The Final Draft

Hi friend,

For twenty years, a French nobleman kept adding to the same book, and refused to remove anything he had stopped believing.

Michel de Montaigne started the Essays in 1572 and was still revising them when he died two decades later. He did not correct the passages he had outgrown. He layered new material around them, so a single page might hold a position he took in his late thirties, an objection he raised in his forties, and a reversal he added in his fifties, sitting together, unresolved, contradicting each other in front of the reader.

He knew precisely what he was doing.

"I do not portray being," he wrote. "I portray passing."

For four hundred years that line has been read as charming modesty from a man too honest to pretend consistency. It is not modesty. It is a claim about what a person actually is, and in 2013 three psychologists produced the data suggesting he was right and almost everyone else is wrong.

Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson measured the personalities, values and preferences of more than 19,000 people between the ages of eighteen and sixty-eight.

Then they asked half of them to report how much they had changed in the previous decade, and the other half to predict how much they would change in the next one.

The two groups gave incompatible answers.

At every age they tested, people reported enormous change behind them and forecast very little ahead. Eighteen-year-olds did it. Forty-year-olds did it. Sixty-eight-year-olds did it. A thirty-three-year-old predicting the next ten years consistently expected less change than a forty-three-year-old reported having actually lived through.

The pattern held across personality, across values, across preferences, and it did not soften with age or experience.

The researchers named it the end of history illusion, and their own summary of it is the sentence I keep returning to. History, it seems, is always ending today.

Then they did something clever, which was to find out what the illusion costs in money.

They took a group of adults and split it. One half named their current favourite band and said what they would pay to see them play in ten years. The other half named their favourite band from ten years earlier and said what they would pay to see that band play next week.

The future group offered an average of $129.

The past group offered $80.

Same question, different direction in time, and a sixty-one percent premium placed on the durability of a taste that the other half of the room had just demonstrated does not last. Everyone in that study could look back and see that their old favourite had faded. Nobody could look forward and see it happening again.

The explanation the researchers offer is the part worth carrying, because it is not stupidity and it is not vanity.

They suggest people confuse the difficulty of imagining change with the unlikelihood of it.

Remembering who you were is easy. The evidence is sitting there, and you can see the distance between that person and this one. Imagining who you will become requires you to invent a stranger out of nothing, using the mind of the person he replaces, and that is genuinely hard work. So the mind does what minds do with hard work. It reads the difficulty as information. I cannot picture myself being different, therefore I probably will not be.

Quoidbach added a second reason, quieter and more uncomfortable. Believing you have just arrived at the finished version of yourself feels good. I wish I knew then what I know now is a satisfying sentence. The alternative, that your current certainties are as temporary as the ones you have already discarded, makes every decision you are about to make feel unstable.

I should be straight about the limits of this study, because they are real.

The researchers never followed anyone over time. They compared what one group remembered against what a different group predicted, which is not the same as watching a person change and checking their forecast against it. They tried to shore this up with data from a genuine longitudinal survey, and admitted the measures were not directly comparable. Critics have pointed at exactly this, and they are not being unfair.

What survives the criticism is the asymmetry itself, which showed up in six studies across every age band they could analyse: the same person who can list a decade of change behind him reliably forecasts a decade of stability in front of him.

Here is the practical edge of it, and it is sharper for your age than for anyone else's.

Almost every decision you make with long consequences is made on behalf of somebody you have not met. The career you are committing to is being chosen by your current interests, for a man whose interests will have moved. The relationship, the city, the identity you are hardening into, the thing you have told everyone you are: all of it is being decided by a version of you that the next version will regard the way you now regard yourself at eighteen.

That is not an argument for choosing nothing. A man who commits to nothing on the grounds that he might change is simply making a different irreversible choice, and a worse one.

It is an argument for holding your certainties the way Montaigne held his, which is to say publicly, seriously, and with the layers still visible. He did not stop having opinions. He stopped believing his current opinion was the final one, and he left the record of his contradictions on the page as proof.

So the question is not what you want, or who you are, both of which you can answer easily and will answer differently later.

What are you currently certain about that the next version of you is going to have to undo?

Until next time

Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill