Every day we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we become. However we are not always happy with those decisions. Dan Gilbet who is a psychologist asks a tough question:  Why do we make decisions that our future selves will live to regret?  That is a great question!

Dan in his TED talk (below) says that we are all walking around with the illusion that our personal history has just come to an end.  That we have just recently become the people we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives!  This is called the End of History Illusion.  We find it easier to remember who we were 10 years ago but we find it much more difficult to imagine who we will be in 10 years time and because we find it hard to imagine we think many changes are not likely to happen!  The bottom line is that time is a powerful force and it reshapes us in every way but we seem to appreciate this fact only when we look back at our lives and not forward!  Dan says that ‘human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished’.   The one constant in life is change.

Look back at your last 10 years.  Have you changed a lot/have a lot of things around you changed?  I bet they have.  Now look ahead to the next 10 years and realise that things will change just as much.  Remember however that the future is not fixed and you can profoundly influence the life of the person you will become by the actions you take today and every day.  That thought is empowering.  Make decisions today that your future self will live to appreciate.