我们的文化崇拜规划，什么事情都必须事先规划。我们的每一天，每一周，每一年，我们的全部生活。我们有日记，日程，目录，对象，目标，策略，甚至是梦想。职业规划是这些膜拜中最阴险的一种，因为它鼓励一种感觉——我们对未来事件的控制感。但我们都不擅长预测我们的未来。当我们不能够预测下周将要吃什么样的三明治的时候，我们如何能够预测在未来的20年我们将要做什么类型的工作？未来对你而言本身就是一个陌生人，这就是为什么一个18岁的年轻人很难选择他职业的原因，其实对于一个中年人而言同样如此，只是他需要承受更多谴责的目光，这是我们的文化。-
正如那些调查问卷中的问题：你如何看待未来的一年时间？这已经引起了一种开始：未来如小游戏一样开始，像建在沙滩上的信念一样结束。你猜到了老板们最想听的是什么，然后你回答了他们想要的。有时候，你为了能够“升职”，这种对未来的事情详细考虑就已经变成了一种你必须玩的小游戏。
“根据自己的价值观和特质，我们自己作决定”
事实上，人们通常都不知道他们想要什么，心理学也已经证明了这一点。这就是为什么职业规划或者至少那些计划你下一步应该怎么走的事情是让人不愉快的。当你18岁，别人问你将来你想干什么时，这会让你很不开心。这里也许有许多不同的观点，这些观点中也许有着无数分歧，而且许多观点是完全相反的。但所有可能性都具有同样的诱惑力，那就是被那些无穷的螺旋型未来所环绕，对于那些中途辍学的跟随父母足迹的孩子我们不足为奇。但是我们并不想相信那些尝试或测试，不管是出于何种理由。我们想依据自己的价值观和特性，完全自主的做决定。
中年危机
18岁时做决定很难，但在理论上已经能够很好的做决定的中年也同样很困难。事实上，当你用30多年广阔的视野和乐观的心态代替那些愤世嫉俗的观点来对待工作，你已经更加清楚一份工作的底线。这里不仅有我们的工作经验，还有我们工作中的朋友，所有的这些人都会让我们感觉事业增添了光彩。
每个人都有自己的内在交易价值。你喜欢例行公事吗：无聊却很安全？你喜欢旅游吗：令人兴奋却不得不远离自己的爱人？你对挣更多的钱在意吗：必须获得更多的无聊/压力/更少满足感的工作？不管上述列举事情的结果如何，不管这些事情周围还有多少其它事情，让你决定生活中应该做什么事情很困难的原因是因为你必须去预测未来。
这里有许多原因为什么我们看起来好像擅长于预测我们的所想。如果我知道我在享受我现在所做的事情，那以后我就会很享受这个事情，不是吗？掌握了这些，我花费了数年的时间去打造一系列我的所爱――电影，书籍，连续剧；以及我所不喜欢的事情――看牙医，严重的困窘和流感，特别所有这些不是同时发生的时候。如果我同时取得了这些喜欢的和不喜欢的，很容易就可以预测未来我的所想。但是，好像我们经常被我们的未来所震惊。
“我们其实无法预测未来是什么使得我们幸福”
错误的想法（miswanting）[注释]
我们对未来的想法犯了错误的概念已经被Gilbert和Wilson命名为“错误想法”（miswanting）。他们的一系列的研究已经发现：我们预测在未来什么让我们更快乐方面的能力很弱。我最喜欢的一个简单实验：两组被试都参加这个实验，他们会得到免费的三明治，这对大学生来说绝对是一个好东西。
其中一组预先选择这一周他们所需要的三明治；另一组每天选择他们所需要的三明治。一个令人不可思议的事情发生了。那些每天选择三明治的被试每天午饭时都选择同样的三明治，并且这些被试对他们的选择做出了合理的高兴程度。
可是，令人惊奇的是，那些预先设想下一周午餐的被试选择却是多变的。他们周一选择火鸡三明治，周二选择金枪鱼三明治，星期三选择鸡蛋三明治等。但是随着下一周时间的到来，他们大多不喜欢他们以为自己应该有的变化。事实上，他们与每天选择的被试相比，显得更不高兴，并表现出了显著差异。
“如果我们知道我们的未来，我们都是如此的不快乐。”
预言失灵
这种“多样性”与“同一性”只是人们在预测未来情绪状态时表现出来的一种特殊偏差。这里有另一个积极心理学所做的“违反直觉的偏差”。主要是观察：当人们在生活中遭遇灾难性的坏事，或者幻想性的积极事件，人们如何预测他们的感觉。比如：如果你中了彩票你感觉有多好？绝大部分人预测他们的生活将完全改变，并且自己活得更快乐。而研究的结论是什么呢？是的，当人们刚刚发现自己中了彩票之后确实很高兴，但6个月之后，高兴的水平却回到了人生的“基线”水平。
可笑的是，在这崇高的旅程中，不管是预测我们中彩票后的感受，还是预测我们中午吃什么三明治时，如果我们知道我们的未来，我们都是如此的不快乐。所以，当我们都不能够预测我们下周将要吃什么样的三明治的时候，我们如何能够预测在未来的20年我们将要做什么类型的工作？
随着年龄的变大，我们偶尔会变得更智慧。随着我们的学习，不管是未知的还是已知的，我们都不擅长预测我们的未来。我们开始认识到这一点也不比我们曾经的想法更科学。
“人们开始明白未来包含着如此少的可确定因素…”
陌生的未来
这就是说你的未来对你而言本身就是一个陌生人。所以，你知道，同样的，那就是为什么一个18岁的年轻人很难选择他的职业。但是对于一个中年人而言，当他的所学很有限时，所遭遇的就是严厉谴责的目光。
这好像是说明人越老越谨慎的另一个原因，但远不是这样的。更准确的说，谨慎并不是随着年龄而增长的，而是受自知之明的暗示。人们开始明白未来包含许多难以察觉的不确定事件，甚至包括那些看起来已经在我们控制之下的事情，就像我们选择三明治一样。
最强的猜测打败最谨慎的计划
对于“错误想法”的争论已经应用到我们生活中的任何领域，包括对我们未来进行预测。职业规划已经变成一种痛苦的事情，因为这是如此重要的一个决定，而且我们要通过掌握的非常有限的有用信息来理解它。
最好的职业规划的策略是这样的：尽你的所能来猜测，试验它，当你不喜欢它时请不要惊讶。但是，请无论如何不要在求职面试中提及这些。
Psytopic成员Roger翻译/原文链接
Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted
Our culture worships planning. Everything must be planned in advance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries, schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even. Career planning is the most insidious of these cults precisely because it encourages a feeling of control over your reactions to future events. As that interview question goes: where do you see yourself in five years time? This invites the beginning of what starts as a little game and finishes as a belief built on sand. You guess what employers want to hear, and then you give it to them. Sometimes this batting back and forth of imagined futures becomes a necessary little game you play in order to ‘get ahead’.
“We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences.”
In reality, people frequently don’t know what they want and psychology has proved it. That’s why career planning, or at the very least just deciding what you’re going to do next, is so unpleasant. It’s no fun at 18 years old when people ask what you want to do. There seem to be so many different options, each with myriad branching possibilities, many of which lead in opposite directions, but all equally tempting. Surrounded by these endless spiralling futures, it is no wonder that many a school-leaver sticks with what they know and follows in parental footsteps. But we don’t all want to trust the tried and tested, whether for good reasons or bad. We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences.
Midlife crisis
If it’s hard at 18, it’s even harder in midlife when people are theoretically better equipped to make their choice. In reality by your 30s wide-eyed optimism has normally been replaced by a more cynical outlook on jobs and the workplace. Now it’s more clear what the downsides of certain jobs are. There’s not only our own experiences of work but we also have friends at work, all of whom colour our perception of their careers.
