Preparing for an Unknown Future Beats Predicting a Specific One
Speculation won’t make ambiguity and risk go away, but preparing for them can remove anxiety and build resilience
Update: Along with Devon McDonald and Bernhard Schluga, I’ll be hosting a 5-day retreat at the I AM ESCAPE Retreat and hotel, in Austria on 8th-12th July, 2025. Entitled, Second Harvest, this retreat is for individuals and couples navigating a major life shift, whether personal or professional (or both), who are ready to leverage their experiences, wisdom, and resources to create a life of deeper meaning, fulfillment, and alignment. You can learn more or apply here.
The future is a sneaky bastard. Just when you think you have it figured out, it changes direction, and reminds you who’s really in charge. For every pundit that is correct, there are a 100 more that are incorrect. Predictions are mostly an exercise in futility.
So why do so many smart, successful people (maybe even people like you) obsess over predicting a singular future when they could be preparing for a range of them? The answer is simple: we hate the feeling of anxiety associated with not knowing.
The Futility of Fortune-Telling
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: nobody actually knows what’s coming next week, or next month, or even next quarter. Nobody. Not the economists, not the tech prophets, not the journalists that write 40 page op-eds, not even your unemployed cousin who watches YouTube videos about the end of the world. Sure, some people make educated guesses that occasionally turn out to be correct, but that’s almost always luck wrapped in hindsight bias.
Within a single lifetime you can expect to see a dozen unpredictable events. Black swan events that weren't supposed to happen. In just the past few decades, we’ve lived through market crashes, tech disruptions, pandemics, cultural revolutions, and yet, most predictions still assume the next decade will be a straight-line projection of the last one. It won’t.
“A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
But you don’t need to know what tomorrow holds to be wildly successful in navigating it. What you need is an adaptable mindset and a toolkit that works across multiple possible futures.
Explain How The World Works Always, Not Only What You See Now
The quantum physicist, David Deutsch describes humans as “universal explainers.” Deutsch reminds us that in order to understand the universe we need to pull back and see the big evolutionary patterns. “We are not simply obeying our genes,” says Deutsch, we are explaining the big picture of how these genes and the other things behave over time.
When you take a big picture view the world becomes easier to understand and thus, easier to prepare for. While the near-term details of the future are uncertain, the broad strokes are almost laughably predictable. Take for example evolution. It’s extremely hard to predict how a single generational change might lead to adaptations, but zoom out and you can clearly see how an arm can evolve into a wing over millennia.
The guarantees of life are in the explanation of how it works at scale, not in the specifics of individual events.
Go back and read history from 50 years ago, or 500 years ago — wars, recessions, housing crises, political scandals. Sound familiar? That’s because 99 out of 100 things will repeat themselves. And yet, every generation convinces itself that its problems are uniquely new. Human behavior doesn’t really change. Markets rise and fall. Politicians disappoint. Technology evolves, but most of it just makes the same things slightly better.
Rather than trying to guess what will be different, you’re better off mastering the few things that always stay the same: human incentives, risk management, adaptability, and good old-fashioned resilience. Jeff Bezos says he frequently gets the question, “What’s going to change in the next 10 years? I almost never get the question: What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” For the person that’s preparing for any future, the second question is actually the more important of the two.
Understanding what stays the same allows you to build a strategy around the things that are stable over a long period of time. Bezos concludes, “When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
Antifragile Beats Accurate
Which brings us to one of the most important principles of preparing for an uncertain future: Antifragility.
Nassim Taleb, the patron saint of uncertainty, coined the term antifragile to describe systems that get stronger when stressed. Your bones, your immune system, your mind — they all improve through challenge. The same is true for your career, your investments, and your ability to navigate an unpredictable world.
Rather than betting everything on one assumed future, the smarter play is to build a life that benefits from uncertainty — one where volatility, surprises, and change don’t break you, but actually make you better.
That means:
- Diversifying your skills instead of specializing to the point of fragility.
- Keeping financial flexibility instead of over-leveraging on a single outcome.
- Investing in your health, because your body will keep score.
- Building strong relationships, because the best opportunities come from people, not predictions.
Mood Follows Action
Another truth about the future: it doesn’t come to you — it comes from you.
People spend years thinking about what they want to do next, waiting for clarity to magically appear. But the reality is, clarity comes from action, not the other way around. Small steps may not look like much when looked at individually, but just like evolution, each step is accruing interest.
Want to know where you’ll be happiest in ten years? Try new things now. Pivot, experiment, put yourself in motion. Your best decisions won’t come from sitting around pondering probabilities — they’ll come from doing and adjusting based on feedback.
A Future You Can Trust
You can’t predict the exact events of the next five days, or even those within the next five years with any certainty. But you can set yourself up for success by making decisions today that will pay off in any scenario.
Instead of chasing predictions, focus on principles:
- Be adaptable. The ability to pivot is more valuable than the ability to forecast. Learn the skills of being like water, as Bruce Lee says. Find a way to go with the always changing tides and seek opportunity in every moment and even in setbacks.
- Be antifragile. Put yourself in positions where you benefit from volatility. Start with your body. Watch is get stronger when you put it under frequent strain. Move to your mind. Learn new skills and watch your confidence improve.
- Invest in yourself. Your skills, health, and network compound over time. Make working out and learning new skills the norm. Make life your classroom. We no longer need school to be the only place we learn new things.
- Take action. The best way to figure out the future is to start moving toward it. Don’t overthink your plans. No plan survives contact with the future. Do something small, learn from it, then try something else.
The next version of you isn’t hiding in a spreadsheet or some guru’s TED Talk. It’s waiting in the actions you take today.
The question isn’t what’s coming? The question is how ready will you be when it arrives?
Update: Along with Devon McDonald and Bernhard Schluga, I’ll be hosting a 5-day retreat at the I AM ESCAPE Retreat and hotel, in Austria on 8th-12th July, 2025. Entitled, Second Harvest, this retreat is for individuals and couples navigating a major life shift, whether personal or professional (or both), who are ready to leverage their experiences, wisdom, and resources to create a life of deeper meaning, fulfillment, and alignment. You can learn more or apply here.
