FutureIQ Knowledgebase

Your Success Formula Is Already Outdated - Future IQ

3,727 views Wait, is this logic right? • Dec 05, 2025
Open in YouTube
Slog Reference: How To Prepare For a Changing World

Description

The world isn’t just changing, it’s rewriting the rules. What made you successful 10 or 20 years ago may not help you tomorrow, yet most of us continue to rely on old habits, outdated systems, and the advice of experts who mastered a world that no longer exists. We repeat familiar strategies because they feel safe, even when the environment around us has already changed.
Like chess players still using classical openings in a format where those strategies no longer apply, or cricketers bringing Test match logic into a fast paced T20 world, we often cling to what once worked instead of adapting to what now matters. Our brains are wired for comfort and repetition, not reinvention.
But the future demands a different approach. It doesn’t reward prediction, it rewards awareness. It doesn’t favour certainty. It favours experimentation. And it doesn’t need rigid beliefs, it needs open, adaptable thinking. In a rapidly shifting world shaped by AI, unconventional careers, evolving education systems, and constant technological disruptions, the real skill is learning how to learn and just as importantly, learning how to unlearn.
This episode explores how to stay mentally flexible, how to identify outdated mental models before they hold you back, and how to cultivate a mindset that stays curious instead of defensive. Because the people who thrive in the future won’t be the ones with the most knowledge but the ones who can update their thinking the fastest.

💬 Join Our WhatsApp Community: http://tapthe.link/futureiqwa

Videos you may like / referenced in today’s episode:
Mastering Both Your Brains | Syste
Believing is Seeing - How Bayesian Priors Trick Your Senses: https://youtu.be/bxx-My8J_kM
Why Superstition is Smarter Than Science - Chesterton’s Fence Explained: https://youtu.be/LYdXruXmlng
How to Learn Anything Fast? Learning by Osmosis: https://youtu.be/YlRmFeOODoY
The Internet Is Making You Stupid - Echo Chambers & Content Curation: https://youtu.be/ftSJN9R-IY4

Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro: World Rewriting Rules
00:48 - Chess Analogy
04:49 - Brain Wired for Comfort
09:55 - Understand What Doesn't Change
11:57 - Focus On People Instead Of Ideas
15:50 - Try To Solve Harder Problems
17:43 - How To Forget Old Methods
20:53 - How Ai Is Changing Things
23:24 - What Are The Effects On Education?
27:10 - Final Thriving Advice

Follow FutureIQ on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefutureiq/

Source / References:
https://paulgraham.com/ecw.html
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chess-players-familiar-moves-memory
https://www.ultratechcement.com/for-homebuilders/home-building-explained-single/descriptive-articles/simple-vastu-tips-while-building-home

