Simulating Power: You Can Only Choose a Future You Can Imagine

You can only choose a future you can imagine.

Simulating Power is a kind of imagination — the mental habit of picturing the future, projecting outcomes, and making a choice. It isn't a gift. It's a habit, fed by your environment. And like willpower, it gets used up.

This article covers three things: how simulating power forms, how it gets wasted, and how to strengthen it through the people around you.

What is simulating power? Why do some people naturally think further ahead?

Everyone has their own way of running the future forward in their head. I call this thinking ability simulating power.

Different upbringings produce different simulating power.

If a kid gets punished for bad grades from an early age, what they often learn isn't to study harder — it's to find ways to cheat.

Because effort doesn't guarantee good grades. But cheating does.

Cheating gets punished too. But so do bad grades.

Under that future-projection logic, the kid easily picks the cheating path.

That's the most basic application of simulating power.

So simulating power is deeply shaped by environment and family education.

If mistakes are unavoidable, the trick is just not getting caught.

Why is simulating power a finite resource?

Gretchen Rubin (2015) points out in Better Than Before that willpower is finite.

The more we use it, the more it gets depleted — until eventually we can't restrain our own behavior.

Simulating Power works the same way. It's finite too:

1. A kid running scenarios on how to dodge a parent's lecture has no bandwidth left to think about how to actually improve.

2. If you keep worrying about your job performance, you can't focus on the actual work.

3. If you're driving while running through tomorrow's client negotiation, you can't drive properly.

Which is why thinking about the right thing at the right time matters so much.

Push hard when it's time to push. Wrestle with it when it's time to wrestle. Rest when it's time to rest. Quit when it's time to quit.

Compared to raising the depth and quality of your thinking, simply thinking at the right time is the easier win.

But thinking is a slow, ambient process. It's a habit — and sometimes a bad one.

Why do we keep wasting our simulating power?

We don't only run simulations when problems show up.

In fact, huge amounts of our simulating power get "wasted" in everyday life.

The single biggest one for me: what to eat for lunch. Seriously.

Daily life is full of small and large things that need "simulating."

We also live in a society where the latest information is always one tap away.

Our attention and simulating power get burned on real-time social media and news feeds.

Some people with autonomic nervous system disorders can't even stop "simulating" while they're trying to sleep.

Fine — I'll admit it. I have autonomic nervous system disorder myself, and I was on medication for a while.

It causes vivid dreams and shallow sleep, so the body never fully rests. Long term, your health deteriorates.

I have a friend who's an elementary school teacher. There was a special-needs kid in his class who was being ostracized.

When his head of department found out, she stepped in immediately and asked the teacher to be careful about wording when speaking with parents.

What she really meant: let's keep this incident contained.

Because he didn't get to decide how it was handled, my friend felt distrusted and resentful.

The thought of working under a supervisor who didn't trust him, going forward, made him miserable.

This friend has a habit.

When he's in a bad mood, he wants to "treat himself" with food.

After eating, his mood lifts a bit.

Then he remembers he's "overspent again" this month, and his mood crashes again.

He gets home, stands in front of the mirror, sees how heavy he's gotten, and starts second-guessing himself: am I really eating too much?

Mood crashes further.

Sound familiar?

He starts simulating a future with less money, more weight, and a worse mood.

If we keep spending our simulating power picturing terrible futures, of course we feel terrible.

Stating the obvious here — but stop wasting your simulating power on this kind of thing.

How do you strengthen your simulating power? Ask the people around you.

If you can't even imagine an answer, you obviously can't choose it.

Simulating power is a kind of imagination — more precisely, the ability to imagine the future, the mental habit of projecting it forward.

Plain version: you can only choose a future you can imagine.

There's a saying in investing too: you can only earn the wealth your awareness allows.

In other words, even if a massive opportunity is sitting right in front of you, you might not see it.

The question is: are there people around you who do see it?

If yes, why aren't you asking them how they see it?

The truth is, I'm surrounded by people like that, and I've learned a huge amount from them.

But I notice almost no one does this. Like asking and learning from others is somehow embarrassing?

As I said earlier, everyone has their own way of projecting the future.

Even if we can't read their mind, we can just ask:

• What do you think of this product?
• How do you see the future of this industry or sector?
• What's your view on this cryptocurrency?
• Do you think this job has a future?

I recommend asking a lot of people. You'll notice: some people have noticeably stronger simulating power.

Their opinions are sharp, well-grounded, and they offer multiple options.

That's what an expert in that domain looks like.

Final advice

If one day you realize your simulating power isn't great, don't be discouraged.

Make a lot of friends, then ask them directly what they expect from the future.

Over time, by osmosis, you'll develop an equivalent simulating power.

Birds of a feather, and all that.

Next step

Find three people you think "see further than you do." Ask each of them the same question: "What direction are you most bullish on for the next three years?"

Don't rush to push back. Just write their answers down. Look at them again a week later, and you'll notice your head now contains three projection paths that didn't exist before.

That's the fastest way to install other people's simulating power into your own brain.

FAQ

Q: Can simulating power be trained? A: Yes. The most effective method is expanding the circle of people around you who "make decisions differently" — friends, colleagues, industry seniors — and asking them directly how they see something. You don't need to understand all of their logic. As long as you load their projection path into your head, the next time you face a similar situation your brain has one extra path to walk.

Q: What's the difference between simulating power and willpower? A: Willpower handles "execution" (whether to keep going). Simulating power handles "selection" (whether you can even see the future of that option).

Q: How do I know if my simulating power is being wasted? A: Ask yourself one question: "Is the thing I spent the most time thinking about today something I can actually control?" If the answer is no (e.g. replaying what people think of you, worrying about things that haven't happened), your simulating power is being wasted.