Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (19 page)

When Jacqueline of the Roscoe Park Eight took her initial tour of the Nettelhorst School (
chapter 6
), she immediately started comparing the sights before her eyes with her mental pictures of the school where she’d want to drop off her child in a year or two. Contrasting the then with the now helped her and the other mothers produce their wish list.

When I visited ULL and LSU, I tried to think about what I would want and need from a school not just as a freshman, but also as a sophomore, junior, senior, and graduate. Some of my thoughts about each school were reinforced, whereas some of my beliefs were challenged. But both visits gave me new information I could use to create a more accurate vision of me going to school, graduating, and then going to graduate school. Contrasting that vision with my reality of being a high school kid with only one relative that went to college helped me realize that the path to graduation would be bumpy but there would be people along the way who would help me get where I wanted to go.

Getting specific about the needs of her future self helped Lisa, a talented graphic designer, weather her first career setback. She was downsized during the recession when her firm lost a major account. It took her weeks to face the reality of being out of work and the bad feelings that come with being let go. When she first started looking again, she adopted what I call the “message in a bottle” approach to finding work. She would start her day by scanning online job boards for openings, spend hours completing generic applications, and then attach a résumé. Hitting “send” put her into the purgatory that is waiting for a response from a message set adrift by a desperate castaway. In Lisa’s case, the sea was the economic downturn, and it was filled with bottles that looked very much like hers.

Lisa’s turnaround came when she started to time travel. She imagined herself sharing her portfolio with the department manager at a hot new design firm she’d read about in a local business magazine. She thought she’d be a good fit for the company, and she was excited by the thought of working there. Next she made an honest assessment of the now: she realized that her portfolio needed refreshing, that she actually had little background knowledge about that design firm (or others in her area), and that she was anxious about going on interviews and meeting new people. Mentally contrasting the then with the now led to more thoughts: She needed to upgrade her wardrobe if she wanted to look right for a hipster agency. She needed to practice her interview
skills with a designer friend. Lisa still didn’t have a job, but instead of feeling worn-out and discouraged, she had a vision of her possible future self plus a list of positive steps she could take to get there. She was on her way from Point A to Point B.

How well do we really know our future selves?
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, in one of his immortal monologues, captured the problem most of us face as we plan for that stranger in our future:

I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, ’cause I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. “What about getting up after five hours sleep?” oh that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem, I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want. So you get up in the morning, you’re exhausted, groggy . . . oooh I hate that Night Guy! See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy. There’s nothing Morning Guy can do. The only thing Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy loses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.

So, how do we get Night Guy to sit down and have a conversation with Morning Guy? Better yet, how do we get them to realize they are the
same
guy?

Hal Hershfield, assistant professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, might have the answers. He researches how thinking about time can affect our decision-making and emotional experience. His work has shown that people who are primed to be aware of their future self (sometimes by as low-tech a method as visiting with an older relative) focus more on their best interest and/or the best interest of society, compared with participants who haven’t made the connection between now and the future. Among other things, they choose to save more money and act more ethically.

In one study, Hershfield and his colleagues used digitally altered photos to bring undergraduates face-to-face with an image of themselves several decades into the future. As if in a mirror, they saw how the contours of their cheeks and jaws changed, how their hair whitened and their skin wrinkled. Then they were asked what they would do with one thousand dollars if they received it unexpectedly. Hershfield reported, “They allocated twice as much to a long-term savings account if they saw an older version of themselves versus just seeing themselves now.”

The age-progression software Hershfield used is not available to the general public. But there are other ways to meet the future you.

Enter the Aging Booth:
A trip to the mobile app Aging Booth can give you a sense of how you’ll look decades from now. Download the app and age away. What financial or health decisions can you make now with the help of the older you?

Write a letter to your future self:
The website futureme.org allows you to send a note to yourself months or years in the future. A note from a futureme user, “Joan in New Mexico,” captures the benefits of this tool: “I love the fact that I have a ten-year plan for my future and I will receive emails periodically along the way inquiring how I am doing on some of my goals . . . it will make me reflect on this time and question my reasoning as to why I felt a certain way and if I have matured or grown from the experience.”

Ask your future self’s opinion:
Thirty years from now (or even five), will your future self be glad you bought the expensive car, the premium vacation, or the house that’s a stretch for you? (Don’t assume that future self will always be a killjoy.
Hershfield says that if he’d thought long term, he’d have paid extra for a sunroof; the pleasure would have outweighed the slightly higher loan payments.) When you are in the midst of making your next big life decision, seek the opinion of the future you.

Spend time with an older person:
Do you have an older friend or relative who’s similar to you in interests and values and positive in
thought and mood? Imagine yourself looking back at your life from their perspective. How does taking the long view change your feelings about the situation you’re in and the choices you face?

By taking these short and long trips, you have been practicing future-casting. Now let’s put your skills to the test. Remember the question about your best possible life, five years from now? Take some time now to describe what that best possible life looks like. Be as vivid as you can. Preview the future you hope to create. Identify the goals that will help you get there. Write all this down to flesh out the details. Then say hello to your future self.

