you’re making decisions based on a future you invented

Before you make an important decision, you’ve usually already told yourself a story about what will happen next.

Take the job and you’ll be happier. 

Leave the relationship and you’ll regret it. 

Move away and you’ll feel lonely. 

Start the project and maybe, a year from now, you’ll be making a living from it.

The problem is that none of that has happened yet, you’re making a prediction. And if that prediction is wrong, the decision you make on the back of it may be wrong too.

So, you better ask yourself this first: when you have an option in front of you, how do you mentally construct what you think will happen if you choose it, and how much can you actually trust that prediction?

That’s why it’s important to understand how we make those predictions, what information we use, what systematic errors we make when anticipating consequences and why our predictions about the future are usually far less objective than we think.

When we make an important decision, we tend to reach for our own personal crystal ball: we try to anticipate what will happen if we choose one alternative or another.

We try to predict the consequences by imagining what might happen, so that we can decide. That means that once we have the options in front of us, we start making predictions about their possible consequences.

But here’s the thing: those predictions don’t come from nowhere. In fact, nothing we do comes from nowhere. To make these predictions, we use memories, knowledge, previous experiences, the information we have now and everything we think we know about how similar situations work to imagine events that haven’t happened yet.

This ability to imagine and anticipate future events is usually called prospection.
In plain English: thinking ahead using what we already know, remember and have experienced.

Imagine this:

You’re thinking about accepting a new job, so you might picture yourself working from home, earning more, talking to a new boss, commuting or having to learn a lot of new things during the first few weeks.

You’re not actually seeing what’s going to happen. You’re building a simulation from the information you already have. And those simulations can be quite useful even when they’re not accurate.

The problem arises when we imagine a future change and focus almost entirely on the thing that’s going to change.

Now imagine this:

You’re offered a fully remote job. You start thinking that you’ll no longer waste an hour a day driving, that you’ll be able to eat at home, that you’ll have more freedom and that you’ll even be able to work in your pjs if you feel like it.

All of that may be true, but your future won’t consist solely of “not having to go into the office”. You’ll still have Mondays, meetings, colleagues you don’t like, bills and days when you sleep terribly. There’ll also be the issue of being more sedentary, whether you can concentrate and get things done on your own without anyone there watching you, and perhaps whatever arrangements you need to make with the people you live with…

Not to mention problems you don’t even know are going to exist yet.

What do I mean by this?

The new job will be one part of your future, not your entire future.

When we try to anticipate what our life will be like after an important event, we tend to focus too much on that event and push everything else that will still be happening around it into the background.

This effect is called focalism. In other words, we overestimate the importance of whatever we’re focusing our attention on because, at that moment, it’s taking up too much space in our heads. 

And this already gives us a big clue as to why our predictions go wrong so often: when we try to imagine the future, we tend to give too much importance to the very thing we’re trying to predict.

In the next newsletter, I’m going to tell you how we go one step further, because we don’t just try to predict what’s going to happen. We also try to predict how we’re going to feel when it happens. And our psychic powers aren’t quite up to Baba Vanga’s standards here either.

Every important decision comes with a story about what you think will happen afterwards. The problem is that the future in your head and the future you actually end up living aren’t necessarily the same thing.

In the 30 Decisions ebook, I talk about the choices that gradually determine the life you build and why you can keep getting them wrong even when you thought you’d anticipated every possible consequence.

Love,
Noemi

P.S. Click the link above to download the 30 Decisions ebook for free.