Want now - Slava Akhmechet
But we don’t want these things now. Right now we want the latest iPhone, our drink to go, to zip through traffic faster. And since anything we ever do we do in the now, paying off debt, helping the environment, and kindness to strangers remain perpetually in the future.
Failed products aren’t necessarily products people don’t want. But they are always products people don’t want now. Confusing “ wanting” for “ wanting now” is an easy mistake to make. I’ve probably made it more than anyone. People are adamant about the urgency of their wants (or maybe I’m just credulous). But once you know what to look for, you can begin telling the two apart. Wanting is free. Wanting now exacts a price.
Put differently, there is no tradeoff to wanting. It costs nothing to want to pay off debt. You are not confronted with a tradeoff until it’s time to write a check to the credit card company, or to deny yourself an expensive purchase. And when that time comes, you have to want to pay off debt now. Which to your surprise you discover you don’t actually want.
The surprise is important. We don’t know what we want now until the now comes, and we have infinite capacity to lie about it to ourselves and others. So to predict behavior you cannot trust what people say. You can only trust the data as you observe them confront a tradeoff. This is so important it’s worth repeating. To predict behavior you must observe people confront a tradeoff.
