Simone Stolzoff

And there's very little accountability to those predictions moving forward.

Like I would love to see, for example, at the end of a football season, every single commentator who's sort of a talking head on the TV have to go back and like reckon with why they were wrong about the team not winning the game or every single political pundit doing the same thing.

But we often do it in our own lives too.

We are very bad at what researchers call

effective forecasting.

So thinking about how we're going to feel about how a future event will affect us.

This is research that comes from Dan Gilbert, who's sort of the godfather of happiness.

And he particularly looks at moments that are very extreme.

So for example, like someone getting left at the altar or someone getting laid off from a job.

These moments that you think, you know, my life is over.

This could be like the end.

And in actuality, what he often finds is some of these really bad moments tend to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

We've all had a friend that's maybe gone through a really traumatic breakup and thought that their whole life was done only to realize the opportunities that presented themselves on the other side.

And there's so many examples of this from the business world, from personal stories, from

characters from history, we are really bad at thinking how we're going to feel about something that hasn't happened yet.

That's a great question.

Yeah, there's definitely a need for that sort of consistency of our own identity.

And part of the reason why people stay so attached to past beliefs or are unwilling to change their mind is this desire for a positive self-image.

So if I thought this thing before, changing my mind wouldn't just mean, you know, updating my thoughts.

It would mean undermining my identity in some way.