J
OS
V
AN
Bedoff served in the Netherlands’ military before he became a maintenance man at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s international airport. He’d done his share of latrine cleaning in the service, and he’d learned a trick that made the job a lot easier. How he adapted it for his new position made him a rock star among people like me who study human behavior.

Straightforward idea, really. Play offense rather than defense. Instead of figuring out faster ways to clean latrines, make it so there is less to clean. Put a red dot with a marker on the sweet spot of each urinal—to one side, not too high, not too low—and the soldier will aim. Soldiers, male soldiers that is, really don’t like to miss a target.

Of course, we’re not just talking about soldiers here. If you’re a guy—or you’ve ever raised a boy—you know what I mean. If there’s no red dot, a Cheerio floating in the toilet bowl will do just fine.

When Van Bedoff arrived at Schiphol, it turned out they had a serious spillage problem. The bane of maintenance workers, spillage is the
technical term for the amount of urine that hits the walls and floors in a bathroom.

Van Bedoff asked his supervisors for permission to conduct an experiment. He knew a red dot made with a marker would work, but he was thinking about something more permanent. He proposed to have a realistic, life-sized fly etched into the back wall of each urinal. (
Whether he knew it or not, the fly was a nod to the bees the ancient Greeks painted in the bottom of their chamber pots.) He got the okay and was given a small budget to modify a number of urinals.

And that is how a fake fly, black against white porcelain, changed the behavior of thousands of men from around the world who passed through Schiphol. Spillage was reduced by 80 percent, and the job of the Dutch maintenance workers became much easier.

Van Bedoff shaped behavior by changing one critical aspect of the environment. He did not put up signs scolding or entreating travelers. He did not invent a new, high-tech urinal. What he did was exploit a natural tendency that focused attention on a desired goal.

How does Van Bedoff’s experiment relate to hope? It shows that we can create situations where it is easier to make the right choice. We can set up systems that kick in when we are too tired, too busy, or too distracted to keep our eyes on our goal. When hopeful people use these strategies, they don’t have to muster up as much willpower, self-control, or agency to keep moving forward, to shield themselves from people who might undermine their efforts, or to act in line with their best interests. This chapter shows you how to hold firm to the belief that you have the power to make the future better than the present by putting hope on autopilot.

Van Bedoff’s fly was a cue—the signal X that reliably triggered response Y. Cues are the key to simple if-then plans that free up a lot of mental space and energy. They’re also the basis for our good habits—you’re
going to bed, so of course you brush your teeth, even with your eyes half shut. And they’re one of the things that make bad habits so hard to change. Hopeful people become masters at using cues in their favor.

My friend Heather wears an electronic wristband set to vibrate every twenty minutes or so throughout the day. It’s a cue for her to get up from her desk, stretch, and walk down the hall or around the room for a few minutes. This cue helps Heather ward off aches and pains associated with a chronic illness.

When I was teaching college, it was a real challenge to get undergraduates to take out their earbuds, turn off their phones, and make the transition into student mode. So I put the behavior on cue. Outside the auditorium where I taught, there was a bronze statue of three kids playing. I asked my students to stop by the statue each time they came to class, give one of the kids’ heads a rub, and then put away the electronics. We avoided a battle of wills over tunes and texts, the heads of the bronze kids brightened from thousands of rubs, and I had the pleasure of a class ready to pay attention.

Defaults are different from cues, but they operate just as automatically once they are set up. Hopeful people reach for this tool when they want to make an end run around indecision, procrastination, or stress. Defaults allow you to preselect a step toward your goal that goes into effect unless you take action to change it. For example, employers who sponsor 401(k) plans for retirement savings realized that employee participation lagged when each worker had to decide how much to contribute each month, and what funds to invest in. Many plans now enroll employees automatically at a preset level. Individuals can still change their terms or opt out entirely, but participation has risen—along with savings for the future.

Or say you intend to save for a specific goal, but there’s never any money left at the end of the month. You set up a default by putting your paycheck on direct deposit, and then instructing the bank to transfer a defined sum to a long-term savings account as soon as the money comes in.

The people you’ll meet in this chapter use many kinds of cues and defaults by setting action triggers such as goal contagions, precommitments, and when/where plans.

How hard is it to pass our goals on to another person?
No harder than spreading the common cold. Simply by proximity, we can infect others with the mission and excitement of our pursuits. And being exposed to others’ goals primes us to adopt them. Associate with people who share your goals, or the goals you want to be more salient, and you get an automatic boost in focus and motivation.

Social psychologist Henk Aarts of Utrecht University studies the way people form goals. His research reveals how much our conscious sense of wanting and doing things depends on an unconscious foundation of habits, social cues, and environmental triggers.
For example, he’s shown that people who simply read stories about adopting and acting on goals soon follow suit.