarity. Not the polished highlight reel version, but the one with scars and stories and evidence of battles won. What do they have? Who stands beside them? What did they build? What did they burn to get there?
Build the most detailed image possible. The temperature of the room matters. The calluses on their hands. The way they move through space. The look in their eyes when they're alone.
This is reconnaissance. You're gathering intelligence from territory you haven't conquered, yet.
Most people can't do this. They get vague. "Oh, I want to be successful." "I want to be happy!" That's not detailed enough. What does success and happiness mean specifically, and how do you obtain these things, specifically? You need to know what books are on their shelf. What time they wake up. What conversations they're no longer having because those relationships ended years ago.
You need to understand what this future version of you did, how they went about doing it, and where they experienced challenges along the way, among other things.
Details in visualization create clarity in action.
Don't fantasize. Architect.
Build the most detailed image possible. The textures matter. The temperature of the room. The calluses on their hands. The look in their eyes when they speak. Take your daydreams and turn them into reconnaissance. Take the intel and build the road that leads back to where you want to go.
"Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor." - Alexis Carroel
But "Man cannot free himself until he first imagines what it means to be free, and sets himself upon that path. The hand cannot carve what the mind cannot see." - Me
Step Two: Trace the Causality
Reverse-engineer your life like an alien machine: every component deliberate, every connection justified.
Now work backward in specific, mechanical sequence.
For that future to exist, what had to happen the year before? The month before? The week before? What skills were required? What relationships were necessary? What sacrifices were made? What was built, and what was burned?
What would you have to do in order to make it a reality? For how long, and how would that effect you during and afterward?
Map the chain of causality like you're reverse-engineering an alien machine. Every component has a function. Every connection serves a purpose. Identify what's essential and what's decoration.
This is where most people quit. It's easier to dream than to dissect. But dreams are comfortable lies as much as they are potential realities.
Causality is truth with teeth.
Step Three: Find Hinges
In that backward trace, you will discover that certain inevitable moments carry disproportionate weight and can bend your timeline. Decisions that seem small can cascade and provide exponential return. Conversations that rewire everything.
Choices that lock in trajectories.
These are your inflection points, the hinges on which futures swing. Mark them. When they arrive, you’ll recognize their weight and be prepared to handle them well.
For me, my decision to join the military opened near infinite doors in the form of connections, skills, and resources. When I crashed out and lost everything, i had the know how to rebuild swiftly and the grit to lock in quickly and efficiently. Childhood me never expected that he would ever find himself homeless, but he knew that if he joined the military, he'd be able to overcome damn near any challenge that popped up later in life.
What decisions or actions can you make today that have the power to disproportionally affect your success tomorrow?
Most people stumble into life defining moments and decisions blind. You will do so no longer. You've already identified them. With practice and intention, you will come to know what they look like before they arrive.
Step Four: Eliminate the Impossible
Now comes Discipline, and we begin with subtraction.
Strip away all that cannot be. All that violates the good laws of time, energy, physics and human limitation is now blasphemous to you and must be discarded, because it does not serve you.
I really want to go all in on why this is super important, but it's really just this simple: You can't be in two places at once. You can't master a skill overnight. You can't undo betrayal or reclaim wasted years. (but I can speak to myself through my writing to you, Dear Reader)
Don't preserve fantasy, face constraints. Embrace them, even.
What remains after elimination is your possibility space. Your new realistic left and right lateral limits are often tighter in restriction than you hoped, but cleaner than you expected. Constraints are clarity disguised as limits.
If I sail the world for 10 years, I'm probably going to self disqualify myself from a number of other ways that I could spend my 30's.
This is good. Constraints force clarity.
Step Five: Run Simulation
Machine Start: Processing, full power.
This is where the work happens. Take each viable path and play it forward. I do this as many times as I can up until I literally can't imagine another combination of situations. Vary the conditions. Introduce chaos. Add unexpected obstacles. Factor in aliens. Factor in humans. Factor in human weakness, including your own.
Especially your own.
