The video discusses the concept of becoming a DIY futurist and how it can help individuals like Jack, who is confused about his career goals, plan for the future effectively. The speaker, who is Jack's coach, uses Jack's situation to illustrate common struggles people face in identifying their future desires amid societal pressures to achieve significant goals. The speaker argues that despite this widespread confusion, everyone can learn to be a futurist and craft their futures by reflecting on past experiences, acknowledging and overcoming psychological hurdles in envisioning the future, and staying focused in the present.

The speaker explains the importance of mental time travel, a term dubbed by psychologists, in helping individuals learn from their past experiences to inform future decisions. They emphasize that memories are interpretations rather than accurate records of the past, often highlighting only those experiences crucial to an individual's future. The video highlights that futurists actively reflect on past experiences to draw valuable insights and demonstrate how incorporating detailed, sensory visions of one's future can overcome challenges like the "Magoo effect," which makes distant futures seem less tangible.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. exonerated [ɪɡˈzɒnəreɪtɪd] - (verb) - To absolve someone from blame or fault, especially after due consideration or evidence. - Synonyms: (absolved, acquitted, cleared)

Thankfully for Billy, he was exonerated eventually, thanks to DNA evidence, but not before he'd spent a year in jail.

2. audacious [ɔːˈdeɪʃəs] - (adjective) - Showing a willingness to take bold risks; daring. - Synonyms: (bold, daring, fearless)

Achieve big, hairy, audacious goals.

3. estranged [ɪˈstreɪndʒd] - (adjective) - No longer close or affectionate with someone; alienated. - Synonyms: (alienated, separated, disconnected)

...we become increasingly estranged from our futures.

4. nostalgia [nɒˈstæl.dʒə] - (noun) - A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past. - Synonyms: (longing, reminiscence, sentimentality)

Sure, we all engage in nostalgia every now and again...

5. interpretations [ɪnˌtɜː.prəˈteɪʃənz] - (noun) - The action of explaining the meaning of something. - Synonyms: (explanation, analysis, clarification)

...memories are not so much records of the past as interpretations of your experience.

6. abstract ['æbstrækt] - (adjective) - Existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence. - Synonyms: (theoretical, conceptual, intangible)

Things further off into the future seem more abstract, less tangible, less relevant to us.

7. cognitive [ˈkɒɡnɪtɪv] - (adjective) - Relating to the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. - Synonyms: (mental, intellectual, perceptive)

We spend most of our cognitive firepower thinking about the next few seconds...

8. compelling [kəmˈpelɪŋ] - (adjective) - Evoking interest, attention, or admiration in a powerfully irresistible way. - Synonyms: (engaging, captivating, enthralling)

The futurist needs to create compelling, motivating visions of the future...

9. tangible [ˈtændʒəbəl] - (adjective) - Perceptible by touch; clear and definite; real. - Synonyms: (concrete, substantial, material)

Things further off into the future seem more abstract, less tangible, less relevant to us.

10. stimuli [ˈstɪmjəlaɪ] - (noun) - Things that rouse or incite activity. - Synonyms: (catalysts, prompts, incentives)

One of the biggest challenges we face comes from hot stimuli.

Be More Futurist - Dr. Graham Norris - TEDxWalthamstow

Jack has big ideas. When I met him, he was a senior manager at his company, and now he's looking to become the head of his department. I'm his coach, so my job is to help him realize his career goals. But we're a few sessions in and we're not making much progress. In fact, I'm starting to feel more like a teacher than a coach as I listen to all his excuses. The Internet wasn't working. The dog ate my computer, another aunt died. And so I say to him in this session, Jack, imagine it's three years from today. You wake up in the morning and you are the department head. Tell me about your day.

He thinks about it for a bit, and then he replies, well, I'd probably have to get up early in the morning, and then I'd be taking a lot of phone calls. I'd be dealing with a lot of difficult people. I'd be putting out fires. I say, Jack, stop there. That doesn't sound like any fun at all. How can this be your dream job? And he pauses for a moment, and then a worried look comes over his face. Finally, he looks up and he says, you know what, Graham? Maybe it isn't.