#futureiq #future #successmindset

Related Slog Matches

How To Prepare For a Changing World

Keyword Search

0.00

Transcript

The world is changing very fast and it is highly likely that you are not prepared for the changes that are coming. It is possible that all the things that you do for success are great for yesterday's world but they are not right for tomorrow's world. Right? I mean of course in general this has always been a little true but it has become especially important in the last few years. Yeah, it has become very very important because everything I have learned so far in my life suddenly has become pointless because knowledge is on tap and uh I have to now develop new skills all over again. No use of a college degree anymore.
Yeah, but it's not as obvious as that always, right? Sometimes the situation the ways in which you are you know not prepared can be more subtle. Let me give a slightly involved example to make you understand. Okay, let's start with the game of chess. Okay, in the game of chess, there is something called opening theory. The idea is that a lot of people what they do is that they memorize a whole bunch of sequences of opening moves, right? That I will play D4, then if he plays this, I will do this, then if he plays this, I will do this. If he plays that, I will play that and so on, right?
And obviously the number of variations is very very large. But for each sequence, what has happened is that over the centuries, people have found the best move in any particular situation, at least for the first 10, 12 moves of the game, right? And if you happen to have memorized a particular sequence and your opponent plays exactly that and your opponent hasn't memorized that then at the end of like the 12th move you're already way ahead of the opponent because you know you just knew whereas the opponent had to figure things out.
Information asymmetry. Yes. So what happened was that instead of chess being a game of skill, it was becoming more and more a game of memorization of opening sequences. Right. So Bobby Fischer, one of the greats, he felt this was bad and he invented a variation of chess which now some people called Fisher random chess. Uh the basic idea is that you start with a regular chess board, regular placement, but then the first row of pieces, the king, queen, bishop, etc., you randomize their order. Oh, as a result, what happens is that everything that has been memorized about openings is no longer valid because you move this pawn because you want to open up the bishop, but now the bishop is in
a different place. Right? Ah, so you are you're forcing your system one to take a back seat and forcing your system two to come into play. Not just that, you might say that well then people will just memorize for all possible variations. very hard to do because there are 960 different variations. That's why it is sometimes called chess 960. Okay, so far I haven't come to the point of this episode. Okay, this is just the sound. I'm waiting. I'm waiting. So, chess 960. Okay, you can play it online.
Many people actually play it and somebody went and did research. Okay, they analyzed 147,000 players playing chess 960 against each other and they found that a fairly large number of people were using the same openings in this as they use in regular chess despite the pieces being randomly despite the pieces being randomly changed. Right? Not just that, I mean the same person, I mean from the account you can see same person plays regular chess as well as chess 960 and you see that the most common move they make in regular chess like D4 people will play D4 here, E4 people will play E4 here. So there is actual data showing that people are still using regular chess strategies
in chess 960. Part two of the research, the more interesting one is that chess engine analysis shows that these moves were inferior. Of course, they're going to be inferior because the original moves are for a certain piece and for a certain opening to open certain ranks and files and they are not I mean is it just muscle memory at that point that they were using those openings? No. The point is that you come up with certain patterns in which you behave. Okay? The pattern would have come up for some reason long ago.
But now it has become a standard pattern. It has gone into your system. One, you do it without thinking. Okay? Yeah. Maybe it is muscle memory. But the point is that you use strategies which were optimal for yesterday's world and you don't realize that the world has changed. Okay. I will give a personal trivial example but it is you know also illustrative. Okay. Uh my office I've been going to the same office for 15 years and there there is a you know the door there is a door which locks and then outside that there is a grill that also locks. So I've been carrying two keys with me every time I go to the office. Just recently I realized that we
have stopped closing that grill, the outer grill seven or eight years ago and I am still carrying two keys in my keychain. Right. I knew I knew that was coming because I have done the same thing with my home security door. There's a lock outside the door which we don't use. I still have the key on my keychain. All right. Okay. Okay. Uh so we do fall into certain old behaviors through laziness, through memory. But it disappears after a while. Now that you've said it, I'm going to go home, take that key out of the keychain and keep it away.
So not always. Let me give a different example. Okay. Vasu chastra. Okay. Past shastra was invented when we were all living in the northern gangetic plains in India and there the plane used to slope in a certain way. Water used to come from a certain side. Correct. Uh sun right I mean because this was north of the tropic of uh cancer. Uh the sun would be in the south and east in the morning and so on. Right. Is it cancer or Capricorn? Now I'm Cancer. Cancer. Cancer. So there were rules right? Your entrance should be north and northeast so that you don't you get gentler light in the morning and not direct harsh sunlight.
Right? Makes a lot of sense there. Makes no sense now that you are not even necessarily living north of Tropic of Cancer. Plus your house is in a 12story building and it is there is no sun anywhere. Right? kitchen in the southeast uh I mean makes sense because first is that you know harder sun in the morning keeps the kitchen dry plus smoke that is coming because of the prevailing winds there is going to go out of the house not inside the house correct again you're not living there I mean you know the sun is not there the wind is not in the same direction and you have fans and air conditioners and air purifiers and gas stoves gas stoves
