How To Predict The Future (You May Already Know!)

People are predictable.

When the weather gets cold we put on our jackets. When it shines we take them off. When we are locked down with nowhere to go we find solace in a garden or fresh air. When our phone is available we scroll through it. When it’s taken away from us, we may be agitated, but eventually, we find something else to occupy our mind. When we see the news, we talk about it. When it’s gone, we forget about it.

So many of our actions are pretty predictable, so it pays to be able to read what people normally do in given situations. Do this and we just might know how to predict the future already! How so?

A case in point. Let’s say the world is going to have to adapt to extreme temperatures more and more over the years ahead. It becomes almost inevitable in our minds that we would need a solution for this problem. All we had to do to realise that simple fact was to simply look ahead.

Our Brain Already Knows How To Predict The Future

We don’t have to hope to be a super-genius to work this out. Why? Well, because we already are. Humans are the great problem solvers there’s ever been. We solve problems all the time, we just tend to do it in the background without noticing. We might think a problem is like an equation. What is 3+4 and we know it’s 7. Yet, our brains and bodies are doing something far far more complicated underneath. Just think of memory, coordination, balance, heat regulation, imagination, and so on.

Whilst we may consciously feel like we are struggling to brush our teeth whilst also putting our shoes on being late for work, our mind is already doing millions of calculations around us. It ensures we don’t fall over, can understand what is safe around us, takes in multiple conversations or stimuli happening nearby, and knows what to block out and what to pick up on.

We probably don’t give ourselves credit but we are pretty damn smart even before we get out of bed. So if we are so smart then why don’t we all predict the future?

We may assume we need even greater superpowers for that, but they are too well within our grasp. The likes of Elon Musk might seem rare, and his blend of visionary and business skills probably are, but it’s well within most people’s grasp to predict what might happen in the future.

The only thing truly standing in our way is the fact that most people simply don’t try to. We assume it’s infinitely too difficult. We’ve been taught to focus and care far more about what is happening around us right now, that’s if we are not being buried and controlled by past experiences and memories.

When we weigh up the amount of work our brain has to do at the best of times, even before we lump a lifetime of experience and fear on it, we are forgiven when we simply try not to challenge our minds to think beyond the current horizons.

The future hasn’t happened, so we assume we don’t know anything concrete, so what’s the point in wasting our precious energy?! it’s all just a guess anyway right?

There’s An Educated Art To The Guesswork

It is a guess, but it can very easily be an educated one, and with an educated guess our mind doesn’t have to work as hard to think of possibilities. That said, it’s not just a case of repetition to become educated at something either. That’s fine for knowing how to do something now, and to preserve energy when doing it, but not for when it concerns something that hasn’t even happened yet.

So, how do educated guesses really work?

We won’t know for sure what individuals or collectives will choose to do in 20 years time exactly, but we can hazard a pretty good guess because we can see what is going on in our world today, we can easily research and understand where we’ve come from, and we can make a distinctive guess on where that will lead us next.

We might not have guessed social media would’ve come around and changed communication and culture (others might’ve), but we can be sure to hazard a guess about the effects it has on us as humans both now and in the long term. We wouldn’t have been able to make this guess if social media wasn’t around yet.

We use the tools and environment around us to consider the needs of the future, and the possible creations.

We Don’t Need Fortune-Tellers. We Already Have A Path To Prediction

We don’t predict the future in a fortune-teller way. Reading palms and telling you what will happen to you is really just a business born out of hope and gullibility. It’s opportunistic, possibly even fun, and yet it’s also built on tradition and beliefs, but it’s not a truly accurate tool to tell us what exactly will happen with our life.

It may feel easier to put the destiny of our life into the hands of some random stranger with a ball or some cards, but realistically they will never know the experiences and the desires we truly have unless we tell them, and even then they are simply making a generic plea to make us feel better (or worse if your prediction is pretty sour).

This kind of predicting the future is generally pretty inaccurate because, in reality, it’s up to us to choose the course of our future.

We can’t choose the exact path we envision (there are far too many variables for that), but let’s say you wanted to be a fashion designer. Well, you can predict that your future won’t be in fashion if you aren’t doing anything now towards planting that seed, but if you are bringing that possibility to your conscience then there’s a much bigger chance that it will happen.

Through one of my longest-serving friends, I can see the predictability of chance even clearer. He’s a professional poker player. Some will say playing poker is all about luck, but in reality, it’s about giving yourself the best-implied odds to win, and sure, luck comes into it at times, but math, psychology, and focus are far more important.

Can you predict you will be a winning poker player? No. But what you can predict is how your educated mind can figure out a better chance and probability of you becoming so. You won’t ‘win’ every hand, but you don’t need to, you just need to know that the chips are in your court and you can have an impact with the choices you make.

How To Predict The Future Beyond Ourselves

So what about predicting the future beyond our own scope, beyond our personal interest? How to predict the future in a place that we have never even been to, or which we have no real educated wisdom?

Well, think of it this way. The weather doesn’t affect just you, it affects us all.

Humanity has many shared interests in the plight of our survival. When you see the human imprint left on our planet it’s clear that you don’t need to be mystic to know that it will lead to certain changes that are needed to restore it.

Let’s go back to the case of extreme temperatures. If we are unable to keep our net-zero promises (and we all know we can’t exactly trust politicians’ words) then what will people need to survive? Clearly, one such idea would be the need for smart clothing, clothing that adjusts and adapts to the temperatures outside and keeps our bodies at regulated temperatures.

We don’t even have to come up with new ideas for new or potential problems ourselves either. If we don’t have the greatest of imagination (it’s more a case of we just haven’t exercised it enough), we can see what others have come up with instead. Movies are a good place to start.

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Watch any futuristic movie that has a dreamer director or writer and you will see a few interesting potential future innovations (that may or may not be viable or feasible in practice – at least yet – but the planted idea makes them at least a possibility). If you are an imaginative person then you’ve likely dreamed up certain ideas like ones seen in movies yourself too.

The realistic question, in terms of how to predict the future, comes not in whether we can think it (we most likely can when our imagination is allowed to roam) but whether it becomes likely that an idea can be taken from a notion into a desirable, viable and feasible (design thinking) solution that would benefit us in some way.

In the future, that benefit becomes more and more about whether it also helps our planet be sustainable, whereas in the past it was solely on whether that idea had selling potential and available materials.

So, if you want to know how to predict the future then a good place to start is by thinking about what could happen in both a best and worst-case scenario for our planet and humanity. This is part of the job of a futurist. There will always be a need to find ways to make a living so there will always be capitalism not far behind, but the face of capitalism is also changing (or likely to change) towards sustainable capitalism.

Your Prediction Is In Your Hands

You may never know if you will turn out to become a major pop star or millionaire, or whatever your dreams are, and you can’t decide exactly who you will meet throughout your life, but you will know that by bringing your desire into focus to develop an abundance mentality of possibility, and by considering the needs of our world, then it’s fair to say you might just be able to know how to predict the future more than you may have realised.

Of course, this isn’t a magic wand. It takes time to develop the ability to be able to challenge your conventional ways of thinking, to learn how to tap into your imagination, and to recognise what is needed in the world, but you’ve come to the right place, as Richly aims to help people do just that.