Hey Early Adopters, Stop Trying To “M-A-S-H” The Future!

Do you remember the game, MASH? If you grew up in the 80s and 90s, you probably know the mansion-apartment-shack-house (MASH) game. Well, I used to play this game all the time with my friends back in the good ole days of elementary school. Essentially, the whole point of the game was to come up with a set of lists, each with four-five choices, and then you and your friend would randomly go through the lists until you had one left for each category. It was a way to “pretend-pick” your future. 

Usually since this was a game of chance, you would wind up with some hilarious combos, such as, “you would end marrying your “pretend elementary school husband,” drive a beat-up 1977 sedan and live in a mansion in rural Kentucky.” That sort of thing.

As absurd as this game is to us now, we play “these types of mind games” all the time as grown-ups trying to figure out the future. While we aren’t creating lists with categories like car, apartment, mate, location, (hopefully!) as adults, we are certainly doing it in other aspects of our professional lives.

For example as a society, we are obsessed with the “what’s next?” or the “this will be the next big gamechanger moment.” We create lists, blog posts, news articles and even books, which are essentially nothing more than educated guesses and blind predictions about future developments. 

Early adopters do this all the time. How many times have we heard about the “next big social media site?” (Called it the “social media shiny object syndrome”) In December and January, Quora was that shiny object. You couldn’t find an A or B-list PR/Marketing blogger that didn’t write a post or several about Quora and how it was going to revolutionize the industry. It’s now May, and Quora hasn’t exactly lived up to its early adopter predictions.

Fast forward until today, you see these whole predictions starting out all over again for the two latest shiny social media objects- Empire Avenue and Pinterest. More bold predictions.

This fascination with trying to predict what sites take off and what doesn’t is a bit of a time-suck, if you ask me. All the early adopters spend their time on these sites trying to figure them out and essentially make projections about sites that in most cases will top out a few thousand or (if you are lucky) a few hundred thousands users. That’s a pin in the bucket compared to sites like Facebook.

Instead of always focusing on what will be the next big thing and trying to come up with all these predictions based essentially on chance and semi-eduational guesses, why don’t we spend more time living and understanding the NOW. The stuff that is happening in the present is what really matters. Instead of trying to understand what the future holds all the time (and playing mind games), focus on really grasping and understanding the present. Because, that’s the only way to understand what the future holds.

Finally, if you want to have a little fun or just kill a little time, you can now play the M-A-S-H game online here.