there is no smoke right most importantly there is no smoke so But you know it's been literally hundreds of years if not thousands uh the world has changed but the rules haven't changed right so okay and even leaders do it right the people at the top do it so there is a saying which says that generals are always fighting the last war right so world war I for example using the the best tactics of those time just before world war I was based on infantry plus cavalry Right. That uh you know the certain way the first the men will come and they'll do this then the horses will come in and so on. Right.
Yeah. Completely defeated by machine guns, barbed wire, trenches and rapid fire uh artillery. Right. Correct. This resulted in mass casualties because people hadn't yet caught on to the fact that the world has changed. Same thing happened in the Russia Ukraine war when suddenly out of nowhere drones came and completely changed how tanks are used and other such things. Right. Okay. So are you saying that everything about our lives is like the old chess openings that you talked about? Not everything but you have to ask a yourself a lot of things like does a university degree matter? How important is a cover letter when applying for a job? If Chach GPT can generate a lovely one, is learning programming still a
good idea? How important are experts? Things like that. Right. You're making me question my very life, Naven. Yes. And in questioning my life, the one question that keeps coming back is how do I prepare for this world that is changing so rapidly. Yeah. So Paul Graham has a lovely article uh which says how to be an expert in a changing world. Right. M so one of the key things he says wait Paul Graham the Y combinator guy yes so one of the most successful investors ever and the person who saw like amazing changes before anyone else like for example investing in Airbnb when it just seemed like a ridiculous idea that oh you will just invite people
to come into your home and live uh rent one room in your house right um so Paul Graham the most important thing he says is that you can't predict the future. Correct? Okay. So instead you have to just try to understand the situation. Okay. First thing to understand is understand what doesn't change. Okay. And if you paid attention during our episode on pace layers, it says human nature is the slowest to change. Right? So in the base layers at the top fashion is the thing that changes fastest. Commerce changes next. Governance changes even more slowly. Infrastructure changes even more slowly. Then you know I forgot one culture and nature. So culture and nature will change the slowest. Right?
So know what changes fast, what changes slow. Second thing to understand is that change usually change that really matters which will catch you you know unprepared comes from an unexpected source right so don't even bother trying to predict it instead what you want to do is because you can't predict the future you should try to predict the present predict the present okay what I mean is that a whole bunch of things have already happened M okay but we don't know about it right you can't predict the future but you can find out what has already happened right there is a famous saying which says the future is already here it is not just evenly distributed this is very much
true so was it Ray Kerszswwell I think it was Ray Kurswell but I'm not sure yeah so um you know the point is that instead of trying to figure out what the future is going to be and pointing yourself in the direction. Just become admit that you don't know the right direction but become super sensitive to the winds of change. Super sensitive to what has already happened. Right? I mean there is there is a very clear argument to be made that if the future is already here and it's not evenly distributed then there are glimpses of that future to be found somewhere around you.
Absolutely. Where there are early adopters picking up on that future. Correct. That very important point you brought up right which brings up one of the important things. Focus not on ideas, focus on people. Ah okay. Because there are you know there are some people who are more attuned to new things and you know try to follow them see what they are doing today that is what the rest of the world will be doing tomorrow right and in this I have a very good example for myself. Yeah, I was not very attuned to the whole concept of LLM and GPT and all of that until you pointed out to me how I was losing out on what could potentially be
a future. Correct. I was still hung up on the fact that there are legal, ethical, moral obligations implications there and I'm still somewhat hung up on them. But then I also noted that my legal my legal ethical moral opposition to that does not stop the world from going ahead. So I have to sort of it's a very weird dance I have to do with myself and I'm still trying to do that dance. But even for myself I cannot keep track of all the changes that are happening in AI. Just way too much. And plus even the ones where I notice, oh this has happened, I can't tell which one is important and which is not. So there are
like about five people I follow who spend much more time on understanding this. And over the last 3 years, I have used Beijian updating to figure out that these people are reliable. I've dropped some people who are not reliable. Right? That's how I do it. But the big picture here is that you have to be aggressively open-minded. Right? If you're close-minded, this is how I always do things and you reject any change, then you're going to be in trouble. Be open-minded and then with an open mind do the UDA loop, right? So, first is observe and orient. You should observe and you should be observing the right people. So, you know, check out our episode on curating your consumption
also. Uh surround yourself with people, other people who are open-minded, right? And that will lead into our other episode learning by osmosis. Okay. Third part is you know have some working hypothesis. Okay. I mean I said you can't predict the future but it is okay to have some thoughts. Oh maybe this can happen, maybe this can happen. But remember that they are hypothesis, right? Make them falsifiable. Ask yourself if I believe this is going to happen. Ask yourself what will happen if this is true and what will happen if that is not true and then look for those two different possibilities. Right.
