What is not going to change in the next 10 years?

Understanding core principles that guide people’s decision making

Hi I’m Jordan, I love helping people think & grow their products. Hope this helps! You can find me on Twitter and via my Newsletter :)

We live in an exciting time where incremental changes in technology have the potential to have compounding forms of impact. The future is rapidly approaching — and perhaps more so than ever before, we are excited and eager for what is next. In an optimistic sense, the future promises to be brighter and bigger for many of us.

The challenge is predicting what that future would look like.

As humans, we tend to overestimate speed of adoption of new technologies but in the long run underestimate overall impact.

So what are our best guesses on what will change in the future?

Will we have flying cars? Virtual reality headsets? Chips in our brains?

We’re all consumed and excited by what will change. Rarely does the press or do we have conversations about what will not be different.

Perhaps that is even a more important question: “What will not change?”

What are the fundamental parts of man kind that move us?

Jeff Bezos provides (via Bill Gurley) a great explanation for how they have implemented that type of thinking into building Amazon:

I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

Understanding the first principles that motivate and drive consumer decision making is crucial to building any sort of business. So before you go and invent the next big thing — ask yourself what would motivate a consumer/business humans to want that thing and why they would want it. Is the reason a first order principle? Or is something a priority only in the moment?

Thanks so much for reading! My name is Jordan Gonen and I write blog posts every day. It would mean a ton to me if you could:

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