Experience is mandatory. Learning is optional.
Here is how to better predict the future by journaling.
We all predict the future without calling it that. Start admitting you’re doing it. Every act of preparation is a prediction. Every choice contains predictions.
However we cannot learn from casual prediction. Our brains are wired to rationalize and justify results after the fact. How many of us “saw the crisis coming” — whether it was the housing bubble, the financial crisis, or any other — and how many of us confidently moved our investment dollars to capitalize on it? To the first question we must answer “many” and to the second “few.”
We mistake our own past predictive power because, after the fact, the confirming evidence is so obviously right, and the confusing and dis-confirming evidence falls out of our active memory.
Every time you make a significant prediction or decision, write it down — along with your major reasons for doing it, a few reasons against you that you’re choosing to disregard, and your predicted outcome.
I hated doing this at first.
When I started this practice, I wrote about a prediction that had already failed.
I had purchased a subscription to a very useful service for consultants because I thought that I’d start using it and, in doing so, gain more clients. Except I didn’t use it reliably.
When it was time to renew the subscription, I canceled it and journaled about it as described here.
It was only then I realized I’d bought two other, different subscription-type products in prior years. These, too, hadn’t helped me — despite being good products that worked quite well for others.
After staring at my journal pages for a while, it finally dawned on me that I was attempting to use the purchase of a subscription to drive myself to behave in a new way (specifically around prospecting for clients) — and it never worked. And it never would. So I stopped buying that sort of subscription, saving me thousands of dollars.
Week by week as you journal, you’ll collect some good predictions, large and small. Every month or two or 12, look back and review old predictions.
Notice your own patterns.
Most of us are quite terrible at deciding and predicting.
That new salesman who you were sure was going to knock it out of the park… and who never seemed to make any calls. You fired him after three months. What were you thinking when you hired him?
Seriously — what were your thought patterns? If you don’t know, you’ll think those same thoughts again. If you wrote them down, you can review them and grow wiser.
Your future predictions will become better. You’ll learn what you’re good at, bad at, and blind to.
This process of recording your thinking process, as you think -- recording your decision making, as you decide -- is what helped Peter Drucker become so phenomenally successful.
Or so Drucker himself said. He learned all the ways he didn't do his best work, and he stopped doing them. He even printed up a card he would send when replying to the hundreds of requests he received. The card said that Mr. Drucker regretted he was not available to... and listed all the things he'd decided weren't good uses of his time: serving on committees, writing forewords of books, giving speeches, proofreading books or papers, and so on. (He would make rare exceptions for close friends.)
He could never have learned what to say 'no' to without this journaling approach. And he'd never have become so influential and effective.
In just three months, you can — with this practice — grow your wisdom.
(I recommend using a journal you’ll enjoy writing in. I use Leuchtturm Journals
We all have experiences.
Leaders learn from them.