Eventually, Diligent Immatures build the Future

People overestimate what they can do short term and underestimate what they can do long term. Like, how much could I really improve anyway?

And at the same time, they believe their future self will have everything figured out and solve all their current problems and challenges. So why do we have two very conflicting imaginations?

• Planning fallacy is the tendency in behavioral economics to underestimate the time, effort, and resources it takes to finish a task or reach a goal. "People overestimate their short-term abilities but underestimate their long-term ones."
• Natural Optimism Bias is the tendency to overestimate how likely good outcomes are and underestimate how likely bad ones are. It can make people too optimistic about their own abilities or about a project or goal working out, so they take on more risk or move less carefully than they should.

They sound opposite. They're both just a bad sense of time.

Say someone gets a health diagnosis and needs to make big lifestyle changes, including exercising regularly. In the short term, they overestimate themselves, assuming they will quickly see improvements in their health and fitness level. But they also underestimate the effort and diligence it takes to keep those changes going, assuming a few quick fixes will do and then they can return to their previous lifestyle. So they don't really think about what comes next, and end up underestimating what we can eventually become. They just childishly believe their future self will somehow figure out how to make these changes. Together, those biases can lead to unrealistic expectations and poor decisions. In the end, the person struggles to sustain their exercise routine or gives up entirely when progress is slower than expected.

No magical future ourselves will come and solve all our problems. They will never come. We just need to be aware of that broken sense of time, and know that building a better life takes sustained effort and perseverance over the long term.

Eventually, diligent immatures build the future.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

-- Marcus Aurelius (121--180)