Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Hal Hershfield on How You Embrace Your Future Self Today EP 302

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

In a world where our future selves are often neglected, UCLA Andersen School of Management professor Hal Hershfield confronts the chasm between the present and the untapped potential of our future. Prepare to challenge the status quo, redefine your relationship with time, and forge a path that leads you closer to the resplendent reality you envision for yourself. The time has come to bridge the gap between who we are and who we strive to be. Hershfield is the author of the new book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. Embrace Your Future Self with Hal Hershfield In a riveting episode of the Passion Struck podcast, host John R. Miles has an engaging conversation with Hal Hershfield to discuss the value of connecting with our future selves. Hershfield shares his research on how a strong relationship with our future selves leads to better outcomes in areas such as exercise, ethical decision-making, and financial planning. Additionally, he highlights some common mistakes people make when thinking about their future selves, such as projecting current feelings onto them and thinking superficially about them. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/hal-hershfield-embrace-your-future-self-today/  Brought to you by Hello Fresh. Use code passion16 to get 16 free meals, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/5eJwWrHAESg  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://youtu.be/QYehiUuX7zs  Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Catch my interview with Marshall Goldsmith on How You Create an Earned Life: https://passionstruck.com/marshall-goldsmith-create-your-earned-life/  Watch the solo episode I did on the topic of Chronic Loneliness: https://youtu.be/aFDRk0kcM40  Want to hear my best interviews from 2023? Check out my interview with Seth Godin on the Song of Significance and my interview with Gretchen Rubin on Life in Five Senses. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  Passion Struck is now on the AMFM247 broadcasting network every Monday and Friday from 5–6 PM. Step 1: Go to TuneIn, Apple Music (or any other app, mobile or computer) Step 2: Search for “AMFM247” Network

Coming up next on Passion Struck. This is the next frontier. How can we examine these sorts of questions in situations where the impacts will be long lasting? And how can we ensure that people don't become habituated, if you will, to whatever sort of interventions we might use? I would doubt that if I continually confront you

with your future self, you'll continue to act future-oriented because anything else, you'll probably eventually start ignoring it. One of the big questions is, how do I vary things up in such a way that's always gonna be fresh and novel and make you continue to think about that future self? Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show,

we decipher the secretsmyles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators,

scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 302 of PassionStruck. Frank Pie Apple is one of the top 10 health podcasts. And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn, and to live better, be better, and impact the world. In case you didn't know it, PassionStruck is now also on syndicated radio on the AMFM247 National Broadcast.

And you can catch us every Monday and Friday from 5 to 6pm, just go to the show notes, and you can find the links there. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we now have episodes starter packs. These are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize, and it convenes you topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or PassionStrike.com slash starter packs to get started.

And in case you missed it, last week we had three amazing episodes. The first was with Seth Goden, where we launched his brand new book, The Song of Significance, an episode you absolutely want to check out. I also interviewed Scott Simon, who is an acclaimed speaker, author, and the founder of the scarier soul movement, and we discuss the book of the same name, which is about how do you find a courage to live an intentional life. And lastly, I interviewed Dr. Gloria Mark, who's the chancellor's professor of informatics at the University of California Irvine, and we discussed her brand new book Attention Span, which dives into why we are being so distracted and losing our focus on the most important things that matter.

Now, let's talk about today's episode. Around a decade ago, today's guest, Howhurstfilled, a UCLA professor and psychologist presented a significant TED Talk with a core idea to secure a better future. One needs to develop more secure and empathetic relationships with their future self. And although it may seem straightforward, we often struggle to make decisions that would genuinely benefit our future selves. We might choose, for instance, a stake over vegetables, ignore concerns about cholesterol.

We might splurge on luxurious, horrors, or boats instead of saving for retirement and fail to follow through on our exercise routines despite understanding the long-term health consequences. The reason for this is that so many of us view the future as too hard to comprehend, leading us to prioritize instant gratification over our overall well-being in the years to come. Whether that's financial, physical, emotional, or otherwise. In our interview, Hal and I discuss why individuals who can develop a strong connection with their future selves tend to strike a better balance between living in the present and planning for the future.

We will discuss his brand new book, Your Future Self, How to Make Tomorrow Better Today, which delves into the scientific aspects of this topic, highlights the cognitive errors that we make while contemplating our future and offers actionable guidance on how we can enhance our present lives, visualize our ideal future, and transform it into reality. Al Hirschfeld is an acclaimed professor of marketing, behavioral decision making, and psychology at UCLA's Anderson School of Business. He has received several awards for his exceptional teaching skills and groundbreaking research in his field. First fields research on future selves has gained considerable attention and has been featured

in outlets such as NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am absolutely honored and thrilled to have Hal Hirstfield on Passion Struck. Well, come hell. Hey, thanks so much, John. I'm really happy to be here. You and I have been talking about this interview for a very long time. So I am so excited we could finally get it into the books.

