Source: Farnam Street
I want to know the future. So do you. However, our desire to know the future leads us to seek answers to unanswerable questions.
The question, “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” is a popular one in nearly all industries. The siren song of avoiding uncertainty and knowing the future is hard to resist.
Having the answer is the equivalent of signaling to the world that you’re an oracle.The best thing? No one will remember how wrong you were.
To capitalize on what’s going to change in the future, a lot of things have to go right. Not only do you have to speculate the changing variables correctly, but you have to guess how they will interact. And you have to go all in on that version of the future. On top of that, you have to hope that your competitors thought you were crazy and didn’t invest resources in that version of the future. This is why it rarely works, and when it does it’s mostly luck.
While predicting the future is important, it’s often not knowable. We’re speculating, but our brains convince themselves otherwise. Plausible answers about the future tend to cement as reality in our minds. We convince ourselves that we know something that is not knowable.
The range of possible futures is always changing, a lot like electrons. Electrons baffle physicists because they are hard to pin down. Any attempts to locate them require the use of energy. Electrons are so light that the energy we use to locate them changes their location. In the same way that shining a light on an electron will change its position ever so slightly, investing in a particular version of the future will change the probability of that particular future ever so slightly.
Complicating things further, it’s not a single-player game—it’s a multi-person game and the odds are always changing.Beyond that, once…
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