Predict The Future With This Simple Concept.
An exercise in making wise, well-informed decisions.
So, first find yourself some tea leaves…no wait…grab some tiny ancient bones and a Yahtzee cup…no again. How about speaking into a magic eight ball…”Don’t count on it.” Ok, ok, I won’t keep you waiting. Are you ready? Order take-out from your favorite Chinese restaurant and ask for extra fortune cookies!
Many people infatuated with the past read, study and write about it. We consider them historians, or as my kids like to call them and me on occasion, history geeks. The past is easy, it’s already happened. We can relive it, learn from it, and some indeed live in it. Best of all, we all have one. Some pasts are more tainted than others, but I digress. The future is where we’re all headed, every second, every minute, day and every year. What about thee future, your future and what is this simple concept mentioned in my title? I predict you will keep reading.
Wow, I did it! You kept reading and I predicted the future. It was only a nanosecond, but I am a firm believer in baby steps. So how do we go from a nanosecond to a second on to a minute and farther into the future?
Have you ever done something and then somewhere in the corner of your mind, you see something? Like perceiving something out of the corner of your eye. You know it’s there but can’t focus on it because you don’t turn your attention to it. It’s not big enough to be a thought. Then that thing, that thing you did makes someone mad. You think to yourself “I knew that was going to make them mad, I just knew it.”
Let’s figure out how you knew it.
Colliding Car
Pretend you are standing at a bus stop a few yards down from a street corner in a big city. Tall buildings surround you as vehicles zip past going through the intersection. At that moment a car runs a red light. This car, that ran the red light, is traveling perpendicular to the others whizzing past you. It barrels through the intersection and WHAM!! Two cars collide.
Everyone around is like wow that car came out of nowhere. Everyone except your friend who is working on the tenth floor of the building behind you. Your friend calls you, “I hope everyone is ok. I knew it was about to happen, like 5 seconds before it did.”
How did your friend know this was about to happen?
One word, perspective.
In this hypothetical scenario your friend had a different perspective. The different perspective enabled your friend to see the rate of speed and the direction of both cars. His brain did the rest. Your friend knew if nothing changed these cars would collide.
We are now past a nanosecond when telling the future.
Let’s face it we all want to know the future. Is this relationship going to work out? Will I succeed in my career choice? Or how about picking a winning stock. Some people seem so good at making choices it’s like they’re never wrong! I always ask myself, “How did they know?”.
Gaining a new perspective on a situation, event or idea can be valuable. I call it “The Power of Perspective.” The greatest thing about it, it’s simple if you can harness it. Your own mind will do a lot of the work for you if you let it. You’ll be able to predict certain outcomes in many situations. But, I say this with caution, as reality can always be unpredictable.
Having almost finished writing this article, I read this quote from Steve Jobs answering the question “What does it mean to be smart?”
“A lot of [what it means to be smart] is the ability to zoom out, like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from the 80th floor down at the city. And while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps, you could just see it in front of you. You can see the whole thing,”
Source: Jessica Stillman in Inc.com
How do you harness “The Power of Perspective”?
When we use the “colliding cars” scenario, having clear vision free of obstacles is a huge advantage.
Move to higher ground.
When possible, move to a new position. Higher is best. This can be physically in some instances, but more often it’s mentally. Moving higher removes obstacles and increases your field of view. It also moves you to a more quiet place for unimpaired observation. You will get the proverbial “big picture.” From a higher perspective you will see things not seen in your normal view. You’ll see all the moving parts in your life. The intersecting worlds with a more predictable outcome.
Pay attention to your peripheral.
pe·riph·er·al adjective
of, relating to, or being the outer part of the field of vision
Your peripheral is where your subconscious lives. This is the area that can lead you to the answer you are looking for, the correct one. These are the “knowings” as I call them. Not true thoughts but where the “I just knew it” revelation originates. These overlooked and underestimated “knowings” are the key between a best guess and an accurate prediction. It could be the difference between winning and losing or success and failure.
We have all heard a person say “I knew I was going to marry that person the first time we met.” How did they know? The usual answer is “I just knew.” But how? Was there something in their peripheral that helped them know? Turning your attention to your peripheral takes some exercise in disciplining your attention. To focus on all angles, then take the bits of seemingly less information and make some sense of it.
Which brings us to —
Apply logic and reasoning based on what you see.
Once you’re able to move higher for the best view and apply focus on the “knowings” of your peripheral, you can apply logic and reasoning. However, this is where things can go awry. Like the fog on your morning commute, introducing emotion can and will cloud your vision. This may sound like the suggestion to be emotionless and valcan-like is somewhat cold-hearted, but let us not forget we live by our decisions, good and bad. Everything that happens around you is unaware of your emotions nor does it care.
The marketers of the business world live by the mantra that people buy based on emotion and not logic. Remove emotions, and we would rarely need more than the clothes in our closet, the food in our fridge and the roof over our head. To predict the future, you must remove all emotion. Look only at facts and logic. The facts being A plus the logic of what makes the most sense B, can give you C, the reasoning behind it.
Facts + Logic = Reasoning
Use it!
Using new and many different perspectives to predict the future isn’t an easy task. It takes practice and repetition to recognize, like the colliding cars, what is going to intersect and at what point. Many times the answer to what is going to happen next may change suddenly. If a dog had run out in front of one of the cars in our colliding cars scenario there would have been a collision of a different sort. If you didn’t have that information in time then any prediction would be difficult. Practicing is a must. Start with simple things. Become an observer and look for repeated patterns, elements that are about to intersect. This can apply to objects, people, events and more.
This is not meant to be a fortune telling ruse but assist in making wise, well-informed decisions by being in-tune with your surroundings.
“Sometimes a change of perspective is all it takes to see the light.” — Dan Brow
Happy Predicting :)