And part of the reason I learned about you was the work that you're doing with Katie Milpman. And I wanted to ask you about the behavioral change for good initiative that was founded by Katie and Angela Duckworth. And can you tell me about its importance and why you joined it? Oh yeah. So Katie and Angela have been doing absolutely fantastic work, not just with BCFG, but in their own independent research. The BCFG is really special. It's a great name, right? Behavioral change for good. And I think the for good means two things there, right?

It's both positive change, but then positive change over a long period of time, right? For good. And what I love about the initiative is that they've gathered together a number of just top researchers around the world. I'm honored to be included in that set, all of whom try to study theoretically interesting and theoretically motivated work that's also practically significant, right? That can also make a difference for individuals or caught consumers and firms as well in policy makers, right? So it really cuts across the population there.

Well, I think it's so important because I've mentioned this before, but you don't see many organizations who are getting so many scientists and researchers together to do these large meta-stud studies that really benefit the entire field, but more importantly, benefit all of us. Yeah, you're so right about that. And one of the things that KD and Angela have really pioneered is this concept of a mega studies, right,

which J. Van Bable and Wendy De La Rosa have also been spearheading their own separate efforts on. And the concept there is you get a whole bunch of researchers together to look at the same problem and everybody comes up with slightly different interventions or different techniques. And then you put them all against each other and see which ones really bear out, which ones seem to work and have some staying power. And one thing that I think is so important about this sort of work is that it helps solve the gap that's existed for so long between academic insights and policy and industry work, right? So much of great academic work lives in journals and stays in journals and doesn't really get translated. And this really helps in that process. Well today we're going to be talking about your brand new book, Your Future Self, How to Make

Tomorrow Better Today, which was actually published by one of my favorite publishers, Little Brown Spark. And you've been studying the science of Future Self and our ability to travel in our minds for a long time. Was there a particular event that happened or a sequence of events that got you down this path to make this your focus? Yeah, I would say it's a sequence, right? I can trace it back to when I was a kid in a way when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always had the same answer, which is I knew exactly what I didn't want to be. My parents were both psychologists and I love them dearly, but for some reason I just said I have to do something different and I got to the end of high school in the start of college. And for some reason I decided what I really wanted to do

is become a politician and I thought oh this is great. I can help people in their life. I was quite idealistic about it at the time. And so I get to my first year of college, and I go to register for classes, I go to register for intro poly side, the course you need. And I had completely loved my schedule and found out that class conflicted with another one I had to take. And so the only thing open to me was intro-social psychology. I loved this class and ended up being exactly what I wanted, right? I started figuring out, oh, here's how you understand how people make decisions and how to help them make better ones.

But there was something bigger about this, which was like, hey, I made a sort of mistake there. And it ended up actually helping me in the long run. But looking back, I realized there's a lot of times when people make mistakes of that sort, where they're focused on the present, they don't really think big picture, and those sorts of mistakes end up messing things up for ourselves. And so I became obsessed with this question of when do we choose in ways that make our lives better over time and when do we, well, love those choices? I could trace those incidents to my current and ongoing sort of passion for this sort of research and figuring out well how exactly do people relate to their future selves

and how do we help them improve those relationships? Well, thank you for sharing that. And one of my favorite episodes I did last year was with one of your peers, Cassie Holmes, and one of the things she often talks about is research. And I imagine as you've been doing this research, you've done a bunch of research with it. And I was hoping you might share some of the biggest lessons that you've learned from experiencing yourself

through your future self. Yeah, Cassie is a great proponent of doing work that matters, not only to others, but also to you. And I think it's so smart because it also means that you're excited about it. I've been doing this work for 15 years now. And over time, the focus has shifted for me in terms of how it's impacted my life.

Early on, I took it quite literally. If I really want to connect to my future self, I should think more carefully about how I spend and how I save. In part, I didn't want to be embarrassed in front of my friend on the guy who studies this stuff and yet I didn't have a fully funded retirement account, this sort of thing. But the impact of the research on me has shifted over time. Now I have young kids and now I often think more about how my future self will feel about the way that I interact with them and the experiences I have with them, my focus with them, and of course my wife and larger family as well. It's really become more a question about how I spend my time and will my future self look back and be satisfied

with how I spend my time or was he going to have regrets? And so it's been a great shift because whenever I have decision-point or a fork, should I do this or should I do that, it's really helped to have that perspective of what will older me think about that decision. Yeah, it's interesting. I have always admired Stephen Covey's work and one of the most important things I think he talks about