What breaks? What holds? What thrives under pressure?
I do this constantly. Not just for major decisions, but for everything. It's become background processing, a low and comforting hum calmly buzzing just beneath the veil of my conscious thought. My mind runs parallel simulations while I'm doing other things. I'm working, driving, walking, while flying, presenting, fighting.
I'm not trying to predict the future per se; primarily, I'm testing scenario structural integrity in the back of my mind.
By the time a decision arrives, I've already lived it a hundred ways and seen this particular frame of the film. The choice is obvious because I've seen where everything leads.
Now if I could only figure out astral projection, then I'd really be on to something..
III. The Philosophy
"Operating from the far side of time" is simple: Live today as though you're already the person your future requires you to become by borrowing authority from your future self and using it to govern the present.
Most people are hostages to the immediacy of the present. They're trapped in reactivity while bargaining for delayed suffering. They optimize for immediate comfort, then mistake motion for direction, and when they make decisions based on who they are now, they then wonder why they stay stuck.
You're doing the opposite. You're making decisions based on who you need to be then. You're reaching ahead to speak with the person who has already actualized the goals you have, and using their authority from your future to govern your present.
Future-first living reverses the flow. You act today on behalf of who you must become, not who you happen to be.
This is what I've decided it means to operate and live from the far side of time.
Behold, something strange and powerful: You stop being owned by circumstance. The chaos that drowns other people becomes background noise that struggles to even register. The anxiety that paralyzes becomes irrelevant. Less Homo-Sapiens, reacting to a strange world and timeline around you, more Homo-Chronus, executing a plan that was built decades ago.
The result is sovereignty.
Circumstance loses leverage.
What drowns others becomes background noise.
And where they find chaos...
You find stillness.
This is the Golden Groove, yo'.
But... Of course there's a cost. You know, there always is.
You'll feel out of phase and will come to notice the gap between your internal timeline and the timing of society. What feels urgent to others will seem trivial to you. What seems impossible to them will feel inevitable in your mind. You'll sit in rooms where people are confusing reacting to making "big decisions" and think to yourself: This was decided some time ago. Why are we just now getting on about it?
You will become socially asynchronous and there will be the occasional bout with madness as you try to rationalize irrational mindsets. Imagine living in a different frequency than the people around you, and an impenetrable barrier to effective deep communication.
VI. The Lonely Chapter
You start thinking about how to build a better life, you start taking actions to build a better life. Somewhere along the way, the general vibe changes.
There’s a chapter on every path toward becoming more aligned with who you want to be where the world grows quiet.
No one talks about it much, but there is a seldom-spoken season between tribes. Though you are not condemned, once you’ve outgrown the circle that once defined you, and haven’t yet found the people who understand what you’re building, you will spend a season wandering.
You start to notice it in conversation when your words are returned with polite nods and faint confusion when you speak about long horizons and patient strategy. I know that you have them in mind already, the ones around you don’t quite "get" it yet. All the while, the builders ahead of you have already moved beyond the starting line and beginners circuit to another game entirely.
This is where the loneliness comes in. And it’s okay.
I have my lonely days, too.
I still want what I believe everyone wants: love and companionship that sees me clearly, people who understand and want to be a part of my strange world, and who want to invite me into theirs. But that kind of closeness can’t be rushed. You have to earn your way to the tribe that speaks your language.
You have to build a space to create a garden, then learn how to garden, before you can attract butterflies. And that's assuming you've dealt with your baggage about "plants" left over from past blunders..
So you detach cleanly not out of arrogance, but necessity, and settle into Campaign. You hike across the metaphorical plains of the world, guided by a vision only you can see. The solitude becomes your sacred training ground.
And why shouldn't we, as conscious beings, take some time every now and again to reflect on that ability we all have to simply be and think?
Each day you are unbothered to practice your craft, refine your habits, and strengthen the bond between your values and your actions. The work reshapes you, and in time, you begin to resonate at a frequency that attracts those who move like you do.
