One day I was doing pull-ups in the gym and a mini-epiphany happened to me. I did 10 pull-ups and stopped. Already walking away from the horizontal bar, I thought about this: the thought that I would not be able to pull myself up again appeared earlier than I thought and before my arms could not. Actually, my hands couldn’t because I thought I couldn’t.
And in short, this is the picture of the future and its role in the present. The point is not that you imagine, visualize the future and it somehow comes true. I think this is absolute bullshit and magical thinking.
The scheme is a little more complicated. The picture of the future structures the chaos of your present and forces you to choose one direction and swim there. You can support yourself by dangling in place, or you can float somewhere. In the second case, there is much more buzz and a number of other advantages.
It would seem that everything is simple. But there is one caveat.
If you ask people, in my experience, most of them simply do not have a picture of the future. Basically, if you ask a person about “your future”, it is “the same as the present, but more money.” The famous story about “what would you do if you didn’t have to work” is terrifying. And if you try to ask about the future of the business, then with a high probability there will be “more money”, “charity” and “expansion”. Bigger and expansion is not a picture of the future, it is the present.
Now about simple practical conclusions from this scheme.
Without really bothering with argumentation.
- People with a vision of the future almost always win.
- These people are few. The competition, frankly speaking, is not very high.
- People without a picture of the future can be recognized by a certain style of behavior: they try to take shortcuts, cheat on little things, win this particular argument, even at the cost of relationships, get into a row at the last moment, and so on. That is, in each specific situation, when you see such a person, he most likely won, cheated and got what he wanted. But when you meet him 10 years later, you understand that he lost.
- People often don’t have their own picture of the future, because in this case they would have to admit: you can’t do everything at once, you need to choose one life scenario, a maximum of 2, or at least 3. In general, by choosing one option, you kill all the others. This is opportunity cost. But if you choose none at all, you most likely lose everything.
- A picture of the future is not a forecast. There will never be enough data to make an absolutely reliable forecast and follow it. Accordingly, any picture is an individual vision with a large share of risk. This is not a guarantee, but a way to structure your reality.
- Brands and companies that sell their vision of the future usually win. Especially now.
- It cannot be that you hate someone. Alas.
- If you don’t have your own picture of the future, you are using someone else’s. Employer, brands, friends, politicians.
They can and should be changed from time to time. At Eventum Premo, we changed it 3-4 times over 15 years, and changed it radically. Now we live in a completely new one and we know where we want to go, but we don’t know where it will lead and we don’t know how we will change when we get there.
That's the fun of it.
Eventum Premo Agency partner Alexey Berlov