is this philosophy of the main thing is the main thing is the main thing, which is really what you focus your time on and your pocketbook really become the key elements of what your main thing is and where you're sharing your life. So this examination of our past, our present, and what we want our future to be really is an important element in deciding where you want to allocate that time. I think that's right. And the one thing I would maybe just add on to that is that it's really hard to have a main thing because if I said to you, well, the most important thing is family time and I only decide on that level other parts of my life would start

withering right I think the concept of balance has been I don't want to say debunked question that it's really hard to have balance but rather not we have a number of different things we do and at different times we have a different focus and at other times we put more attention in one domain or another and trying to allocate my time in ways that sort of maximally impacts the stuff that I really wanted to impact, that's become my focus, I would say. Yes, well, it is so interesting how we unconsciously, work consciously, engage with the world around us. And if we would just consciously engage

engage with the world around us. And if we would just consciously engage more on those things that bring balance to our life, what a difference it would make. Yeah, I totally agree. I think this really does harken back to some of the great impioniering work that Cassie Holmes has done on how we spend our time. Right? I think a lot of these things link up together.

Well, they certainly do. And I'm going to jump back to the book and I'm going to guide this interview in many ways that the book follows. You have three sections in the book and the first one is on the philosophy and science of traveling to distant futures in our mind. And you open up the book by mentioning positive psychologist Marty Seligman, whose research found that much of history through the lens of psychology has been dominated by the past. However, he and his co-authored John Tierney claim that what sets our species apart is our ability to contemplate the future. And I recently interviewed

Gabriella Rosenkellerman, who wrote the new book Tomorrow Mind with Marty. And in it, they say that perfection, the ability to anticipate and plan for the future, is the meta-skill for our era. Why do we thrive by considering our prospects? Let me just start by saying it. I couldn't agree more with that sentiment. That is the sentiment that this is the meta skill for our era. We thrive by considering our prospects in a way because, and I'm sorry to be blunt about it, we have to. It's the only way I think to survive, but then on top of that, to go beyond just surviving, and to moving into thriving. It's a skill that has had to be sharpened over the, let's call it, centuries, right?

At a period when life expectancy was considerably lower than it is now, it wasn't something that we needed from a very long-term perspective, right? Of course, perfection was necessary from the standpoint of thinking ahead to the seasons that we needed from a very long-term perspective, right? Of course, perfection was necessary from the standpoint of thinking ahead to the seasons and our food supply, et cetera. But that's on a much shorter timescale

than what I think is needed right now, where it's not just better perfection abilities in our own lifetimes, but also better perfection abilities that go beyond the sort of quote unquote here and now and into the further future, we call it two, three, four, I know some futurist

think about seven generations down the line. But point being, we need to sharpen those skills so that we can withstand many of the temptations and pulls and major issues of the present, I would say. I think it's such an interesting topic, and I loved how in your epilogue you were talking about the climate change dilemma that we have that's facing us and how you looked back in time, how maybe the people generations before us didn't exactly know what the future was to hold, but perhaps they had the forced site to take actions for their future civilizations that followed them. And in the same way,

you say that we can use this process of perfection, maybe in this case of climate change to travel in time to summons our minds eye on events that could come and how we can prevent them now. I thought it was really an interesting way of looking at it. I'll give some credits to Zander Rose who's on the board of the Long Now Foundation. I talked to him and he really brought up this point that he really really hammered this point home to me, which was that if generations past had stopped focusing on the future and solely attended to the present. And then I think you can go a step further and say, how do we only focus a bit more on some of the issues that are plaguing us now? Might we be in a better situation?

And it's very hard because the present is incredibly powerful, and it's really quite weighty. And it feels almost wrong at times to say, well, I know there's terrible things happening right now. And we don't have to go through the laundry, let's them sure, we all know them. It's really hard, in other words, to say there's terrible things happening right now.

And yet, I'm gonna do some work to append to the future, whether it's in sort of the medium term or the long term or the very long term. And yet, I think we have to do that. One of the things that Zander Rose had said to me was, it's not a 50-50 thing, of course. But if you were to get a pot of money and say, how do I allocate this money? You might be wise to say, let's take 10% of it. And put it towards issues that are going to balloon in size and impact a down the line. the balloon in size and impact down the line?

Well, some people have made the argument in your research that the future self may be thought of as another person. When imagining a birthday in the distant future, for instance, research participants, you found we're more likely to take on a third person perspective and see their future self as another person in their mind's eye. Why is it that we experience diminished empathy towards our future selves?

Right, that's some fascinating work that was originally conducted by Emily Pronen Mershi and her colleagues found, and this is work that's been shown by others since then, but they have found that there's a slight tendency, right, for people to think about their distant future selves using the third person perspective. It's a fascinating finding from my point of view, because it suggests that we, in almost an analogous way, think of our future selves as if there are other people. Now, your question is about diminishing empathy. And if you put your question and the finding together, I think what's happening is something like this.