So predict like micro futures of each thing that you hypothesize. Correct. Exactly. Not just predict you might even do little experiments try out things. Right. Be more actionoriented. Right. And uh you know I guess we haven't done an episode on strong ideas weekly held. So you know we have spoken about it off the channel but we need to do an episode on that. Yes. Right. So u you know it's a very interesting concept strong ideas weekly held um which in fact can you just give a quick summary of the concept of strong ideas weekly? You know let's say you have a hypothesis of this is going to happen right you work as if okay this is going to be true right and
then go and start taking actions around it not like oh maybe it'll happen I don't know I'm not sure so let's just wait and watch no no wait and watch right strong idea right to believe it and believe in it strongly right now but start experimenting keep looking for evidence that this might be false and the first time you find evidence that this is false be ready to reject that idea and find a new one. Right? Strong ideas weakly held. Right? Yeah. Now, here is one more thing that Paul Graham said, right?
Which is that, you know, if you need to get these hypo ideas about, you know, what's going to happen in the future. You can't get ideas by sitting and saying, "Okay, I'm going to sit and I'm going to come up with ideas for the future." Right? Instead, just be a domain expert. try to solve hard problems. Okay? You don't get ideas by trying to get ideas. You get ideas by trying to solve hard problems and then respecting your instincts about it. Okay? Because the more of a domain expert you are and when you're trying to solve a real problem, not just theoretical issues in your head, when you're trying to solve a real problem, you'll get an maybe I should
try this, right? Why don't we what about this things like that right and do you know why if you are an expert you are going to get instincts like this we have done an episode on this exactly fingertips feeling right so but so that is the idea I mean basically it is that you can't predict the future but you have to watch the present much more carefully be open-minded and look for the winds of change uh regarding the domain experts bit that he mentioned mentioned if you suffer from imposter syndrome I see you the only solution to that is you have to find a way out of it figure out a way out of it
because until you do you're not going to be a domain expert or you're not going to call yourself a domain expert whereas the fact is you are a domain expert and you don't know it yet. Ask people around you and they'll tell you what you are a domain expert in. That's one way to get rid of the imposter syndrome. Try it out. kind of worked for me not entirely still trying to figure it out but do it but coming back to our discussion on uh the old chess openings bit let's let's keep that as sort of the foundation of this okay so now I know what my old chess openings are now I know that I have
certain steps to do if I want to forget these this habit of old chess openings and try and figure out a system to way of chess openings what does that look like in my day-to-day life is what I'm wondering. See, one of one easy way is to look at what your parents used to do which you are also doing now and but some other people are no longer doing right and then start analyzing that. So for example old behavior right 20 years ago 50 years ago your parents used to watch news and of course you are also watching news right now right so try to understand why it made sense in those days I mean in those days news
was respectable there was some attempt at being unbiased and definitely some attempt at focusing on things that actually mattered and so on right but if you do a first principles analysis of news Now, right, you and we talked about this in stop watching the news, right? You will basically find that in modern world a lot of those things are no longer true, right? Because of virality, because of mass broadcast due to the internet, uh the subscription models have collapsed. Fully ad supported model is there. So now they have to try to be toxic and news is not really news. The the thing about fully ad supported is news has been fully ad supported for a long time.
There was a point where news was unbiased because uh it was seen as a profession as as something to aspire to and now it's no longer the case and also the concept of broadcast itself has changed in the past few years because of the internet. Now where broadcast once was literally a oneway broadcast, now this broadcast has become more of a conversational thing over social platforms and social networks and all of that. So a lot of models have indeed changed. I do agree. So anyway, I mean and once you decided that this behavior is wrong, the new behavior is you know instead of watching news curate your consumption, right? again episode but let's take a different slightly
broader example social media right so this is not your parents generation although for some of you it might be but yeah say 20 years ago social media was what was social media it's like Facebook and you connected with your friends and that was a way of being in touch with your friends but in the last five seven years social media is no longer really about that right it's the algorithm feeding you things from somewhere anywhere in the world and it is more forwards, it is more viral content and so on just and again that's something you could at least you know maybe not stop social media entirely but change how you curate it right correct correct correct
a different way I mean another reason to ask yourself all of this is you know AI okay yeah AI is going to change everything right a whole bunch of things which made sense until 2021 will suddenly not make sense. the world is going to change entirely right and I mean that's just too broad a topic so I won't talk about it but let me give two three examples that you might not have thought about right self-driving cars are here right way Tesla etc the car can drive itself yeah but uh how much of our life is based on the fact that most traffic on the road is cars and those cars are driven by humans
badly right I mean you know self-driving cars maybe traffic lights are not needed at all right they could just coordinate with each other by sending each other messages at the last moment I mean uh seating arrangement is all based on the fact that there will be one driver and a steering wheel here I mean if all of that goes away maybe you could have people sit around in a circle there can be a table in the middle right okay that's an interesting way to look at it also because you are driving the car and you spend most of your day doing actual work, not driving. That is why you need to most of the time your car is
