The Future is Now

As you are reading this, the future is happening. The future is now.

It’s a pretty common to put things off until later. We figure that we’ll just do it in the future, and that everything will get done and we’ll be fine. But it won’t. When you postpone things to the future, stop and remember that the future is now. Go ahead and execute your idea immediately, or your idea may find itself forever lost in the annals of history. I take that back – it won’t be found in history because it will have never happened.

An example from James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, pg. 232:

“…[people] express a preference for saving [money]. But when it comes to actually doing it, [...] they procrastinate. In economic terms, they value the present so much more than the future that saving seems to make little sense. The paradox is that although Americans aren’t willing to make sacrifices in the present to improve their future, they say they’re willing to make sacrifices in the future to improve their long-run prospects. In other words, they’re willing to save significant parts of their income tomorrow. The problem is that people turn out not to be that good at estimating what their preferences in the future will be. This may not be that surprising: we change, circumstances change, why should we imagine that we know what we will want. But one consequence of that is that the plans we make today in anticipation of how we will act tomorrow may not work. Specifically, if we say we will not worry about saving today because tomorrow we will finally get around to saving, it will not be surprising if when tomorrow rolls around we find ourselves still spending.”

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