There are many times in our lives when we act self-interested, right? I'm not saying that we're fundamentally selfish, but we don't always act behalf of others instead of ourselves, right? Like if the example I always like thinking about, it's not giving the charity, but rather, if you had a coworker, you barely know, and they stop you in the hall and they say, or on Zoom, whatever. They say, hey, I'm moving apartments this weekend. Can you help me? I think you'd be within your rights to say, no, I've got a lot of other stuff. Now, is that because of we're fundamentally selfish or a lack of empathy, I think it's a little bit of the fact that we don't fully relate to that person. They're essentially a stranger to us. And so if you apply that lens to our future selves, if they're not only another person, but someone we barely know,

like that sort of random coworker, it's not crazy to think that we don't have that much empathy for them. What an interesting way to look at it. I never thought of it that way, but thank you for sharing that. Yeah, for sure. It's not just a funny sort of quirk, right? But it has real implications. If I don't do that much for others who I have a very weak connection to, then I shouldn't really be expected to do much from my future self, who I have a weak connection to. In other words, if that's a future self that I have, not a strong relationship with them, well, it might make sense to do things today and not fully prospect and try to step into their shoes and see the world through their eyes.

One of the things that I found interesting around the research of future self is that it shows that a person's past doesn't dictate their future actions and behaviors as much as them being pulled towards their future self. Is that something that you have found in your own research? research. So it's not a question that I've looked at directly. And in fact, I know this is something that Seligman and some of his colleagues over the years have talked about as well, which is just psychology has traditionally focused on the past and in how our prior experiences impact us now and how to grapple with them. And we have for the last, however long, 20, 25 years been focusing as much if not more on how do people look ahead and how can the future be almost a more powerful anchor point for our behavior. Your specific question empirically, I haven't looked at what's stronger in terms of my likelihood to say

engage in some sort of behavior, my connection to my future self, my connection, my past self. I love the question though, but it's not something I've looked at directly. Well one thing you have done in your research is you have shown people images of their future selves and you've actually made that experience immersive. How did people react to seeing their future images and how did it impact their decisions? Right, in some of the work that I've done earlier on and that we've continued, we've shown people digitally altered images of themselves

to make them look older, right? It's pretty straightforward, pretty simple. The basic idea was, if we have a hard time imagining our future selves, let's boost people along, let's help them. It's my co-author, Dan Goldstein, helped with the term imagination aid, right? So let's think of these as an imagination aid. In one of the experiments, we put people into an immersive virtual reality environment where they walk around a room and they come face to face in this digital world with a mirror and they look in the mirror and they see that they're older self. And we've since done this in other different contexts online, et cetera. But one thing that I remember seeing when I would run research participants through this was this sort of exclamation of, wow, that looks a lot like my grandfather or grandmother. And I'll note that at the time that graphics were pretty low-tech compared to what we have now. I started doing some of this work more than 10 years ago. Now, there's some really simple methods to age yourself. Snapchat has one great tool, FaceApp is another. I don't work with any of the companies there. And it's quite realistic.

I actually used it recently and my daughter walked by the image and said, what's grandpa's picture doing on the screen there? In our work, what we found is that when people are exposed to these images, the exposure can help them have some more connection with their future selves and take more action for their future selves. So in some of the studies, it was really confined to the realm of intentions, hypothetical decisions. But recently, we've found that in people exposed to these images, there are a little bit more likely to make a contribution to a retirement account. This is a study that we did in collaboration with ideas 42 with a bank in Mexico. The gist is that exposure to these images can help.

I want to be careful. It's not like these are massive huge effects because we're dealing with really noisy domains. Spaces where there's a lot of different factors that impact people's decisions. From my standpoint, if we can do something that moves the needle a little bit, it can really go a long way, especially if the change lasts. it can really go a long way, especially if the change lasts. I'm glad you brought that part about intentionality up because it's really the whole lens through which we do this podcast. And I found it interesting how, as you just said, looking at these age progressed images, made many of the subjects more patient about their long term intentions,, specifically around finances, ethics, and health, which I found very interesting. Did you find that when they did this, were they short-term results, or did they become

long-term results? It's a million dollar question, with inflation at the 10 million dollar question. In many of the research context that we've examined, we've been looking at what I would call single-shot decisions, making a one-time contribution to your retirement account or in other research projects signing up for an automatic savings account or deciding to go to the gym. Some of those can be considered short term. You did it once, what's going to happen after that? Some, if I sign up for an automatic deduction, that's a single decision, but most likely I'm not going to change it, that can end up

having long-term ramifications. This is the next frontier. How can we examine these sorts of questions in situations where the impacts will be long lasting? And how can we ensure that people don't become habituated, if you will, to whatever sort of interventions we might use? I would doubt that if I continually confront you with your future self. You'll continue to act future-oriented because, can you think it else, you'll probably eventually start ignoring it. One of the big questions is, how do I vary things up in such a way that's always gonna be fresh and novel and make you continue to think about that future self?

