8: Mental Time Travel

The chapter starts with some quotes, an anecdote or two, and some generalizations that emphasize the value of being able to visualize an outcome - to perform "mental time travel" to envision a future time when the current plan has been completed and consider the changes it will effect.

From a psychological perspective, visualization is a significant difference between the human and the animal mind: animals react to stimuli in the present without much thought for the future. Some, to a very minor degree, seem to be clever enough to work out problems that require planning, nit only on a very primitive level.

He mentions developmental experiments on children: when offered a small prize today or a bigger one tomorrow, a three-year-old will always go for the present, whereas a five-year-old will often be willing to wait. And in general, our willingness to wait increases with age.

In game strategy, a player or team who can think further ahead will generally outperform those whose vision is less. A novice chess player may think a move or two into the future, but a grandmaster will be thinking twenty moves ahead.

Moreover, effective strategists think beyond themselves. They recognize that their actions will have consequences for other people, and that some others will be taking actions that affect their own ability to accomplish their plans.

(EN: And that's really all there is to this chapter - the last several pages get lost in the details of a few case studies that are not quite detailed enough to convey a clear relationship to the topic. "They succeeded, hence they must have planned to succeed" seems to be the assumption.)