Hey there,

Well, here we are: 2025.

Here’s what I have for you to start the year:

• One big thing. Why we often want the wrong things and why it matters.

• You have to check this out. The start of the new year is a perfect time to learn more about habit formation.

Let’s dive in!

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

Miswanting the future.

One of my favorite southern sayings is: Wantin’ ain’t gettin’.

A kid tells their mom they really want the candy displayed at kid-eye height at the gas station, and mom says without looking down, "Wantin' ain't gettin'."

It’s origin could be a 1967 song by the Association that says: But wantin' ain't gettin' and gettin' ain't got. While the song is from the anomaly of a sub-genre called raga rock, the lyrics hit on concept that is sneaky-insightful.

Wanting something is not the same as obtaining it.

Wanting is an act of imagination. Something desirable is missing in my life: gum, a vacation, a promotion, a loving partner.

Wantin' ain't gettin' tells children how we believe the world should work.

Wanting should cause trying, trying should cause getting, and getting should cause liking.

Wanting is a prediction of future liking.

Children want ice cream, not spinach. You want a vacation to Kauai because you predict you will like it.

You’ve been reading this newsletter for the past few weeks. By now, you know our memories are unreliable, cherry-picking the highlights of events that are, well, memorable. You know our feel-good selves use rose-colored filters to make the past and the future more positive than reality.

But surely, smart and beautiful people like us are good at predicting what we will like and not like in the future, right?

I bet you can see where this is going.

Wantin’ ain’t likin’.

Join me for a stroll down aisle seven at your local grocery store. You know the one with those new crinkle-cut kettle chips. Oooooo, and they have the salsa I love, right next to the family-sized bag of authentic tortilla chips. Wait, do I smell rotisserie chicken?

It’s a tale you know well: Never grocery shop on an empty stomach.

Let’s dive into why.

In a book I recommended before, Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert explains several reasons why we make poor predictions about what will make us happy in the future.

The poor choices you make while shopping on an empty stomach fall into the category he calls "presentism." When you consider the future, you are so steeped in the emotions of the present. While you know many things will be different in the future, you fail to accurately account for the fact that your feelings and emotions will also be different.

When you’re hungry, you imagine your future self will thank you for buying 1,000 taquitos (at such a bargain, thanks, Costco!). When you finish Thanksgiving dinner, you are sure you’ll never be hungry again.

Let’s think through what’s going on here. Predicting our wants in the future is an act of imagination.

If you imagine eating a fresh-cut slice of New York pizza, your brain runs a simulation of that future bit of deliciousness. You can visualize it, smell it, and taste it. Taken together, you get a preview of how it will feel to eat that pizza.

This is a process Gilbert calls prefeeling.

In some cases, prefeeling is a better predictor of future happiness than logical comparisons. When it comes to the tricky business of liking something, our rational brains can lead us astray.

But there is a grey and fuzzy line between our present feelings and our simulations of future feelings. Just as it is very hard to recall the melody of 50 Ways to Lose Your Lover while your earbuds are playing Rihanna’s Work (work, work, work, work, work), your brain cannot separate predictions of future emotional reactions from your current emotional state.

The clever folks in the research lab asked people at a nearby gym to imagine how they would feel if they got lost hiking and had to spend the night in the woods with neither food nor water. Would feelings of hunger or thirst be more unpleasant? They asked some of these gym-goers after a treadmill workout (thirsty group) and some before a workout (non-thirsty group). 92 percent of the thirsty group predicted thirst would be more unpleasant than hunger, while only 61% of the non-thirsty group made that prediction.

Our researchers also called people in different parts of the United States and asked them how happy they were with their lives. People’s answers were radically influenced by the weather on the day they were called. People believed they were giving accurate assessments of their lives in general when, in fact, their current weather-induced emotions were playing a major role.

Blind spots and event horizons.

Let’s go back to that slice of New York pizza.

Do you think you would enjoy a slice of pizza on your next trip to New York (or Chicago if you prefer eating your pizza with a spoon)? Assuming you’re not suffering from anhedonia (or lactose intolerance, like me), you will say yes. But consider what is going on with your prediction.

You have taken my tiny dose of detail (pizza in New York) and begun to fill in all sorts of additional details I didn’t give you. The shop where you once had a delicious slice. Melting cheese, warm crust, and that glorious smell. The friends that might be with you.

In making a prediction of future liking (the basis for your current pizza wanting), you filled in a lot of details drawn from your mind’s New York pizza memory folder. Then, sprinkled in even more details based on things you have heard or seen but never experienced.

While your remembering self selectively stores memories, your mind’s imagination machine is more than happy to do what your brain is uniquely good at—filing in missing pieces of information to form a complete picture.

Have you ever done one of the cool demonstrations of your eye's blind spot? They look like this:

If you are on your phone, you'll need to turn it horizontally (otherwise, the distance between the two items is too small to work).

Extend your arms, then close your left eye and fixate your right eye on the left cross. Continue focusing on the left cross with your right eye as you move the image closer to your face.

What happens to the red X? Because there is a point where your optic nerve passes through your retina, there is a distance as you move the image closer to your face where your eyeball cannot see the item on the right at all. So, what happens?

Your brain fills in the missing eyeball-generated information with a brain-simulated best guess of what should be there (try the three variations in the link above to truly experience this).

This little trick feels trivial, but your brain does this all the time without your knowledge. It is a fill in the blank guessing machine.

When you think about things you may want in the future, the same thing happens. You take limited facts and begin to fill in the blanks.

Sometimes you might do so with rose-colored glasses, imaging future scenarios unjustifiably as best-case scenarios. Delicious, melted-cheese pizza, rather than cold, chewy, rudely served pizza.

Promotions ain’t pizza.

Wanting is a prediction of future liking. More specifically, it is a prediction of how we will feel when wanting becomes getting. That first bite of pizza is the feeling of enjoyment.

Even though some people will travel to New York just for the pizza (or pack their favorite spoon for a trip to Chicago), they know the pizza high won’t last terribly long.

In your life, there are some wants that are more substantial than pizza.

Here is where miswanting can lead you astray with wider consequences.

Our crack squad of researchers traveled to America's finest universities to test this out. They asked assistant professors to predict how happy they would be after achieving or failing to achieve tenure at their current university. Then they returned years later to measure the general happiness of these same professors who had or had not achieved tenure at the same university.

In the first conversations, the assistant professors believed tenure would dramatically influence their general happiness (not just their work life), and therefore they desperately wanted it.

In the follow-up conversations years later, however, the professors who did not achieve tenure were no less happy than the professors who did.

To be sure, the professors who got tenure were surely happy when they heard the news and probably remained so for a period of time. “But after a while—a much littler while than the assistant professors had themselves believed—the emotional traces of these events had evaporated,” explains Daniel Gilbert (himself a tenured professor).

Life’s third quarter.

Gen X mavericks like you are in the locker room of life’s halftime (pardon the sports analogy). You’re looking back at what worked and didn’t work in the first half. You are planning a third-quarter strategy (ages 50-75) and hoping you are still in the game for the fourth quarter.

If happiness, well-being, and fulfillment are the goal, you first need to understand what that means for you and then you need to translate that wantin’ into trying’. A game plan for the third quarter.

But as we have seen, what we think we want, what we think will make us happy, is often an illusion. Wanting doesn't always lead to liking because our predictions about future liking are often flawed, incomplete, or inaccurate.

My favorite line from Daniel Gilbert is, “My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.”

In 2025, Second Act Creator will be about what you can do to make better third-quarter plans.

That’s it for today. Here’s to a great start to 2025.

Happy holidays,