Now, I'll come back to Jack later. But I've met lots of people like him who are confused about the future and what they want from it. Society tells us that we need to think big. Find your purpose. Achieve big, hairy, audacious goals. Create value for our organizations. Be valued. Yet the reality of the world that we work in is one of distraction and overwhelm, chasing our tails, resisting eating all the chocolate biscuits while working from home, we become increasingly estranged from our futures. Instead of being a source of hope and optimism, the future has become a source of fear and worry as we procrastinate and second guess ourselves.

To reconnect with our futures and our ambitions for the future, we need to become DIY futurists. What is a futurist, you ask? A futurist is simply someone who explores the possibilities of the future. Some people think I try to predict the future with my crystal ball, but that's not what I use it for. What I try to do is spot the trends that will shape the future outside of our control and the ways in which we can influence the future so we can achieve what we want. It's a profession, but you don't need to be a professional. Anyone can become a futurist.

The key skill to becoming a DIY futurist is that of mental time travel. It's not about being Doctor Who. It's a term from psychology to describe how we recall the past, imagine the future, and make decisions in the present. And that's what I'm going to talk about today, in that order. The past, the future, and finally the present. And I start with the past, because the future is often an extension of history. The seeds of the future have already been sown.

As we think of the past, we often get confused about what's really happening. There's an adage amongst futurists that says, however far into the future you look, you first look back twice as far. So if you want to know what Walthamstow will look like in 10 years' time, first see how it has changed over the past 20 years. But there's a problem. There's a problem because our memories don't work the way we think they do. We like to think of our memories as being like computer hard drives, faithfully recording the facts of our lives. But do they really?

Raise your hand if you can remember what you had for lunch on this day last week. No one. There's usually one. Yes, there's one here. And that's because they have the same thing for lunch every day. Right. I know it. But it's not easy. Right? It's not easy to remember. And it's not even easy to remember what we had for lunch yesterday. Even so, the courts place great faith in the memories of witnesses, even though they're frequently proven to be wrong.

Take, for example, the case of William Mills. Billy Mills, as he was known to his friends, was convicted of robbing a bank In Glasgow in 2007, when robbing banks was still a thing. He was convicted based on eyewitness testimony, even though he was at home at the time. These eyewitnesses included two people who were in the bank when he supposedly robbed it and identified him from a lineup. Thankfully for Billy, he was exonerated eventually, thanks to DNA evidence, but not before he'd spent a year in jail.

In the United States, the Innocence Project has helped free almost 200 people just like Billy who were wrongly convicted based on incorrect testimony. How? How, when the stakes are so high, can our memories be so wrong? The reason is that your memories are not so much records of the past as interpretations of your experience. Sure, we all engage in nostalgia every now and again as we think back to a favorite episode of Friends or Love Island. But the real purpose of your memories is to inform your understanding of the future. We remember what's going to be useful, and we forget everything else you don't remember what you had for lunch because it's not important, even though you thought it was at the time.

The futurist doesn't leave this process of remembering and forgetting to chance because you can extract so much more value from your experiences by actively reflecting on them. For example, a study in India of call center trainees showed that those who spent just 15 minutes reflecting on what they learned at the end of every day improved their performance in a final exam by 23%. Another experiment by the same researchers gave participants puzzles to solve in two rounds. After the first round, in the break, they asked the participants if they wanted to do some practice puzzles or whether they wanted to write down their reflections, their learnings from the first round.

80% chose to do the practice puzzles. That's what life tells us, right? Practice makes perfect. And yet it was the smart minority who wrote down their learnings and their experiences from the first round of puzzles who outperformed on the second round. So futurists learn not just by doing, but by thinking about what we've done. So you've all been taking good notes from today, right? Don't worry, you've still got time before you go to bed tonight. Just 15 minutes can make all the difference.

So this is the first step in becoming a DIY futurist. It's recalling the past so we can learn from our experiences and see how they're going to apply to the future. And that's where we go next, to the future. Fortunately, it's not so easy to think about the future because of a psychological concept with a really complicated name that I just call the Magoo effect. For those of you who don't remember who Mr. Magoo was, he was a cartoon character who was incredibly short sighted. Because he couldn't see very well, he'd get into all kinds of mischief. And that was the heart of the cartoon.