Everyone has their own internal trade-offs. How much routine do you like: boring but safe)? How much do you like travel: exciting but you’ll be away from loved ones? How much do you care about earning more money: and taking a more boring/stressful/less fulfilling job? Whatever the outcome of all these swings and roundabouts along with many more, the reason that deciding what to do with your life is so difficult is that it involves predicting the future.
There’s many reasons why it seems we should be good at prediction what we want. If I know that I’m enjoying what I’m doing now, then I should enjoy it in the future shouldn’t I? On top of this I’ve got years of experience building up a set of things I like - cinema, books, sitcoms - and things I don’t like - trips to the dentist, severe embarrassment and flu, especially not all at the same time. If I’ve got this huge bank of likes and dislikes it should be easy to predict my wants in the future. And yet, it seems we are often surprised by what the future throws at us.
Miswanting
“We are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future.”
The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future has been termed ‘miswanting’ by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to a range of studies finding we are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future. My favourite is a simple experiment in which two groups of participants get free sandwiches if they participate in the experiment - a doozie for any undergraduate.
One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice.
Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they’ll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don’t like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day.
Prediction failure
This variety versus sameness is only one particular bias that people display in making predictions about their future emotional states. There is another counter-intuitive bias emerging from the work being done in positive psychology. This looks at how people predict they will feel after both catastrophically bad, and, conversely, fantastically positive occurrences in their life. For example, how good would you feel if you won the lottery? Most people predict their lives will be completely changed and they’ll be much happier. What does the research find? Yes, people are measurably happier after they’ve just won, but six months down the line they’re back to their individual ‘baseline’ level of happiness.
So, in the journey from the sublime - predicting how we’ll feel about winning the lottery - to the ridiculous - predicting which sandwiches we’ll want for lunch - we are incredibly bad at knowing our future selves. And if we can’t even decide what type of sandwich we might like next week, how can we possibly decide what type of job we’d like to be doing in twenty years?
With age occasionally comes wisdom. Over time we learn, whether implicitly or explicitly, that we are not that good at predicting the future. At the very least we begin to recognise it is a much less precise science than we once thought.
A stranger future
This means your future self is probably a stranger to you. And, on some level, you know it. That’s why it might be hard for an 18 year old to choose their career, but it’s a damn sight harder for someone in midlife when limitations have been learnt.
“People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties…”
This might seem like just another way of saying that people get more cautious as they get older, but it is more than that. It’s actually saying that it’s not caution that’s increasing with age, but implicit self-knowledge. People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties, even for those things that would seem to be under our most direct control, like our sandwich preferences.
Best guess beats careful planning
The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it’s such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information.
The best strategy for career planning is this: make your best guess, try it out and don’t be surprised if you don’t like it. But for heaven’s sake don’t mention this in your interviews.
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