A couple of weeks ago I was approached by a friend of mine. They needed some advice. They were thinking about their career, had a couple of options on the table, and wanted to see how I would approach their situation. They were moving jobs - to a great place - and their current place had upped their offer to make them stay and was showering them with promises (much as a jilted lover promises to change after they are broken up with).
From my outsider's perspective it seemed easy - that the new opportunity had much more long term benefit than a quick win in the short-term. The reason my friend needed advice was because they already knew this - but they needed someone else to push them toward the harder choice, rather than settling for the easy option.
Later that same week I got approached, completely coincidentally, by three other friends. They were all three asking for similar advice, and although they didn’t phrase the question as such, this was what they wanted - ‘when the easy option is to keep doing what I’m doing, how much better does the hard option need to be to lift me out of my inertia?’. This is the crux of the problem. Inertia is a powerful force, and it takes much more effort to overcome it than it does to put it in place. It is that psychological inertia that governs huge amounts of our behaviour - without us even realising.
This problem - short term thinking rather than long term is part of what makes us human. Our psychology evolved to be a short to medium-term thinker. It is much harder to switch our brains 🧠 to think of things in the longer-term, especially if it involves short term pain or discomfort. We don't get a nice 'Back to the future' style feedback for our decisions afterall.
I often talk of this as ‘f*** future you’ - as a way of highlighting how these decisions do actually punish ourselves, even if we can’t see it now.
Eating a cookie now, to burn off later. F*** future you.
Leaving that to-do list until tomorrow. F*** future you.
Staying in a job with no prospects because it is easier. F*** future you.
Maybe, just maybe, we should all be a little nicer to our future selves, and our current selves will eventually be thankful.
REFLECTION
I had fun spraying out the advice for my friends - showing them the logical fallacies around continuing the easy option, when in fact it makes no strategic career sense in the short or long-term to continue, and that there is a future which is much brighter with just a little bit of disruption now. It’s always fun giving advice - feeling like you’re perspective is worthwhile, and pretending you are some wise monk, stroking your beard and reflecting on life’s difficulties (or is that just me?!).
For me, after giving the advice - I turned my perspective inward. This experience has made me consider two things more:
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I should ask more people for advice more often. People like giving advice, on careers, on life, and another perspective is always useful. And it could make my world better.
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To consider what decisions am I currently making that are f*ing over my future self and try and amend them. (puts down biscuit...).
So, with the above said - anyone have any advice for me? 😁👍