Extrapolate your life to understand where you are going….and if you like it!

I don’t know how it is for you, but I use my vacation to reflect on how my work year went and where I am going in the coming year. What during the year developed in a direction I hoped for? What took an unexpected turn? Is there anything I need to correct in the coming year to bring more meaning and fulfillment into my life. For me, the time for reflections was extended to urgently needed full twelve weeks, due to my in-between-jobs-time-gap. I spent one week in solitude in Norway, working on my next book project (let’s see if it comes to fruition) and also a long weekend hiking in the Dolomites with my American cousin’s family and my youngest son. The longer time, and new perspectives, set my mind on a thought model for how to assess personal development and your life’s direction. I want to share my insight with you.

Sliding doors

I bet you remember the Peter Howitt directed movie Sliding Doors from 1998, where Gwyneth Paltrow plays Helen Quilley. The plot revolves around Helen when she gets fired from her public relations job. As she leaves the office, she rushes to catch a train on the London Underground. The film then splits into two alternate realities: one where she catches the train and another where she misses it. The movie explores how this seemingly small moment can lead to drastically different outcomes in Helen's life, including her relationships, career, and personal growth. It cleverly interweaves the two storylines, showing how Helen's life unfolds in each scenario.

One of the books I read last year, which contributed to my realization that I needed to make a major professional change, captures the “sliding doors phenomenon”. In the book “The portfolio Life” by Christina Wallace, she elegantly illustrates the concept in the move in one picture.

Christina sees her life as a multitude of choices, just like in sliding doors. Some are deliberate, others more of a serendipity. From the day you are born until now, your life unfolds like a tree of possible lives.

However, in every bifurcation of your life, you take one, and only one, specific turn, hence you end up in the place where you are, just as you read these lines.

What Christina so stylishly point out is, that the future looks just like your past with a multitude of opportunities. The question is:

which branch do you want to end up in for the future?

One way to predict that is by the use of extrapolation, you know the mathematical concept you learned in high school.

Extrapolation as a tool to understand where you are going

If you want to predict tomorrow’s weather, they say that the most successful approach is to assume the same as today. But if you study a phenomenon, and have historical data, the concept of extrapolation offers a better tool to predict the future. Let’s brush off your high school mathematic course.

Extrapolation is a method used to estimate unknown values by extending a known sequence of values or facts. If you have data points that follow a certain trend, you can use that trend to predict future values beyond the range of your data. Let’s look at a concrete example. For instance, if you have yearly historical data for measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere from 1960 to 2010, they look as follows according to NOAA Climate.gov .

Now, say you want to predict what the value would be 2020. By using the method of (linear) extrapolation, you take the value 2000 and 2010 and draw a line intersecting those two points and extend the straight line to 2020. The intersection between the extrapolation line and the year 2020 will be your extrapolated estimation.

Since we already are in the future of this example, we know the measured value 2020 and can therefore judge the correctness of our extrapolation.

As can be seen in the graph above, the linear extrapolated prediction slightly underestimates the real value, but the estimation was pretty good. Of course, you always need to keep in mind that the extrapolation process relies heavily on the assumption that the pattern observed will continue into the future.?

Extrapolate your life’s trajectory

Let’s return to Christina Wallace’s wonderful picture. What is the most likely branch of all the possible futures for you to end up in? Why not use extrapolation.?

Assume the left most grey dot represent where you were five years back and the red dot represent where you are now.

Then pick some measures that mean something to you that have changed over that period of time. Some of those measures like, salary and status might have gone up and you welcome the development. If that is the case, others like work hours and un-free time, most likely has also become more pronounced. For some of us, we realized that really important qualities like missed family opportunities have also unwillingly increased alongside with annoying ones like waist line and 10k running time.

What is the most likely outcome for the prediction of your life if you look 5 years into the future?

Since we have just learned the concept of extrapolation, let’s see what an extrapolation will tell us?

The most likely development five years into the future is that the trajectory you are on will continue along approximately the development you have seen last five years.

If you don’t make a deliberate change, you can expect end up in the green point where both salary, waste line and un-free time to go up together with work hours and missed family opportunities. Will the extrapolation tell a truth about your future? Probably not, but the point I try to make, and what finally lead me to make my major direction change of my professional career path as well as my life path in general, was:

the insight that the extrapolation of my life path didn’t point towards a place I wanted to be five years into the future?

Therefore, I decided to make a bend of my life’s path. Maybe, salary and status might take a hit but other, for me, more important measures will bend towards a more favorable direction. In my 27 year-long career at Scania, I have always tried (not always succeeded though) to be a good role model. With some distance to my quitting, I have come to the conclusion that the biggest positive influence I could have on the colleagues at Scania was not to stay and lead in a day-to-day relation, but to leave and show that there are other values than money and status and that I take my future life seriously.

Closing words

They say about strategy in a company, that it is realized by all the project you start, decide to stop, and eventually finish (note, strategy is not the fancy powerpoint presentation titled strategy 2030). These projects are supported by a multitude of decisions. The same is true for the project we call life.

Life is a continuous stream of decisions that will lead you to a place.

I encourage you this summer to

step back and reflect and ask yourself if your five-year extrapolation points towards a future place where you want to be. If not, take your time out of work to plan how you bend your extrapolation line.

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