Tag: past

If You Time Travel to the Past, Tell Yourself You’re Wrong

It’s really hard to break free from your past definitions of success.  I’ve met a lot of unhappy people who are doing exactly what they used to want to do.  The problem is, we change.  If you shackle yourself to the form of success envisioned by your past self, you’re a slave to a person that doesn’t even exist.

I’ve written before about how it’s good to be a failure when you’re failing at a past goal.

It can also be constraining to attempt future growth based on the models of past growth.

Check out the short video below.  What things do you and your past self disagree on?

Who’s Calling the Shots, Your Future or Your Past?

I heard an interesting talk from Dan Sullivan on why 10x growth (in business, life, whatever you choose) is actually easier than 2x growth…if you get your mindset right.

He described 2x thinking as fundamentally controlled by the past.  You look back at what it took to get where you are and you attempt to do more and better of the same activities, approaches, and processes.

10x thinking is controlled by the future.  Since the future hasn’t yet happened, you first have to imagine the future you want.  Once your idea of that future is firmly in place you work backward from it.  You deconstruct what it takes to get there.  You let this vision of the future determine what you do in the present.  The past may occasionally provide lessons, but it’s mostly a distraction.  What does the future demand?  If you are to grow 10x, what would have to happen to get there?

It’s amazing how much this little insight helps.  So many things we do unthinkingly just because we did them in the past.  We assume they are necessary because they were before.  When you ask only what the future wants, instead of replicating what the past was, your entire mindset shifts and you begin to focus only on the truly key activities and those that are scalable.

Are you a slave to the past or are you letting your vision of the future lead?

Redistribution and Time Travel: A Thought Experiment

A means of effective time travel has been invented. People can freely traverse time, travelling from the present to any point in the past and vice-versa. Access to time travel is pretty universal, and due to this, knowledge of conditions at all points in time is acute.

For those who believe there is a moral obligation on the part of the better-off to help the less well-off, and who believe in redistributive policies to do this, play along and consider the situation.

People in the present are outrageously wealthy compared to people in the past. Even the poorest Americans today have access to abundant clean water, hot and cold water, heated shelter, air conditioning, an overabundance of cheap, calorie-rich food, more clothing than they need, refrigeration, telephony, transport by internal-combustion engine, laundry facilities, bathing facilities, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, emergency care, and on and on. These present poor are better off by almost any measure than even the wealthy a thousand years ago.

Do people in the present have an obligation to give some of their wealth to those in the past? Is there some minimum standard of living that we need to keep the ancients up to? Do the poor among the rich (present day poor Americans) have an obligation to the rich among the poor (the well-off a millennium ago)?

What kind of redistributive policies should be enacted? Would they work? What might some side-effects be? Is it required to fulfill a moral duty? Is it wrong for someone born in the present to enjoy the relative luxury and wealth they are inheriting from their era, by no merit on their part? Should they pay an inheritance tax to support people in the poorer past?

What about future generations. What if the future is also poorer; does the present owe them a chunk of our wealth? What would be the result of efforts to redistribute from the present to the future? What if the future was wealthier; do they owe the past a portion of their bounty? What would happen if resources flowed to us from the future, in order to ease our relatively lower condition?

Spanning all of human history, would we have a moral obligation to attempt to make all people across all eras more equal? Would we be obligated to narrow the gap between the caveman and the flying-car-owning future woman? How big could we let the gap be? Would narrowing it be possible? Would there be any side-effects of efforts to try?

What is the difference, morally and practically, between redistribution across time and that across space?

Rewrite the Present

Humans tend to have a “good ol’ days” bias.  We imagine the past as better than it was.  Over time, events and experiences in our own life that were dull or painful can become funny or wonderful as we recreate them in our memory.  Epochs long before our time are romanticized, like the idea of the noble savage or the simple pleasure of pastoral life.

This bias can be problematic.  We often critique the perceived failures and excesses of the present in comparison to a past that never was and is not possible.  Some hate the fact that most of us buy food from people we don’t know, grown by still others we’ve never met.  They hate it because they think it alienates us from what we eat in some way.  They imagine some past where they would be joyously working a small field to harvest beautiful ready to eat produce that they planted months before with their own hands, far from the grit and concrete of the city and all that shipping and packaging.  They don’t think clearly enough to see the constant festering blisters; the rotten, insect-ridden, small, and unreliable crops; the body odor of their family members sleeping in drafty homes with little privacy, and the unavailability of a varied diet, just to name a few oft forgotten realities.

In this case, a rosy bias towards the past makes us less able to effectively deal with real or perceived problems in the present.  The romance is employed to prove the need for the use of force to stop human progress.  It’s a version of the Nirvana Fallacy.

We could attempt, through mental discipline, to eradicate this tendency in ourselves.  We could look hard and deep at the real past, internalize how rough it was, smash the romantic memories and become hardened realists.  I think this is a bad solution.

The past is no longer a thing that exists.  It is a bundle of ideas we carry in our brains.  It is valuable only to the extent it enhances our present.  A realistic assessment of the trials and travails before can sometimes make the present better and provide valuable knowledge.  Just as often, it offers no value, but only makes us sad. An idealized and romantic past can bring a lot of joy and laughter that enhance our present.  The fact that we recreate the material facts of the past and store mostly the positive is probably a wonderful thing.  Recall the times you felt tremendous sadness, guilt or fear: Imagine carrying a realistic memory of all those compounded experiences around with you all the time.

More problematic than recreating the past is a failure to recreate the present.  The way you perceive life determines the quality of it.  If I think fondly on my childhood because I’m filtering it for the good, why not work on implementing a similar filter for the present?  It’s never possible to be perfectly accurate in our perceptions of the world; we will always have limits and bias in our worldview.  Why not cultivate that bias towards things that bring peace, freedom, and joy?  It’s a little more than making lemonade out of lemons.  It’s a conscious effort to learn from our brain’s natural filtering of the past and trying to implement it in the present.  It’s a discipline.  An optimistic outlook is no less accurate than a pessimistic outlook, but it is more fun.

A good place to start cultivating an optimistic (yet realistic) worldview is at Tough Minded Optimism.