Or barring the inability to do that? How can I set up these sorts of interventions in context where the outcome is one that's gonna stick for a long time. And what are some of your recommendations on how if we wanted to do this exercise of playing out in our minds, our potential futures that we could go about doing it? Are there specific questions you can ask yourself about your future self or how do you go about this envisioning? Well, John, I'm going to call back to the word you used a minute ago, which is intentionality.

And as you said, as a big part of your podcast, right, because I doubt that any of these exercises will be impactful if they're done and a lighthearted or quick and dirty way, right? The context that I've been looking at, whether its finances are health or ethics or environmental decisions, are big messy contexts where decisions happen solely and they happen in a way that requires deep thought. And so if I had a recommendation, if we're going to try to interact with our future selves, in an effort to change our decisions, then we might try to pair any sort of conversation or interaction with our future self

with a context where we're really ready to make a decision. When we're ready to say sign up to talk to the financial advisor or sign up to talk to my HR person or a nutritionist or somebody who can help me with these decisions, right? And I would really emphasize that talking to my future self is probably not enough. There really needs to be some back and forth. Let's just put up an image of your future self or just write a letter to your future self. I think there's gonna be some impact there,

but it would almost be like going on a date where you just do all the talking. You're never gonna find anything out about the other person and you certainly won't take their perspective. So I think what's necessary is trying to do what we can to step in the shoes of our future selves and figure out what would they ask me?

What would they tell me? I mean, I think that's the sort of exercise that can really dial things up here when it comes to making some of the decisions that are so hard to make. It's interesting. My kids are older than yours, but as I try to give them guidance, I often do it through the lens of my past decades. And if I had to do it all over again, what I would have told knowing what I know now to my younger self. So it's interesting how we can use that to influence others, but also the reverse of it,

I've used to influence where I wanted to go in life because I found in my 40s, I didn't make as much impact as I wanted to on others. And so I set a concrete goal that in my 50s, I wanted that to really be what differentiated them from other decades of my life. I love that. A couple of things that I want is, I love the concept of course of trying to talk to your

kids through the lens of what you would have wanted to know. Of course, I'm guessing since the beginning of time, this has been conversations that parents have had with children, right? And there's certain things we have to find out for ourselves. And if we're listening and paying attention, maybe we will learn to some extent what are mistakes or different ways of spending our time that we could do, how do we pay attention to our elders talking about what they would have done differently. But you brought up another point there,

which is this idea of goal setting around decades, which I love because decades in a way are meaningless. There's nothing that concretely separates your 50s from your 40s other than the number. However, it's a milestone. It's a nice time to think in a deep way about how you want things to be different. Yeah, and this presumably better. And the fact that you set that goal there in a concrete way is

nice because it holds you to something to try to make those changes. I'm glad we jump to goals because part two of your book is why we fall short of our goals. And I know one of the biggest goals that people have difficulty maximizing their long-term outcomes on is our physical and emotional well-being. And I want to ask you, how does the relationship between current and future selves influence our judgments and decisions

and what are three-time traveling mistakes that people often make? Let me start with the first part of the question. The first part is really about the relationships we have. I'll answer that in broad rest stroke. The gist here is that people who have a closer reported relationship to their future self, that is people for whom the future self feels like a close other

They're the ones who Experience better outcomes in all sorts of domains when it comes to asset accumulation Exor's highest likelihood to take an ethical path even some educational gains Life satisfaction recently. There's a paper by Charles Chou and Brian Lowry finding that people are more connected to their future selves experience more meaning in life as well. Yeah, I should know. These are correlational studies, but even when you factor out the things that you think might matter, the demographics, the psychographics, et cetera, you still find the relationships in many contexts.

There's a causal link to if I boost connection, I end up seeing a positive outcome on some of these as well Now your second question there is what are the three mistakes that we make? Well in the book I talk about the fact that we have these sort of time traveling mistakes I say one of them is that we get overly anchored on the present the present just impacts our decisions more In theory than it should. Another mistake is that we think ahead to the future, but we do so in a very surface level way. We convince ourselves that we've thought about it,

but we haven't really. And then the third mistake is a little bit of a combination of the first two, where we get anchored on the present and use our feelings right now to project them onto our future selves, essentially failing to really think deeply about the future self and thinking too much about the current self in ways that sort of can really perniciously impact our outcomes later on.

