Why waiting feels safe
When you think about changing something, the costs of change are vivid: lost income, awkward conversations, less time with family, the risk of failing in public. The costs of not changing are quiet. Another year of the same Tuesday. Another birthday. Nothing dramatic happens, so nothing seems to be lost.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people weigh possible losses more heavily than gains of the same size (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). The status quo gets counted as “no loss”, even when it’s costing you something every week.
What people regret
In Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec’s research on regret, people’s short-term regrets were mostly about things they had done. Looking back over longer periods, their regrets were mostly about things they hadn’t done: the chance not taken and the path not tried (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995). Later studies found this pattern varies between people and situations, so treat it as a tendency.
A later study by Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich went further. People’s most enduring regrets were about failing to live up to their ideal self, the person they hoped to become, more than about failing their duties and obligations (Davidai & Gilovich, 2018). For successful people, that’s worth noticing. You’ve probably met most of your obligations very well. The question is what happened to the hopes.
You’ll change more than you think
Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson asked thousands of people how much they had changed over the past ten years, and how much they expected to change over the next ten. At every age, people expected to change much less in the future than they reported having changed in the past. The researchers called it the end-of-history illusion (Quoidbach, Gilbert & Wilson, 2013).
That cuts both ways. It means “it’s too late for me to change” is probably wrong: you’ll keep changing whether you plan for it or not. It also means the person who’ll live with this decision in ten years will be different from you now, and may care more about what you didn’t try than you expect.
Is it too late?
The sentence “it’s too late” is one of the most common I hear from people in their forties. It sounds like a fact. It’s an assessment, a judgement about what’s possible, dressed up as an assertion you could check.
So check it. Too late for what, exactly? According to whom? Who do you know, or know of, who changed direction at your age or later? What would you need to see to know it really was too late?
Usually what’s too late is a specific version: becoming a professional athlete, say, or starting at the bottom of a new career with no savings. What’s rarely too late is the direction underneath it.
The 12-month question
Here’s the question I use. It’s also one of the five in the Reading on this site.
If the next 12 months look exactly like the last 12, how is that for you?
Answer it in three ways:
- Out loud, in one sentence. Notice the first words that come.
- In your body. Picture it for ten seconds: same work, same evenings, same weekends, same holidays. What happens in your chest, your stomach, your jaw, your shoulders?
- In detail. What would you have missed? What would be a little harder to start a year from now?
The answers tend to fall into three groups: “fine with me”, “uncomfortable” and “not acceptable”. Each is useful. “Fine” may mean now isn’t the time, and that’s allowed. “Uncomfortable” is the easiest to live with for years, which is worth noticing. “Not acceptable” is energy you can use.
From the question to a step
Seeing the cost of waiting doesn’t mean making a dramatic move. It means taking the first small step you’d regret not taking.
- Write what the next 12 months would cost you if nothing changed. Be concrete.
- Write the smallest step that would make the next 12 months different from the last 12, even slightly.
- Notice what your head says about that step. Write the sentence. Check it.
- Take the step, with a date, and read what comes back.
That’s how the loop in the method starts: a summit, a move, a reading, a choice, the next move.
A composite example
Details from several clients, combined and changed.
Jure, 46, had been talking about writing a book on leadership for eight years. When I asked the 12-month question, he laughed and said “fine, I suppose”. Then he went quiet. When we pictured it in his body, his jaw tightened. “It’s not fine. It’s the ninth year.”
His sentence was “I don’t have time to write a book.” We checked it. He had time to read three business books a month. His first step was 30 minutes of writing every Tuesday and Thursday morning before email. Not a book, just pages. Twelve months later he had a first draft.
One thing to try this week
Ask yourself the 12-month question tonight, out loud and in your body. Write down your answer. If it’s anything other than “fine with me”, write the smallest step that would make the next 12 months different, and take it this week.