The Future Authoring Program — Is It Worth the Gig?

6 min readOct 4, 2022

“We cannot navigate, without something to aim at, and while we are in this world, we must always navigate.” — Jordan Peterson

The context

During my university years by sheer luck of the algorithm, YouTube introduced me to the Canadian professor and clinician, Jordan Peterson. Years later I’ve decided to check out some of his products, one of which was the self-authoring suit listed on the educator’s personal website.

The suit contains four different exercises: past authoring, present authoring (faults), present authoring (virtues), and future authoring.

I’ve played around with most of the exercises, but never got myself to finish either of them. A few weeks ago I’ve decided that it is finally time to cut to the chase and finished at least one. Maybe as a consequence of deciding to move abroad for a little while, I’ve decided to start by completing the Future Authoring program first. Here is my review of it.

The future authoring program

Jordan B. Peterson together with his team created the self-authoring suit as an experiment to see whether it would help university students to get better results in terms of their academic performance, and it did. In fact, it increased the retention rate of the students at Toronto university by 25%!

The most studied of the 4 exercises included in the self-authoring suit is by far the Future Authoring one.

Its goal, at least in my understanding, is to create a detailed plan for the person’s ideal future, which would help him or her to map the appropriate steps in order to move forward toward it. As said by the author himself:

“What you aim at determines what you see.” — Jordan Peterson

In response, one might say “Well, I can plan my future absolutely perfectly without paying a single dime for anyone’s assistance.” Sure, maybe you can, but a guided program may help one to stay on course without deviating, hesitating, or getting discouraged along the way.

Laziness is a powerful enemy, and a structured questionnaire might just be the appropriate antidote against it.

The structure

Introduction

The program starts by giving a detailed explanation of how the course is structured and what one should expect while going through the motions. Also, in this stage of the course, you will get some tips on how and when you should write, what pitfalls to lookout for, and how much time you should allocate for each of the activities.

Aim high, dream wide

Next, the course encourages you to spend some time daydreaming.

How would your ideal future look like 6 months, 2 years, or 5 years down the line?

What kind of relationships would you have with your friends and family members? What would your career look like? How would you spend your leisure time? What habits would you cultivate to maintain your physical and psychological well-being? Where would you like to be situated geographically?

In this stage, you don’t have to be very specific or pragmatic. Dream big, you will bring those dreams down from the heavens in the upcoming stages.

Avoid the road to hell

After you have written down your vision of an ideal future, the first part of the course also asks you to think about a future that you’d want to avoid at all costs.

As mentioned by Peterson himself, everyone has a picture in mind of how things could turn out if we went off the rails. A vision of a personal hell, if you will. Thus, while you are moving toward your ideal future, at the same time you should be running away from the worst in you that could peak its ugly head whenever one gives in to his or her vices.

“It’s great to run toward something that you like, but it’s even greater to run from something that terrifies you,” elaborates the author.

Specify, prioritize, and subdivide your goals

In the second part of the course, the program asks you to write down 6 or 8 concrete goals that you would like to aim at achieving in the upcoming few years. This can be anything, ranging from something trivial such as buying a new car to running a marathon or even running for congress.

Next, you will be asked to rank these goals in order according to their worth and priority. Later, you will be asked to evaluate your motives for selecting these goals, explaining how they would benefit you, your family, and maybe even society at large. Finally, you’ll have to subdivide these goals into smaller, more achievable microtasks.

Say you want to start a business… Maybe first you have to come up with an idea or a business plan, later you have to prepare a product or a service, build a website, and find the right audience for whom your services might come in handy. There are many small steps that you have to consider before taking a big leap, so it’d be wise to think them through beforehand.

This will get you in the motion of moving toward your aim, even if you will have to adjust it later.

Think about what might get in your way

Life is unpredictable and things don’t often go the way we expect them to. Thus, it’s a good practice to think of all the possible obstacles that might interfere with you moving forward.

There are many variables that might set us off track. An inability to manage one’s time; children, friends and family; laziness; partying; insufficient funds… All of these things might stop us from doing what we would otherwise love to do if we don’t prepare for them up-front and think of ways of working around them

As mentioned by the last of the 5 Good emperors of Rome, Marcus Aurelius:

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Monitor your progress

Last but not least, the course suggests finding ways of monitoring your progress toward you aforementioned goals.

What sorts of things will you accept as evidence that you are progressing towards your aims? How will things in your life have to change, measurably, for you to feel satisfied with your progress? How will you make sure that you are neither pushing yourself too hard nor slacking off?

Knowing where we are in relation to our pursuits is crucial. Otherwise, it’s sort of like driving to an unfamiliar location without having the map or navigation. Maybe we’ll get there, but chances are that we’ll end up somewhere else altogether.

In conclusion

The future authoring program is a great tool to pick your brain and systematically create a detailed plan for your desired future. It took me 8041 words to write out mine, and it’s only but the first draft! Still, I had lots of fun in doing it and I am pretty sure that I’ll revisit the program sometime in the near future.

As finals word, I’d like to leave you with a perspective on the program by its creator himself:

“I’ll close this by saying that if you have any interest in doing this which I would recommend, it’s also ok to do it badly. A good first draft aim for your life is incomparably better than vague nihilistic hopelessness... And you’re not going to get it right, because what do you know? You are going to pursue your goal and you’re going to learn a bunch. Then your trajectory is going to shift but it doesn’t matter. The trick is to get the process of moving forward toward the aim started, and then to have the humility to make course changes along the way as you inform yourself. And so, it gets the ball rolling.”