It's interesting you brought up the whole anchor concept because I recently interviewed Matt Higgins, if you're not familiar with him, he's the head of RSE Ventures and Professor at Harvard and recently wrote this book or in the Boats. And he has this analogy of the anchor to working on where you want to go in life because you end up hedging or anchoring yourself to things that are in your current position that you don't think you can get beyond to lead you to your future self. And it's such a limiting thing that so many of us do. I think you're right. I'll add a couple layers. I think the analogy of the anchor is so important because like a ship anchor, of course, it's not that it goes down to the bottom of the ocean and then just makes the ship stable right there, right? The ship still moves around. It can go forward. it can go back, however long

that chain is, but it's still confined to that general space there. And the same concept is true when we talk about when judgment and decision making researchers talk about numerical anchor, the idea is that numerical anchor holds a sway on us, though it's not the only impact on our decisions. And in a similar way, it's not that we can't engage with the future at all. It's just that the present is this really strong anchor on our feelings and our decisions in a way that makes us overweight things that are happening right now and underweight the outcomes that will befall us later. Very interesting. Thank you for sharing that. One of the things that I found while reading the book and doing research was the ship of thesis riddle.

And I'll give this analogy if a ship leaves Tampa, Florida and travels around the world, but during its journey, gradually replaces all its parts. Is it the same ship when it returns to port? In a similar way, people have asked whether people tend to think of themselves as remaining the same or different over time. And I was hoping you could relate that concept to future self. I think these are unanswerable questions, right? And we can stay up all night talking about this, right? Is it the same ship?

I might the same person. Part of what matters here is, what do we mean by same? What do we mean by different? And if we take same to mean literal, I don't think the ship is the same. If we take same to mean similar, the two things are so overlapping, then in some ways, I think we can

come up with different answers there. We're not necessarily specific ones or ones that we'll agree on. When we think about these concepts applied to the future self, part of what can be difficult here is trying to figure out whether or not future me is really me. Where I've landed on this question based on the literature out there, both from the philosophical side as well as from the psychological side, is that many important

things do change. We can expect that aspects of our personality change. We will get possibly more conscientious. We may become less extroverted, some fascinating research by the psychologist, Brent Roberts and his collaborators have found that over a decade, we might expect major change in one of our four or five personality traits. But you can look at that two ways.

You can say, well, most of our traits stay the same. Or you could say, wow, one big one changes. That's really quite fascinating. So in some ways, you can say that stuff remains the same and other things differ. When I think about it, the thing that I think matters most is why Nina Strowmanger, a professor at Wharton, has talked about as essential moral traits. That is, what are the core aspects of us that really make us who we are, that other people would point to and say,

John is kind and compassionate. If that changed, you would no longer be the John people know. Or sarcastic, whatever it may be, that sort of represents the core of you. I think if we can expect some continuity in those traits, then we can expect a stronger relationship and a stronger sense that there's something that links future me to current me and looking back something that links future me to currently and looking back

something that links past me to currently. But there's many other aspects that I can look at. My name, my face, my hair color, where I live, my friends that will fundamentally change over time. I think it's important that you brought up the core value portion because I think that our core values today and whether they are poor or sound ones really can influence our outcomes over time. And it's so important as we're doing self-examination to set those values for the person we want to be in the future. I'm not sure if you agree with that or not. I completely agree. I know this is something that you've talked about eloquently

before. I think it's such an important idea because it's the difference from sort of something happening to us versus making some sort of intention for it to take place. I think it's probably at the core of why many of us try to teach our kids to be tight. It's a moral trait that we want, and we want to have not just be a thing that's happening in the background, but something that we're really actively attending to. I love this, your question here, because what it's pointing to is the idea that our fate is in fix. It's not that it's the one we can try to actively cultivate some of these core aspects that we find important and use that as a thread that can connect now to later.

I got a chance to interview your peer Ethan Cross. So I'm sure you and I asked him about the fundamental question of fate. He found empathetically 100% that we can influence our fate. And I think imagining this future that we desire to have, imagining what this future can be has such a big aspect of influencing where we're gonna take our lives,

because the more we think about it, to what you were just saying, the more intentional, we start taking steps towards it. Whereas if we don't believe that we can influence our fate, if we believe that life just happens to us, we tend to treat it as we're being on autopilot. And I think there's a huge gap that exists between those two states.

I think you're so right about that. I think you have to appreciate the power of context, right? There's certain situations that are hard to escape. There's certain natural tendencies that we can't get around. If my intention is to become a pro basketball player, it's not going to happen. But then there's other aspects I could say that the deeper ones, the more meaningful pursuits, where I completely agree with you that our fate isn't fixed there. And setting that intention can matter. But I would add that if you take the work that Gabriel Oatingen and her collaborators have done, one of the things

that they find is that positive fantasies about the future can sometimes backfire, right? And that what we really need is implementation intentions and mental contrasting. In other words, figuring out where we are now and where we want to be and what's the gap, what stands in the way, what can I overcome? What are the overcomeable obstacles? Because if you engage in sort of one of these intention exercises and just sit there and think about, this is what I intend to have happen, that can really quickly blur over into a fantasy about the future. We get energy and utility from those fantasies. This is, again, what Gabriella Tangerine has found. and utility from those fantasies. This is, again, what Gabriella Tingen has found. And that sort of energy can push us to rest on our laurels

and to sit back and think positively about what might be without doing anything about it. So that sort of extra step of taking the action and figuring out what's overcomable, that's what's crucial there. Well, another question I wanted to ask you on these lines is I find that our meaning or our why drives our thoughts, energy, and actions.

