Prediction is the mechanism by which you learn from experience, thereby enabling you to discover what is true. As you observe any new situation or event, one of two things can happen: either the experience will meet your expectations, or it won’t. When an experience meets your expectations, your mental model of reality remains intact. But when an experience violates your expectations, your mind must update its model of reality to fit the new information. This is how you learn from experience and discover new truths.
Your predictive powers are extremely flexible. When you learn something new, your mind tries to generalize from the experience. It favors storage of general patterns instead of specific details. Your ability to recall the finer points will be fuzzy, but you’ll normally have a strong recollection of high-level patterns. For example, you can understand written language, but you don’t recall when and where you learned each word. You know what certain foods taste like, but you don’t remember every meal.
Your mind automatically makes predictions about the future, even when you aren’t aware of it. When you see the edge of an object on a shelf, your mind can predict that it will be a book if you pick it up. You expect the book to have a certain weight, texture, and appearance. As long as your expectations are met, the mental pattern remains intact.
Based on your previous reading experience, you already have certain anticipations about what you’ll find in this book. If it satisfies all your expectations, you won’t learn anything new and reading this will have been a waste of your time. In order to help you grow, this book must violate your expectations and give you some unexpected “Aha!” moments.
Your mind continually generalizes from your specific experiences, stores those general patterns, and then applies them to predict the outcome of new events. This happens automatically, usually without your conscious knowledge. However, once you become aware that this is how your mind works, you can deliberately take your intelligence to a whole new level.
There are two powerful ways you can apply your mind’s predictive powers to accelerate your personal growth. First, by embracing new experiences that are unlike anything you’ve previously encountered, you’ll literally become more intelligent. New situations shift your mind into learning mode, which enables you to discover new patterns. The more patterns your mind learns, the better it gets at prediction, and the smarter you become.
Read a book on a topic that’s completely alien to you. Talk to people you’d normally avoid. Visit an unfamiliar city. Stretch beyond the patterns your mind has already learned. In order to grow, you must repeatedly tackle fresh challenges and consider new ideas to give your mind fresh input. If you merely repeat the same experiences, you’ll stagnate, and your mental capacity will atrophy.
What you learn in one area can often be applied to others. For example, Leonardo da Vinci, considered a genius by any reasonable standard, achieved competence across a diverse set of fields, including art, music, science, anatomy, engineering, architecture, and many others. While some would argue that such wide-ranging interests were a result of his intelligence, I (Steve Pavlina) think it’s more likely that they were the cause of it—or at least a major contributing factor. By exposing himself to such a rich variety of input, da Vinci found patterns that others never notice. This vastly amplified his problem-solving abilities. What’s considered commonplace in one field often has creative applications in other disciplines.
Excessive routine is the enemy of intelligence. Exposing yourself to the same types of input over and over again won’t help you grow. You’ll merely satisfy your mind’s expectations instead of pushing it to form new patterns. If you want to become smarter, you must keep stirring things up. Establish basic routines only to provide a stable foundation for branching out into unexplored territory. Push yourself to do things you’ve never done before. Keep exposing yourself to new experiences, ideas, and input. The more novel situations you encounter that violate your expectations, the faster you’ll learn and the smarter you’ll become.
The second way to apply your mind’s predictive powers is to make conscious, deliberate predictions and use those predictions to make better decisions. Think about where you’re headed and ask yourself: How do I honestly expect my life to turn out? Imagine that a very logical, impartial observer examines your situation in detail and is assigned to predict what your life will look like in 20 years, based on your current behavior patterns. What kind of future will this person predict for you? If you’re brave enough, ask several people who know you well to give you an honest assessment of where they see you in two decades. Their answers may surprise you.
When you become aware of your mind’s long-term expectations, you bypass the pattern of denial and stare truth straight in the eye. This gives you the opportunity to reinforce your positive predictions and to make changes to prevent negative predictions from occurring.
Your emotions are part of your mind’s predictive output. Positive feelings stem from positive predictions, and negative feelings result from negative ones. When you feel good, your mind is anticipating a positive outcome that you desire. When you feel bad, your mind expects an unfavorable outcome. Negative emotions serve as a warning that you must change your behavior now in order to prevent unwanted predictions from coming to pass.
Listen to your honest expectations. Don’t fight with them or try to deny them, since that will only drive you into self-doubt. Learn to accept your expectations and work with them. When you notice that you’re anticipating a negative outcome, look behind those beliefs to find the cause, and keep making changes until your expectations change. When you uncover positive expectations, notice what’s working for you and keep doing more of it.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina