Time & Perspective Quote by Anne Wilson Schaef

Self-help has a reputation for selling miracles; Anne Wilson Schaef’s line refuses the pitch. It’s a small but pointed act of anti-fantasy: the future isn’t a makeover montage, it’s carpentry. The sentence hinges on two choices that reveal intent. First, “influence” replaces “control.” That word lowers the temperature, acknowledging relapse, chaos, history, and habit - the messy realities Schaef spent a career writing about in the recovery-and-systems orbit. It’s not motivational thunder; it’s a therapist’s kind of honesty that still leaves room for agency.

Second, the quote doubles down on time as a material constraint: “tomorrow can only be built on today.” The subtext is a rebuke to magical thinking and to the cultural habit of outsourcing change to next week. If you’re waiting for clarity, inspiration, the perfect plan, Schaef is saying you’ve already chosen: you’re building tomorrow out of avoidance. The phrasing “built on” is doing heavy work, implying foundations, load-bearing decisions, and the way small daily actions compound into structure - or into collapse.

Context matters: Schaef wrote in an era when popular psychology and 12-step language were becoming mainstream, often flattened into slogans. This one keeps the moral weight but swaps moralism for mechanics. It’s not telling you to “be better.” It’s telling you that identity is a practice, and that the most radical part of change is its ordinariness: today’s unglamorous choices are the only raw materials the future gets.