And I wanted to ask you a two-part question, how does a lack of purpose impact our future self? And how do you shift from fearing your future to fulfilling your future? These are fantastic questions, and let me speculate a bit because I haven't done specific research on say, how a lack of purpose impacts a future self, that direction. I think it's a fascinating direction to go in. Here's my speculation though. As you said, those sorts of questions boil down to my big why. They boil down to what is driving me to do what I want to do. It's possible to have a future self without a sense of what that sort of, quote unquote, big why is, what that sort of bigger purpose is.

My suspicion is that it's going to be much harder to really envision where we want that future self to be, right? It's almost analogous to saying, I want more money in mind, maybe really helpful when it comes to envisioning what my future self will be doing and thinking more deeply about how the things I'm doing right now will impact that person. So I love the question. I think it's a great direction for future research. I'm going to jump from that to someone you feature love the question. I think it's a great direction for future research. I'm going to jump from that to someone you feature in the book who I have to imagine has looked at her meaning as a way to how it's influenced her career over many decades. And that's Jane Fonda, who you bring up in chapter seven. And you rightfully say that she has worn so many hats and has remained on the cultural cutting edge.

But you worked with her in a completely different role. Can you explain what happened when she put on a virtual reality mask and did the plank walking exercise? That's, and this is probably 13, 14 years ago. She was visiting Stanford where I was in grad school and she was working on a book about what we do in the latter years of our lives.

And that had brought her to campus to talk to some researchers. And I was lucky to be one of them. At the time, was working on the virtual reality experiment where we immersively put people into the room to have them see their future selves. Well, one way to explain the power of virtual reality is you can just tell people about it or you can really show them. And so the lab that I was in, this was Jeremy Balancin's lab, had built a virtual room where essentially you put your goggles on. The regular room,

by the way, is just the most boring on the script room. There's just four white walls. Well, then you put your goggles on and you look around and it looks like you're in a field. You walk around the field and about three or four steps in front of you is a giant seemingly bottomless pit. One thing that we do to try to get people to get immersed and show them the power of the VR situation is to say, hey, just walk across the plank.

Now we've game it a little bit, because there is a actual plank in the room. So when people are walking over the virtual plank, they're also walking over the actual plank. I feel bad saying that it's quite funny to watch people walk across this. I only say that because I know they won't get hurt. But we put the goggles on Jane and I stood behind her and shadowed her. We always shadow people because you want them to know that they're safe.

And she was a real champ. She walked across it bravely and strongly, though still, she had her arms on her side, she was balancing, and she, like, just about everybody else who does it says that was terrifying. Some people can't do it. They say, I just can't, and you stop and you say, you can't actually follow the plank that's in the room as it's a two by four, if best. And she was able to do it, but it was also a great demonstration of just how immersive these settings are when you're in these sort of virtual worlds. Yeah, I found it fascinating

and I highly encourage people to read that chapter, especially because it was one of my favorite and I think most impactful in the whole book. And in it, you use this philosophy that we're more motivated by a singular victim than the suffering that we see around us that many people might be going through. And you relate that to the concept of making people's future selves more identifiable because doing this analogy, you can reduce the distance between who you are now and who you will be in the future. And I was hoping you could explain that just a little bit more.

Right, it's the identifiable victim effect. Much of the research that's been done there, by the way, has been done by Deb Small and George Owens team, it points to this sort of what I find is a fundamentally ironic finding, which is that a description of many people suffering generates less of a strong response than a powerful story or image of one. This is a finding that's really steeped into pop culture. I think most people would say, what's the number one strategy that charities use? Of course, show up in image or tell a story.

That just works so much better, of course, than the stats. Stats are not vivid or emotional. Stories are and vivid, emotional examples are the things that drive behavior. I think you can translate these findings over to our future selves. We in a way have many future selves or you can think about just one, but there's Lurie and Vague and without thinking about them deeply, they can lack emotion. And so you think about what are the ways that we can make them more identifiable? What are the ways that we can almost dial up the contrast so we can see them clearly and vividly? That's when you can start getting into the territory where we can move the needle on behavior and get people to really relate to those distant cells.

