I saw this tweet the other day and I think that – for the most part – I really like the message behind it.
Many influential people spend a lot of time and energy trying to predict the distant future. Predictions about the future are meaningless—they rarely come true. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. And that’s done by making the present as interesting as possible.
— hardmaru (@hardmaru) April 22, 2018
The whole idea is this: the world, in many ways, is changing quickly. Really quickly.
Planes were not around 200 years ago. Google was not around 50 years ago. Cell phones were not around 30 years ago. You get the point. Shit moves fast.
While we can do our best to be psychics, chances are it will be really hard, if not impossible, to get everything perfectly right. All we can really do is aim in the right direction and hope that our intake of signal is at least partially right.
I think we over-index on how good we are at future estimations.
Who would’ve thought that uber would come out of the mobile movement?
No one. Until it did.
We can spend all day – all life – playing what if scenarios in our head about macroeconomic trends. Sure it is interesting, and perhaps worth studying/diving into, but I believe that my future happiness/success/impact is largely driven by what I am able to do today.
The future is important, yes. But it does not exist unless we do something today. Conversely, the future will go on regardless of our existence. We are small. We are nothing compared to the earth.
This paradox is a mess of a problem.
I find we are not important enough to drive the world. And the world is too complicated to attempt to be explained entirely. So in the meantime, we are left with a common thread: do something.
In our culture of waiting, we often forget the simplest remedy: action. Change. Small steps in a direction and improvement.