For us, it's the same when we look at time. Things close to us in terms of time in the present or the near future seem concrete. Real important things further off into the future seem more abstract, less tangible, less relevant to us. It seems almost unnatural as well as hard to think far into the future. And pretty much the only time we do it is when we start planning for our holidays. Our friend Jack, for example, he could see the nuts and bolts of his job very clearly. But what was at the top of his career ladder wasn't as clear to him as he thought.

We spend most of our cognitive firepower thinking about the next few seconds to even think about tomorrow normally takes a deliberate effort for us to look at our calendars and to think through what's going to happen. So we can't leave this process to chance either. The futurist needs to create compelling, motivating visions of the future that seem as real and as vivid as what we can see right in front of us right now. The key is detail. If I ask you to imagine your lives in five years' time, if you're like most people, you'll probably create an image that looks very much like today. Even though five years is a really long time, just think about what you were doing five years ago.

But to create that compelling, motivating vision of the future, it's just a sketch you need to color it in. So if you think about yourself in 5 years' time, how old will you be and what does a person of that age look like? How about the people around you? How old will they be? Your partner, your parents, your children, your pets? And it's not just time frame. When we imagine the future, we need to think about where you'll be, who you'll be with, what you'll be doing, what you'll be thinking. We need to feel the future with our five senses. Take notes, record voice memos, whatever you need to bring that future to life so you can understand what it's really about.

If it feels good, great. You've just made that future more compelling. If it's not so good, no problem. You can try another future on for size. The imagination is a wonderful thing. You can keep trying futures on for size in the same way as you try clothes on for size in the shop until you find one that fits. This is the second step in becoming a DIY futurist. After recalling the past and understanding the value of our experiences, applying those to overcoming that magoo effect so that you can appreciate the possibilities of the future and what you want from it.

Finally, we come to the present, where the rubber meets the road and we set our ideas into motion. But if you thought recalling the past or imagining the future is difficult, perhaps the hardest is staying focused in the present. One of the biggest challenges we face comes from hot stimuli. Anger, fear, lust. Hot stimuli provoke our most basic instincts. In a particularly creative study that I kind of wish I was a part of, researchers in Belgium showed pictures of women in bikinis to heterosexual men and then asked them to make financial decisions. With their hot cognitive systems fully engaged, these men became almost incapable of making sensible long term decisions, especially compared with another group who was just shown pictures of boring landscapes.

Basically, these ladies in swimwear had strengthened that Magoo effect in these young men. Think about your lives. They are a heady broth of hot stimuli from angry driving, social media, outrage, junk food and of course, Love Island. This is the third step in becoming a DIY futurist. It's despite the noise, staying connected with what we want from the future and being aware of our state when we're pulling the trigger on those most important decisions.

As we pull all this together, let's go back to our friend Jack. I ask him to choose another goal. He thinks about it for a bit and then he starts telling me about how he used to dabble in art. And he thought very casually about combining his interest in art with his experience in finance to become an art fund manager. I say, great, I have no idea what that is, but let's do it. Let's imagine it's three years from today. You wake up in the morning and you are an art fund manager. Tell me about your day. And he comes to life. He starts telling me about how we have coffee with gallery owners and lunch with investors. And he goes to exhibition openings in the evening, goes partying with the artists. Sounds like a great life.

The most important thing we do every day is make decisions. All decisions are about the future. So by becoming DIY futurists, we can escape the noise and urgency of the present and reconnect with our ambitions for the future. You are today a product of decisions that you made last week, last month, last year, many years ago. And the you of next week, next month, next year, many years into the future will be determined by the decisions that you make. Starting today. I want you to lean into uncertain futures. I want you to make the decisions that make a difference. I want you to take control of your future. Thank you.

LEADERSHIP, MOTIVATION, PHILOSOPHY, FUTURISM, DIY, CAREER DEVELOPMENT, TEDX TALKS