Okay. And one of the things that we often do is we feel tension when we make sacrifices for our future selves and it can be something as small as do I eat a hamburger versus a salad or do I stay in bed or do I wake up and do I make the sacrifice and go to the gym? How can we make these sacrifices easier to undertake? Right, so I think you've got to start with the observation there, like you just said, is that there is a fundamental tension. It's always me now who has to do the painful thing in service of some later version of me. There's a quote I found when I was researching for the book. I think it was attributed to Grau-Tro-o Mark. What are future generations ever done for us?

Same thing. What's future me ever done for me? I've done a lot of work trying to figure how do we connect people more to their future selves? Well, this has been a sort of a shift to say, well, what are the other contexts where we should say, let's not even bother with trying to connect you to future you, but rather, what can we do to just make those current sacrifices feel easier to undertake? I've looked at a few different strategies. One, I call take the good with the bad, trying to infuse anything positive into a negatively valanced or negative motion situation as a way of offering those bad feelings so that

can push through and get to the other side, get to the thing I want to do. I also spotlight some of the work of Kidney Milkman on temptation bundling where we try to pair the painful sacrifice with something we want to do and some work by my colleague, Ali Lieberman, on what she calls tangential immersion. Basically, the idea is similar, but there's something a little different there, which is make sure that you have a match between how exciting something is on the positive side and how boring it is on the negative side. If you pair a really boring painful activity

with something that's much better, you're gonna eventually lose focus and stop the negative one. And then finally, I talk about what I call making the big small or breaking things down, right? So I've some work I'm really excited by in collaboration with Steve Xu and Shilmo Benarzi where we try to get people to sign up for long term savings accounts, not by talking about the amount

that they'll have to contribute in monthly terms, but by talking about how much they have to contribute in daily terms. Right, $5 a day feels so much more palatable than $150 a month. And the gist there is that the sort of smaller chunk, the smaller temporal chunk, if you will, it just feels less painful. Many people can think about a five dollar purchase that they can give up on a daily basis, but it's considerably harder to think about the $150 purchase I can make on monthly terms. Okay, and I had one last question for you, and that is anyone who's a fan of the show knows I love the topic of transcendence. And I wanted to ask you, how does pursuing our future self impact, self-actualization?

It's a really beautiful question to some extent, because I think it circles around the notion, again, to come back to this idea that we've brought up before that we can eventually become more of who we wanna be. When I think about the self-actualization work from Maslow, my sort of more modern take on that is that we can start to become more of our authentic self and more of the self that we really want to be. And I think if you're living in such a way where life happens,

it's probably going to be a lot harder to just wake up one day and say, I got there. I'm now arrived at my authentic actualized self if we're instead taking more from perspective of what are the core things that I want to be present? And how can I get there? In other words, what are those aspects of that more actualized version of me? From my perspective, those are the questions we should be asking to eventually smooth that path between who I am now and that future more, you will actualize version of me. Well, I think that's a great way to end and give the listener something to really think about because I completely agree with you that we have the ability through our intentional choices that we make to self actualize. to self-actualize who someday we want our future self to be.

Hal, if a listener wanted to learn more about you, what's the best way for them to do so? Right, so you can go to my website, halhersfield.com, and all my research is there, and there's a link to the book there as well. And of course, my email is public and out there, or you can follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It was such an honor to have you here. And one of the amazing book I highly recommend the audience pick up a copy. And we just covered the surface today. So many great stories in there, great examples and so much wisdom.

Thank you, John. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Hal Hirschfield. And I've wanted him be on this program for a very long time. And I wanted to thank Al, Hashtag books, and Juliana, Probeczeski, for the honor and privilege of having him on today's show. Links to all things Hal will be in the show notes. Please use our website links in the show notes

if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one community place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Videos are on YouTube, both at passionstruck.com clips and John Aramiles. As I mentioned at the beginning, you can also find this now on syndicated radio, Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m.

on the AMFM 247 National Broadcast. Links will be in the show notes. I'm on LinkedIn where you can join my newsletter or you can also find me at John Armiles on all the other social platforms where I post daily doses of inspiration, hope, and meaning. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStark podcast interview that I did with Sally Jenkins, a New York Times best-selling author and a powerhouse in the world of journalism, with over two decades of experience as a columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post. We discuss her new book,

The Right Call, What Sports Teach Us about work and life. It's a famous story in the NFL. Tom Brady used to pay practice players if they intercepted him in practice. A lot of quarterbacks resent it when the second or third

teamer or some guy on reserve comes out and picks off the star quarterback in practice, Brady appreciated it. The message to the team when Brady would pay a practice player for intercepting him was, hey, the guy did us a favor. He exposed me now. So I don't have to get exposed and deliver up this interception on Sunday.

The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or inspirational. If you know someone who would like to understand more about up this interception on Sunday. you can live what you listen now. Until next week, go out there, be passion struck.