Ronald Cummings-John
Founder, Become Your Future
About 15 years ago I was at a personal development workshop and someone gave the group a simple exercise. Find an image of the life you want from a magazine, cut out a photo of yourself, and stick your face on top of it.
Honestly, it sounded ridiculous. Sitting there cutting up magazines felt like something a teenager would do. But the idea underneath it, putting yourself into the image, I could not let that go.
So I thought: Photoshop. I learned one skill, how to cut out my face and drop it into a stock image. I made two pictures. Me and my co-founder, celebrating like we’d just won a huge client. Me at a whiteboard, working on strategy. Every morning I’d look at those images. Close my eyes. Go into the picture from the inside.
Then, a few weeks later, the phone rang. Evernote. Then Facebook. Then YouTube. Each one became a client. And without really planning it, I had stepped into exactly the role I had been seeing in those images every morning.
Here’s what I also noticed: even with my own face in those images, you could always feel it wasn’t quite right. My face in someone else’s life. Close enough to feel something. Not believable enough to fully feel it. The tool I actually needed didn’t exist yet. So I built it.