Ted Audio Collective.

In my first year of business school, way back in 1999, I took a required leadership course

where our final assignment was to write a two-page memoir detailing what we would be doing in 2011, ten years after graduation.

My professor had us bring in two copies, one to turn in and one to keep.

And yes, I still have mine.

My memoir says that by 2011, I would be married with three kids living in West Africa working for UNICEF.

It's no surprise to me that this was my vision.

I knew very few people at the time who were in their mid-30s without kids

and I had done some work in the nonprofit world before business school.

So all the little details just made sense.

But ten years after graduation, my life looked nothing like that, and my life today is even more different.

I live in my hometown, New York City.

I'm a business school professor.

I've been married, and I'm happily child-free.

Which is such a reminder that it's so hard to know what the future will hold.

So why is it so easy for us to assume that who we are today is the same person who will be ten years from now?

I'm Madhu Bakinola. This is Ted Business.

Our speaker today is Shankar Vedanta, journalist and host of the podcast Hidden Brain,

a show that explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior.

In this talk, Shankar explains why we believe our future selves will share the same views, perspectives and hopes as our current selves,

and shows how we can more proactively craft the people we are to become.

Then after the talk, I'll share how we can be wrong about our future emotions too.

...