in the parking lot. That is why we need so much parking space. With self-driving cars, maybe most 95% of parking lots disappear, right? The car doesn't have to be parked. The self-driving car is just dropping different people all day. Uh right. So all so so many things can completely change. Seat belt might not be needed because self-driving cars will drive at a safe pace and they don't have accidents unless there are other humans doing dumb things on the road. Okay. Okay. I I am very interested uh in this example that you've given me because it shows a very clear path towards reaching this hypothesis of a future. So connecting back to the Paul Graham essay that you
very beautifully outlined I can see that you went from an assumption about the future which is uh cars will be replaced by self-driving cars and then you started building micro futures on top of this hypothesis on top of this idea on top of a bet that uh self-driving cars will replace all cars eventually and how that will change the landscape around you from what you see normally. That's a very interesting as an exercise you could do the same analysis for what happens if most deliveries are done by drone right and most wars are done by drones right a more difficult question which I don't have an answer to is that schools are still stuck in the old way of doing
things I don't know how schools will change but something to uh worry about and the you know some of you should do your own micro uh predictions and experiments related to schools. Parents and children will need to figure out on their own what parts of school are important and what are not. I don't know if schools will be important but I believe that teachers will still be important and when you try and reconcile those two concepts together it makes for a brain mush time. But uh any thoughts you have happy to hear them in the comments or in the WhatsApp community that we have QR code on your screen link in description join us there. We have tons
of fun conversation there and tons of very intellectually stimulating conversation there. So uh looking forward to your thoughts there. But yeah, this is definitely something uh worth thinking. But now I'm also thinking what we are doing here is we are looking at a Chesterton fence evaluating whether or not it is needed and then destroying these fences. Yeah. Okay. So for those who missed our episode on Chesterton's fence, this is a great point that you have brought up, right? What Chesterton turns fence says is that if you come to a road and you see a fence there and you say nobody is using this fence, let me get rid of it.
And then in the middle of the night, you find out why the fence was really there. Right? The point being that some old system, some tradition, do not get rid of it until you really understand why it was there in the first place. Right. Correct. That is one thing to keep in mind. Even more important to keep in mind is the fact that the stated reason for some old tradition might not be the same as the real reason. Okay. Uh my uh ideal example for this is homeopathy, right?
Homeopathy claims that there is all these you know toxins and you dilute them so much and uh you know then they will fight disease in you. Whereas my explanation for why homeopathy works is really much much different. It has more to do with the placebo effect and the fact that uh you know modern medicine doctors are too busy to even listen to you whereas homeopathy doctors will take such a detailed history that you feel heard and just that by itself makes you better and so on. Right? Don't want to get into the details here. That's a different episode. But the point is that the stated reasons might be very different from the underlying real reasons. Right.
Correct. So you have to be very careful before you discard an old thing. And this whole episode is about discarding old things. So what what what should we do? Right. So the important principles are this one is that you need to really understand anything that you're trying to discard you need to really understand it right you need to really understand why it existed in the old days and why it is no longer relevant right and you have to look for the reason behind the reason that requires a lot of first principle thinkings and guess what your lucky day because you know that's we spend a lot of time on future IQ doing that kind of
f first principles thinking. We spend every single moment on future IQ doing first principles thinking. Every single episode on future IQ is first principles thinking. Even when we analyze entire papers, we do it from a lens of first principles thinking. So yeah, your lucky day definitely. And if you want to make somebody else's day lucky, forward them this episode. Yeah. So let me summarize, right? I mean you can't predict what is going to change but you can definitely predict that a lot is going to change especially with AI. Okay.
Yeah. Most experts are not experts because they are experts in a past version of the world not the future. Right. So to deal with it do not try to predict the future. Right? Instead become good at knowing the present. Okay. and then become good at discarding old beliefs, old patterns of thinking, old patterns of behavior. But keep in mind that not every traditional system that seems obsolete might actually be obsolete. Right? So become good at understanding past things from first principles and become good at experimenting with new behaviors and looking for evidence of is this working the way I intended or not. Yeah, a quick note on something he said. Uh things that have existed for a long time will
continue to exist for a long time and that is the Lindy principle which we have uh occasionally spoken about in a couple of episodes. Maybe we'll do an entire episode on one of these days but if you look at this episode it is kind of talking about the Lindy principle as well. And the second thing that you spoke about that I do want to have a conversation with everyone is the fact that most experts are experts of the past and not of the present or the future. And that kind of worries me but also excites me. If you know why, join us in the WhatsApp community or drop a comment under this episode and we'll have a conversation
about that. Shriant Naven Future IQ and uh we've lined up another episode for you about the Chesterton's fence that we just spoke about in detail. Go check that out.