We Suck at Predicting

Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/

At the turn of the 20th century, cities around the world had a crappy problem that was getting worse by the day.

Literally.

Metropolises were rapidly growing in population, and thus so did the number of horse-drawn carriages to transport people from place to place.

The problem? Horses generate a lot of waste.

At this time, New York City had an estimated 130,000-200,000 horses transplanting people and goods around Manhattan, which meant there was upwards of 5+ million pounds of manure being generated every day.

Yeah, that’s a lot of poop.

At this point, with city populations exploding vertically into taller buildings, and more horses being employed daily to serve these people, the future looked pretty dire.

In 1894, The Times of London allegedly predicted that in 50 years, the city would be literally buried in horse poop! And can you blame them? If one looks at the trajectory of people, and horses, and poop, it would be simple to just continue to draw all of those lines up and to the right.

Two years later, in 1896, a battery and internal combustion engine was attached to a horseless carriage, and within two decades the automobile had taken over, and the horse manure problem solved itself.

Simultaneously, while humans were solving the transportation problems on the street, they were still struggling to solve another transportation problem…

Would human beings ever actually fly?

By the late 1800s, after millions of wasted dollars, terrible mishaps, and fatal accidents, humanity’s attempt to fly had largely been abandoned.

Despite widespread interest and plenty of experimental attempts, too many people had died and too much money had been set on fire. There just didn’t seem to be a safe path to success.

The Washington Post soundly declared, “It’s a fact that man can’t fly.”

A particularly pessimistic gentleman predicted that “men would not fly for fifty years.”

That prediction was made in 1901.

We all know what happened next: Less than two years later, Willbur Wright took to the skies in his glider and became the first person in history to fly a manned aircraft.

Who was the idiot that made the comically bad prediction about not flying for 50 years?

Wilbur Wright!

Luckily, he took the fact that his prediction was off by 48 years in stride, and was glad to have proven himself wrong. It’s also one hell of a lesson to have learned: hold those predictions loosely!

We suck at predicting!

Look back at any major development in history, good or bad, and you can find comically bad predictions from noted experts.

1968’s The Population Bomb predicted worldwide famines due to overpopulation within decades…which makes sense. One look at this chart would lead you to the same conclusion:

Of course, this is no longer the problem we’re facing as a planet.

Most experts these days are still raising alarm bells…but they’re ​terrified about underpopulation​, the exact opposite problem compared to a few decades prior.

Predictions are fickle, and we humans are quite bad at them.

Hell, the reason I can send you this essay is due to the fact that one of the most famous predictions ended up being comically wrong. In 1998, Nobel-prize winning Economist Paul Krugman said ​the following about the Internet​:

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically…By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

Yikes.

So, if humans, even experts, have been comically misguided and made terrible predictions about some of the most transformative moments in human history, do we think it’s also possible that we are wrong all the time about the predictions we make about our own lives?

It’s time we start holding our predictions a little less strongly.

My vote? We start to be a bit more like Willbur Wright.

As laid out in David McCullough’s ​The Wright Brothers​, Wright thought about the future differently after proving himself wrong:

“This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since distrusted myself and have refrained from all prediction—as my friends of the press, especially, well know.

But it is not really necessary to look too far into the future; we see enough already to be certain that it will be magnificent. Only let us hurry and open the roads.”

This is a pretty good strategy for looking at our own lives.

We can start with acceptance: we’re never going to get better at predicting the future.

We can also hold two conflicting ideas in our head at the same time. As President Dwight. D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

I’ve simply accepted this is just how life works. I still make plans, and I still make predictions…but I hold those plans and predictions very loosely.

Looking back five years, I never would have predicted how the world and my life would turn out. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted a worldwide pandemic and life-altering medications like GLP-1.

Hell, if I look back at last week, I can point to a bunch of things that didn’t go according to plan. But, because I expect nothing to ever go according to plan, I’m rarely caught off guard when things turn out differently than expected.

This is our task for today:

If we want to become more resilient and make progress on our goals, we need to accept that our plans will rarely go according to plan!

Here’s what that might look like in practice:

• “I plan on working out at 5:30PM on Monday/Wednesday/Friday, but I fully expect one of those dates to get screwed up because of work. So, I have a backup “home workout” plan I can do in my living room on those days.
• “I have my “meal plan” for the week, but I expect 30% of my meal plan to get blown up by my kid’s unpredictable after-school schedule, so I know exactly what I’m going to eat if I end up driving through McDonalds and not fall off track.”
• “I am trying to reach this goal weight by this date, but I know that everything will always take longer than expected, so I won’t get impatient and instead just keep my focus on what needs to get done that day.”

This is my homework for you today:

1. Is there a plan or prediction you’re holding onto far too tightly?
2. Can you make an alternative plan for when things inevitably don’t go how you predicted?
3. Are you currently assuming some future scenario that will absolutely be true, instead of being open to the possibility that you’re going to be proven wrong?

The sooner we can accept we suck at predicting, the sooner we can get to work on what to do about it!

Strong predictions, held loosely.

-Steve

PS: In case you missed the past essay, ​we also suck at time​! Fun. I know.

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