Our desire to know the future leads us to speculate on questions unanswerable questions.
Everyone, in nearly every industry, ponders, “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” The goal is to gain an advantage by anticipating the future. If only it were that easy. The problem is, we’re almost always wrong.
Capitalizing on what will change requires many things to go right. Not only do you have to correctly identify the variables that matter, but you also have to accurately predict how they will play out in the future and get the timing right. Despite their extensive education and fancy math, economists struggle to forecast the next year, let alone the next decade. And, on the rare occasions when they are right, it’s mostly just dumb luck.
All the effort and energy that goes into speculating things that cannot be known comes at the expense of things we can know.
A More Important Question
While it’s entertaining to guess what the future holds, a more important question is, “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?”
This is the secret to how both Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett built their fortunes. The leader of one of the most innovative tech companies and the head of one of the most boring conglomerates agree on one thing: understanding what will remain constant is more valuable than predicting what will change.
Bezos realizes the energy and effort put into predicting what will change is a speculative bet. It might work, and it might not. The hope is that if it works, it pays off spectacularly, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t cost you much.
While investing in what’s changing is risky, investing in what stays the same is not. Bezos realizes investments in what doesn’t change will still pay off in ten years.
“When you have something you know is true, even over the long term,” he said, “you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
Rather than the sexy speculation of what will change in the future, our effort is better spent on the boring truth of what stays the same. During the dotcom boom, while most people were caught up in the hype, Buffett was in his Omaha office, asking himself what would remain constant. His biographer, Alice Schroeder, explained his approach:
There is less emphasis on trying to reason out things on the basis that they are special because they are unique, which in a financial context is perhaps the definition of a speculation. But pattern recognition is his default way of thinking. It creates an impulse always to connect new knowledge to old and to primarily be interested in new knowledge that genuinely builds on the old.
While we can’t predict the future with any degree of accuracy, we can position ourselves to thrive in multiple possible futures. The key is often found in what doesn’t change.
The answer to how to position yourself often comes down to what doesn’t change.
We may not know when a financial panic will hit, but we know one will come. We may not know what job we’ll have in the future, but we know that acquiring certain skills will likely increase our value. We may not know when a supply chain crunch will happen, but we know it will happen eventually. We may not know which competitors will stumble, but we do know that when they do, it will present an opportunity for those who can pounce. We may not know what we’ll sell in ten years, but we do know that customers will still want high quality, low prices, and exceptional experiences.
The path to success lies not in predicting the future but in positioning ourselves for it.