Eventually, you’ll find them. A truth and beauty of this Good World is that the builders, the thinkers, and the ones who live a few steps ahead of you are only a few signals away. So build, and do it publicly. Together you’ll build the next tribe, the one you once searched for. Community will return, this time by design, not inheritance.
All beautiful things require patience to grow and discipline to sustain, and friendship, mastery, legacy are no exception. They manifest only after seasons of work in silence.
Until then, you keep going. You keep imagining the life already waiting for you and walking the path that makes it real.
I remind myself often: my elder self has already lived this life. He’s already built the empire, raised the family, found his circle. My job now is simple: I am charged with execution until his memory becomes my reality and I live like others dream.
I’m not chasing success; I’m catching up to it.
Everything I want already exists. I just have to arrive.
IV. The Application
When I left my mother’s basement in Chicago and flew to California to buy a sailboat, people thought I’d finally lost it. Some said I was acting recklessly. I wasn't. I'd already lived the version where I stayed. I'd seen where that road ended.
There were only so many options that led to the future I'd already built in my head.
Imagine seeing where you want to arrive, and seeing multiple branching pathways that will allow you to get there. Each pathway has specific challenges, some more intense than others. Every pathway has pathways, and while some can be followed through to connect with goals, some are cleverly disguised dead ends...
I learned of that path and rehearsed that journey years earlier in hundreds of private revision sessions where I built, argued with, and learned from the man I intended to become. The basement, the betrayals, and breaking points were landmarks that confirmed my location.
From there, all I had to do was execute.
So I unpacked the predesigned set of tasks and executed. The situation called for an RV or s Sailboat. Boats are cooler. Once I ruled out the alternatives, I had an obvious viable route that made sense.
Everything I create is in part of my work and execution in a plan written by a future version of me, who looked back and said, “This is the way through.”
Thinking is a skill you can practice and learn to have some mastery over. The future is a landscape you can visit in your mind. Learn to navigate it in reverse, and the present begins to make sense as a set of tools rather than a trap.
Most people don't slow down long enough to actually do it. They're too caught up in the anxiety and stress and pleasures of modern life to be still and think. They react instead of attack. They optimize for comfort instead of front-loading the suffering.
I'd rather suffer now and live like others dream later.
So I overclock my brain until it tires me out. I run simulations in reverse. I run them in parallel. I read, I plan, I strategize.
And like a certain fictional gangster once said: "I think. It's what I do."
V. A Question
Your future self, the one who made it, who built the thing, who became the person... If they could send you one message about that one particular decision that you're avoiding right now...
The conversation you're not having.
The change you're not making.
The life you're not building.
What would that message be? And the question that actually matters:
Why are you pretending you don't already know the answer?
Be relentless with holding yourself accountable, and follow with the love that only you know how to give.
Epilogue
The person you’re meant to become is already waiting at the end of the timeline.
They’re not hoping you’ll choose well. They’re watching to see whether you’ll carry the weight required to reach them.
Every decision you make today is either builds toward that person...or postponing them. There are no hard decisions, only heavy ones.
Choose accordingly, yo'.
Per Aspera Ad Astra
Through Hardships To The Gorydamn Stars
---
TL;DR
Operate from the far side of time.
Inhabit your future, reverse-engineer the path, strip away the impossible, and act with calm velocity.
Decisions aren’t hard...they’re heavy. Carry them early, and you’ll walk lighter later.
---
This is Week 2 of a 12-week series documenting my journey from the void beneath hell to ground zero just above the pit, and the frameworks that got me here. Next issue: "Through Hell to Freedom: The 4-Phase Protocol for Dark Times" - How I create structure when there's none, including my actual daily routines, task management, and the mental frameworks that run everything when everything is falling apart around me.
If you’re reading this at 2 a.m. wondering if starting over is still on the table...it is. I’m living proof. Don’t spend another day drifting alone in darkness; start building toward the light. If you need a guide, check out my publishing hub. I believe in you, frfr, yo'.
- Isaac
Comments