You don't need a DeLorean or Tardis to time travel.
We do it everyday.
We have two versions of ourselves - Now Me and Future Me.
- Now Me wants to eat ice cream, Future Me can eat salad for the rest of the week.
- Now Me wants to buy shoes, Future Me can worry about superannuation.
Now Me is governed by Short Term Bias, our desire for immediate gratification, which helps explain procrastination, bingeing and impulse purchases.
👉 It’s also why only talking to your customer about benefits they’ll reap down the track won’t get you anywhere. They need some form of payoff now.
But there’s two more things to consider when it comes to time travel.
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Future Me loves variety
Thanks to Diversification Bias, Future Me tends to seek variety. When imagining our future needs, we overestimate how many options we’ll end up using.
From planning meals to optioning a product to packing for a trip, we think we’ll want variety but in reality, Now Me sticks with a smaller array of favourites.
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Future Me is more virtuous
When we imagine our future selves, we think we’ll have greater motivation than is likely to be the case.
For example, when choosing movies to watch at a future time, people tend to opt for highbrow, earnest flicks. When choosing in the moment, it’s Romcoms and blockbusters that get us in.
Instead of planning for our best selves, we need to plan for tired, cranky, immediate gratification Now Me.
Does this resonate with you? How do you get Now Me to do what Future Me promised?
Refs:
- Diversification Bias - Salisbury, L. C., & Feinberg, F. M. (2008). Future preference uncertainty and diversification: The role of temporal stochastic inflation. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(2), 349–359. https://doi.org/10.1086/586915
- Virtuous future self - Read, D., Loewenstein, G., & Kalyanaraman, S. (1999). Mixing virtue and vice: Combining the immediacy effect and the diversification heuristic. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 12(4), 257–273. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0771(199912)12:4<257::AID-BDM327>3.0.CO;2-6
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