We have wonderful dreams and ambitions…there’s no end to our visions of better things in the future. And, behind these dreams and ambitions, our motives are admirable – all around helping people, solving tough problems and building fun, cool and valuable things.
As we identify opportunities and conceive solutions, we are prone to trick ourselves. According to psychologists, we are predisposed to a wide range of biases. These biases skew our thinking, causing us to be over-anxious, over-confident and hold many other troubled mindsets between these extremes. If you were to fully research all the 100’s of psychological biases then you would probably be so frazzled you’d have trouble thinking anything positive about the future, let alone envisioning bright future changes.
So – we don’t want to dwell on these biases.
We just want to mention one of the biases – the tendency to be over-confident about our ability to predict the future…i.e., the ‘overconfidence effect’.
Psychologists tell us we are prone to be over-confident when we forecast the future. This causes us to over-estimate the success we will experience when we create a new product or service. While psychologists illustrate the problems this natural bias can generate, there are other ways to think about it.
For example -
Scientists tout evolution. To a large degree, the concept of evolution is accepted by non-scientists. Along that vein, scientists and non-scientists alike can ‘blame’ evolution for our tendency to be over-confident about our ability to predict the future. And, consistent with evolution concepts, we can conclude this tendency must exist to help us adapt and survive.
If we were not naturally blessed with the tendency to have over-confident thoughts about the future then we would be less inclined to envision better futures, set goals around our visions and be persistent in action aimed at our visions.
The where would we be?
[We’d be hobbled with low-confidence and submerged in fatalistic, status-quo thoughts.]