We’ve all been there:
- “We’ll do better next time.”
- “We can refactor that later.”
- “Let’s just ship it now and clean up the tests later.”
- “We’re just using that database until we prove the concept, then we’ll switch to something solid.
- “We won’t make that mistake again.”
You won’t do better next time. You won’t refactor that code until it’s caused you far more pain than gain. You won’t clean up the tests. You’ll stick with the crappy database until your business is on the line. You will make that mistake again.
We all fall prey to this form of optimism bias, the baseless belief that things will work out better than all the evidence says it does. We are particularly vulnerable when it comes to beliefs about ourselves. We can barely admit we’ve made mistakes in the past, so contemplating the possibility of making mistakes in the future is nearly impossible.
When you make a mistake and suffer the consequences, there are three ways to react:
- Do nothing
- Half-assed improvements
- Real improvement
The problem is that a lot of half-assed improvements look whole-assed when viewed through rose-tinted glasses. You give your future self a little bit too much of the benefit of the doubt. They’ll be smarter, more knowledgeable, less easily distracted, more careful about following directions, and all the things that we wish we’ll be but never will. For instance, you might add items to a checklist, because your future self will always look up the checklist, will always find it, will carefully follow every item in exactly the right order without taking any shortcuts, etc. This unrealistic optimism leads us to believe that we can address complex problems that we failed to solve today by adding complexity tomorrow.
Dan Milstein, then of then Hubspot famously said, “let’s plan for a future where we’re all as stupid as we are today.” Yes, learning is important. Yes, you’re getting better every day. But the way in which you’re going to be better is unpredictable, and you’re not guaranteed to be better in all the ways you need to be exactly when you need to be. If you really want to deal with this problem better in the future, you have to accept that your future self is going to be basically just as flawed as your present self and construct your system to work in spite of those flaws.