Who is in charge of your New Year resolutions? You 2021 or You 2030?
How to recruit your future self to smash your New Year’s resolutions.
There was an interesting article today on the BBC news website by famous thinker and philosopher Steven Pinker. It was entitled Three ways to be more rational this year, and contained some tips on how to make better decisions in 2022.
One of the theories is getting a better balance between your current incarnation and your future self. We often discount the future too much, opting for the extra drink now and forgetting the hangover in the morning, or the extra slice of cake now, forgetting how we will feel as our weight creeps up or our Jeans start to get uncomfortable tight.
This was a concept that I had already experimented with in 2021, creating alter-egos aligned with my goals, to help me with my decision making. What would “Seventy-five kilo Simon” do? (He is less worried about food waste and therefore doesn’t insist on eating up those two slices of pizza his daughter has left, especially when he is already full). What would “sub four Simon” do? He is going to go for a run now (the only time that ever exists) rather than later, which may never happen. Sometimes they double team and help Simon pick the Thai vegetable stir-fry and sparkling water over the house burger with cheesy fries and two pints of beer.
However, with a goal of losing weight, or completing a marathon in under four hours, both my alternative Simons were still short term, and therefore only have so much influence or leverage over other areas of planning and decision making. In order to optimise my choices in 2022 I decided to recruit a panel of decision makers from the future.
In 2022 God-willing, I will turn fifty, and so fifty-year-old Simon is pretty close to the now version of me. But looking back I feel certain he could give some great advice to twenty-year-old me, thirty-year-old me and even forty-year-old me. That’s not to say I got lots of things wrong, decisions taken for better or worse, have made me who I am today, but with a different perspective, there are surely things I could have done to make my life easier, my health better, my financial situation more secure, and my future options even more compelling.
So what would sixty-year-old Simon think of this decision, what about seventy-year-old Simon, and how about eighty-year-old Simon. One advantage is that they would definitely have a longer time horizon and would care more about decisions today (our today) affect them in ten, twenty or thirty years (their todays). I might tell my thirty-year-old self, to spend a bit more on things that are going to last, and a bit less on things I will never use. I would almost certainly advise my twenty-year-old self to start his pension a bit earlier, with the amount he went out he could certainly have saved even £10 a month, and by increasing that a little every year, would already be in a position to retire. But My eighty-year-old self might tell me to spend the money, and have fun now, while you can still enjoy it. You never know what’s around the corner, and by taking that dream trip now, you can look back on it fondly for 30 years, rather than doing it when you’re so old it creates anxiety and you may not have anyone to do it with.
So I decided to convene a panel. My fifty-year-old self has the strongest presence, and the biggest say, but if I recruit a committee of Simon 2032, Simon 2042 and Simon 2052, then there is a greater chance of a more balance decision. They will all take a longer-term view, be it of health, money, relationships or community. I can already feel my seventy-year-old self telling me to stay fit and healthy, and keep playing sport and skiing, so he can still enjoy all those things in twenty years time.
For good measure though, I also want to include my twenty-year-old self, Simon 1992, so I don’t lose the youthful input into my decision making. He can keep me grounded in the optimism of youth, and provide balance to the wisdom of age. I think together we can be quite a team, and if we can agree together on some goals for the New Year, I think we’ll be well placed to make the right decisions to achieve them.
While talking about resolutions, it would be remiss to not mention two of the most powerful tools in helping achieve them. Writing them down, and sharing them.
With that in mind, here are my top 4 goals for 2022:
· End the year with my relationship with my wife and family even stronger than it is at the start of the year.
· Pay off 10% of my mortgage (with a longer-term aim of having it all paid off by 2027, when I hit 55)
· Run a sub 4 hour marathon at the London Marathon in October (current pb a little over 4hrs 20, set in Chicago in 2003)
· Complete my writers’ course and have one paid for article published by December 2022.
Wish me (and my future selves) luck!
