Making, recording, and evaluating predictions is a simple way to improve your thinking and decision-making. But the way to properly make and record predictions isn't obvious. In this article, I'll share some predictions I've made, what I've learned, and how you can improve your thinking by making predictions.

Making predictions has grown my business

Five years ago, I had been running my business for ten years, and it wasn't going great. Then, I started publishing monthly income reports, and along the way, making predictions. My income has nearly doubled, and I attribute much of that success to my habit of making predictions.

I began by predicting how much money I'd make in a product launch, and grew to predicting how much traffic articles I had written would gain, and how many copies books I'd written would sell. I now routinely make predictions for things as seemingly mundane as whether I'll enjoy a conference, whether I'll still be publishing on TikTok a year from now, or whether an avocado is ripe.

On the surface, making predictions seems like a pointless game. This is, indeed, true of making predictions the wrong way. But making predictions the right way helps you deal with uncertainty you otherwise have no hope of handling.

Predictions help you bet your life, better

Each of us has limited resources, such as time, money, and mental energy. We're constantly making decisions about how to use these resources, and when we make those decisions, we are expecting outcomes.

• If we go on this date, will we find the love of our life, or wish we'd stayed in?
• If we write this book, will we achieve fame and fortune, or feel as if we've wasted years of our life?
• If we spend an hour on social media, will we make valuable connections, or spiral into self-hatred over our lack of discipline?

As Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets wrote:

In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. —Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets

Each decision we make is a bet. We bet a resource, and expect something in return. Most of us don't recognize or express the expectations of our bets. But we should.

Some bets are clearer than others

If you bet a dollar on a coin flip and only win $1.50 for guessing correctly, you'd easily recognize that as an unfair bet: There's a 50% chance of guessing correctly, so you clearly should receive two dollars. But the more variable the odds, and the more vague your wager and winnings, the more difficult it becomes to think clearly.

What's the value of finding the love of your life? What other benefits can you get writing a book besides fame and fortune? What are the chances that during this hour of social media you'll make a life-changing discovery? Making objective decisions taking into account all these variables becomes so complicated you might as well throw up your hands, surrender to randomness, and do what feels right in the moment.

And that's what most of us do. Case in point: The multi-billion-dollar gambling industry, propped up by people doing what feels right in the moment – their decision-making shrouded by the smokescreen of ever more complex and variable bets.

The key to making predictions in a way that helps you evaluate your decisions is to avoid what Annie Duke calls "resulting." If you wager a dollar on a coin flip, with a chance to win $10, and lose, the result of your decision was bad, but your decision was good. The odds were clearly in your favor. Mathematically, you were sure you'd win that bet one of two times. If you had won, you were going to win ten times your money.

Now how do you apply this thinking to more complex and vague situations, such as a product launch, your Saturday night plans, or whether or not your new hobby is a passing obsession? The key is to make a prediction, the right way.

How to make predictions the right way

There are two components to making predictions the right way.

1. Turn it into a coin flip.
2. Identify the odds.

1. Turn the outcome into a "coin flip"

First, turn the prediction into a coin flip. I don't mean in terms of odds, but in terms of result. When you flip a coin, it comes up heads or tails. When you make a prediction about a result, that result must either happen or not. For a prediction to be useful, it has to be falsifiable.

This is not easy to do, which is why few of us make predictions the right way, if at all.

• If you think it's going to rain, in what area will it rain, by what time? Does a single raindrop count?
• If you think you'll still be doing bird photography in six months, how many bird photos will you have taken, within the previous month?
• If you think you'll enjoy going to the party, how many good memories will you be able to recall a week later?

You can define a successful result in whatever measurable way you want. The important thing is that to make a prediction, you need to turn the result into a coin flip. Not in terms of odds, but in terms of how you define the result.

Some actual predictions I've turned into coin flips:

• My Black Friday promotion will earn $3,000–$6,000.
• My blog post on Zettelkasten will average worse than a ranking of 10 for the keyword "zettelkasten", the first three months after publish, according to Google Console.
• I will sell 5,000–15,000 copies of Mind Management, Not Time Management within the first year.

With each of these predictions, I was wagering resources. It took, time, money, and energy to run a promotion, write a blog post, and write a book. But what did I expect from those investments? I could have done any of these without making a prediction. Besides the long-term benefits of making these predictions – which I'll get to in a bit – turning these predictions into coin flips had immediate benefits.

Turning predictions into coin flips helps answer these questions:

• Is this worth doing? By defining a successful result, you're forced to ask yourself if it's worth the investment, based upon your expectations.
• How will I achieve this? In the process of defining a successful result, you start thinking about why you expect to achieve that result. Do you have prior experiences or past data to draw upon? You'll never search as hard for these as when you're making a prediction.
• Can I do better? Defining a successful result has a symbiotic relationship with the effort you put forth trying to achieve the result. Making the prediction motivates you to try to make that prediction correct, which sometimes motivates you to predict and try to achieve an even better result.

When you flip a coin, you of course aren't sure whether it will come up heads or tails, and when you make a prediction, you aren't sure whether you'll achieve that result. And that is how it should be.

2. Identify the odds

The second way to make a prediction the right way is to identify the odds of achieving that result. You've turned the prediction into a coin flip, but it's not necessarily a coin flip with 50/50 odds. It may be more like a die roll, with 1:6 odds, or a roll of four or lower, with 2:3 odds.