Foresight is key to success in all areas of our lives, including significant life decisions. Unlike people who lack foresight skills, they are much more likely to find themselves unemployed when jobs disappear unexpectedly due to new technologies, competition, or shifts in consumer tastes. So without foresight, we often have little idea what to do next. So developing our foresight skills is perhaps the best way to protect our current jobs and future employment potential.
Foresight gives us increased power to shape our future even in the most turbulent and changing times. People who can think about the future will be ready to take advantage of all the new opportunities that rapid social and technological progress creates.
Foresight is a skill for success
Foresight is the ability to see patterns that will affect our future, and it is an essential characteristic of success and motivation. So is our ability to accurately predict future outcomes. It constitutes a long-term view of the “bigger picture” of how certain events will develop and how we can act to affect specific results in our lives.
Thinking about the past and the future activates our minds and confirms that our memories and past experiences play an essential role in imagining and anticipating future events. We use our past experiences to learn general rules or guidelines about how business and events in the world work, and then we take these guidelines and use them to predict future events.
Foresight is a future-oriented behavior. Our interest includes current events, having a long-term view of future needs, and an idea of how to achieve them. Therefore, foresight is key to success and is an essential skill in any part of life. Note that those with foresight skills have the best preparation for the future and, therefore, the best results.
Valuable ways to build foresight in your daily life
Here are some basic ways to do it if you want to build more accurate and effective foresight as a key to success in your everyday life:
- Acquire knowledge. If more you know about a topic, the easier it will be to find common patterns and themes within that topic. Read books, articles, and scientific studies to gain as much knowledge as possible about something.
- Gaining experience. Work experience provides knowledge and ideas through articles or books. So try to find ways to actively expose yourself to new things and build a wide range of experiences to learn from and build upon when applying foresight.
- Think default. Run “thought experiments” in your mind, and ask yourself about the possible causes and effects of some situations that are not necessarily known to you. Also, think and ask yourself: “Does this make sense or is it possible?” and then use your knowledge to help you.
- Make small predictions. Practice making small, low-risk predictions to test your outlook. Ideally, the more knowledge and experience you have with something, the more comfortable you should use foresight. But don’t fall into the trap of “illusory superiority” by over-confidence in things, some of which are not well known to you. So it’s best to be as honest with yourself as possible.
- Play the critic. Always be prepared to test assumptions with a critical eye, and try to look for situations where you might be wrong or that the “rule” or “guideline” you have in mind is not working. It can help you sharpen your thinking and discover the different factors that may influence a situation you haven’t considered before.
See yourself in the future
Success and happiness need to have an idea and plan. The better your outlook, the more you can act accordingly today to be better off tomorrow. And ask yourself the following questions:
- How often do you look at your future?
- Do you have an idea where you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?
- Any long-term goals, aspirations, or interests?
- Where do you theoretically want to be in 5 or 10 years if you had a choice?
- What kinds of things do you need to start doing to get there?
Thinking more about yourself in the future can help you make better decisions in the present.
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