Hold up. Predicting my life? This statement may cause more than one eye roll out there. But, bare with me. You may be picturing an old lady hunched over a crystal ball, with talons gripping tarot cards more worn than your most loyal pair of underwear. Or, perhaps you're envisioning a ring of cult members surrounding a smokey bonfire with eyes glazed over, chanting voodoo hymns in unison. Prediction. Sounds like some certified New Age BS.
But, allow me to set the record straight. This is not the type of palm reading-esque prediction that I'm talking about. Instead, I'm talking about using prediction as a tool for more proactive living. More specifically...
I'm asking you to define a working theory for your path to greater happiness, so that you can pressure test and iterate on that prediction.
This Week's Video: Predictive Processing
In this week's video, I talk about how our brain uses prediction -- or constant, restless hypothesizing-- to process the world. Rather than the brain attempting to take in every minute sensory detail, it merely looks for glaring discrepancies with it's pre-existing mental model. In essence, it's testing a theory, moment-by-moment.
This is groundbreaking new insight into how our brain works. Centuries of evolution has worked up some serious cognitive wisdom -- and I, for one, have taken the brain's learnings to heart. It's pushed me to completely re-think my own best practices by adopting those already in use by my brain. Let's dig into this more.
The Value of Predicting your Life
In the same way that our brain takes in incomprehensibly large amounts of data, so too do we when we ask ourselves the important life questions. I'm talking about the big, existential ones -- the "what do I want to do with my life?" and the "what's my life purpose?" and my personal favorite, "how do I find happiness?"
Asking ourselves these questions is natural, but it forces us to deal with massive (downright unnatural), amounts of information to answer them. We have to solve a complex quadratic fulfillment formula with competing factors -- things that drive day-to-day happiness (social and leisure activities), against those that provide long-term stability (work and money), against still other things that drive more meaningful joy (perhaps volunteering or community work). Oh yea, and time. All of that stuff, divided by time. You ain't got forever to figure it out, kid.
Optimizing all of these factors to craft your ideal life trajectory is an exercise in distilling big data -- and no one has mastered this art quite as well as our brain. So, let's take some tips, shall we?
Adopting our Brain's Prediction Engine
We should always have a forward looking hypothesis for our life's happiness. This prediction should be a statement about how we think we can derive greater fulfillment from our life in the next 3-5 years. Sure -- it's a bit gimmicky to actually write this out. But, do it -- because having a working hypothesis actually saves bandwidth. You no longer need to keep track of every fine detail of your lifestyle. Instead, you just need to look for the "prediction errors" -- details that differ from your prediction for what fosters a more fulfilling life. In essence, the presence of a prediction primes our mind to catch important insights, that either support, or refute, our working theory.
In Andy Clark's book, Surfing Uncertainty, he describes this as:
"data compression by informed prediction."
If this is still fuzzy, watch the the video, where I talk through my own example of iteratively refining my life prediction. Here's also a summary of the key steps:
Define this month's "hypothesis." What are you currently doing or not doing that you think will drive towards a greater sense of fulfillment over a 5 year time horizon? This could be moving to a different geographic location, breaking up with a partner, shifting to a different career path, meeting more people, or mastering a new skill/hobby. Note that you don't actually need to do the thing in the timeframe of a month. You just need to have a working hypothesis each month.
Over the course of the month, test your hypothesis. Let's say you want to quit your job to pursue a passion. (Hypothetical congrats on having a passion--that's the hardest part!) You're itching to drop everything and go. But, slow down, Seabiscuit. First, think of a structured way to test this. Can you ask for a leave of absence? Can you shift to part time and still support yourself? Can you stay at your job but block more time to work on your side hustle? Big decisions are a lot easier to make when you have insight from a small scale beta. One other important callout here: only test one or two hypotheses at a time. If you move to a different state, switch careers, ditch your significant other, and convert to Buddhism all at once -- it's going to be tricky to see which one of those actually impacted your happiness positively or negatively.
Refine and restate your hypothesis based on what you learned. This is the most important step. What we're trying to do is slowly but intentionally wiggle our way to a more fulfilling life. To do that, you must (1) reflect on what you learned, (2) subsequently refine your prediction, and (3) do it often.
All this to say -- the road to happiness is one of restless hypothesis refinement. If you don't know what you want, you're probably in good company. And, a decent strategy, is to just start with a guess.
Read about your Brain, for your Brain
If you're interested in learning more about the "predictive processing" model for the brain, read "Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind," by Andy Clark, available here. It's dense, but if you can muscle through comprehension of the concepts, you'll find it to be a fascinating explanation of the brain's most sophisticated behaviors.
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