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So, in the journey from the sublime - predicting how we’ll feel about winning the lottery - to the ridiculous - predicting which sandwiches we’ll want for lunch - we are incredibly bad at knowing our future selves. And if we can’t even decide what type of sandwich we might like next week, how can we possibly decide what type of job we’d like to be doing in twenty years? With age occasionally comes wisdom. Over time we learn, whether implicitly or explicitly, that we are not that good at predicting the future. At the very least we begin to recognise it is a much less precise science than we once thought. A stranger future This means your future self is probably a stranger to you. And, on some level, you know it. That’s why it might be hard for an 18 year old to choose their career, but it’s a damn sight harder for someone in midlife when limitations have been learnt. “People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties…” This might seem like just another way of saying that people get more cautious as they get older, but it is more than that. It’s actually saying that it’s not caution that’s increasing with age, but implicit self-knowledge. People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties, even for those things that would seem to be under our most direct control, like our sandwich preferences. Best guess beats careful planning The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it’s such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information. The best strategy for career planning is this: make your best guess, try it out and don’t be surprised if you don’t like it. But for heaven’s sake don’t mention this in your interviews. （责任编辑：职场达人） |
