By Futurist Thomas Frey

We’re a very backward-looking society. We’re backward-looking because it’s human nature and because, well, it’s easy.

Think about it this way: We’ve all personally experienced the past. We see evidence of the past everywhere. In fact, all information that we encounter is essentially historic in nature.

The past, then, is very knowable, and we’re hard-wired to look at the things we already know and understand. The problem is, we’re going to be spending the rest of our lives in the future. For this reason, we essentially find ourselves walking backward into the future, which is clumsy at best.

As a futurist, it is my job to help turn people around so they can anticipate the future and walk toward it, boldly and with confidence and inspiration about what the future may have in store for us.

That leads to a more profound question than it may initially seem: How does the future get created?

The future gets created in our minds and in the minds of everyone around us. It turns out that we all participate in creating the future, and the truth is that some people have far more influence than others.

I like to put it all in perspective with the idea that the future creates the present!

This is exactly the opposite of what most people are thinking. You’re probably coming up with counterarguments in your head right now, aren’t you? Most people think that what we’re doing today will create the future, but think about this: it is the images of the future that pervade our thinking that will determine our actions today.

Let me rephrase that: it is the images of the future that we hold in our heads that determine our actions today.

This includes every decision, every involuntary action, and every plan, hope, desire, friendship, and daydream. Everything is being filtered through the preestablished mental picture of the future that we have in our heads today.

Our image of the future is what I refer to as our inner vision.

The key thing you need to recognize at this point is that if you change your vision of the future, you will also change the way you make decisions today.

That’s right. Simply altering your understanding of what the future holds can dramatically alter the process through which you make decisions today.

For instance, how would your plans about the next ten years change if you realized that your chosen career field wasn’t even going to exist five years from now?

It should be no surprise that my intention with every speech that I deliver is to alter each audience member’s vision of the future. If I’ve done my job well, those audience members will walk away from my talk with a different, more accurate view of what’s next, allowing them to make different, better decisions.

That’s what futurism is all about, offering people a clearer vision of the future. Once they gain that vision, they will have all the tools they need to make vastly better decisions moving forward.

Every one of us is already deeply immersed in the future though few think about it this way. And yet we are living, breathing, and swimming in the future. Just as fish have no awareness of the water within which they’re swimming, we have great difficulty understanding a future within which we’re already immersed.

In a world filled with techies and number crunchers, there is a constant push to capture, model, and analyze our analog world in a digital form, often for little more reason than for the business-minded to accurately measure their return on investment.

But not everything can be quantified. Not everything in life is measurable and ready to be neatly slotted into a big data model or dataset. For example, one seemingly insignificant insight into the future can result in dramatically different consequences and how the path of your life unfolds. Think about those chance encounters with people who proved so significant to your life journey. What if you hadn’t gotten that flat tire? Missed a connecting flight? Stepped in to finish that college presentation?

The world is far more complicated than the simple surface details we can measure. Billions of people offer an endless number of potential interactions. What’s the value of a new idea, a new strategy, or a new awareness being added to a previous blind spot?

Too often, our predilection for focusing on a single detail or aspect of our lives can blind us to the future, to an enormous change that’s about to obsolete or replace an entire business, industry, or life.