Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they’ve experienced. And since experiences will always be different, disagreement will be constant. Same as it’s ever been. Same as it will always be. Same as it ever was.

People tend to have short memories. Most of the time they can forget about bad experiences and fail to heed lessons previously learned. But hard-core stress leaves a scar.

The typical attempt to clear up an uncertain future is to gaze further and squint harder—to forecast with more precision, more data, and more intelligence. Far more effective is to do the opposite: Look backward, and be broad. Rather than attempting to figure out little ways the future might change, study the big things the past has never avoided.

Historian Tony Judt notes that the state of affairs was so bad in postwar Europe that only the state could offer hope of salvation to the masses of displaced people. So it did. Everything from generous unemployment insurance to universal health care became common after the war in ways that never caught on in America.

But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?” It’s the question that contains the most answers about why people don’t agree with one another.

you can separate today’s tech entrepreneurs into two clearly different buckets—those who experienced the dot-com crash in the late 1990s, and those who didn’t because they were too young.

It is too easy to examine history and say, “Look, if you just held on and took a long-term view, things recovered and life went on,” without realizing that mindsets are harder to repair than buildings and cash flows.

Eventually being right is one thing. But can you eventually be right and convince those around you? That’s completely different, and easy to overlook.

Doing long-term thinking well requires identifying when you’re being patient versus just stubborn. Not an easy thing to do. The only solution is knowing the very few things in your industry that will never change and putting everything else in a bucket that’s in constant need of updating and adapting.