If a prediction changes your behavior, the future it describes may never get a fair test.

A forecast that reaches its subject stops being a neutral description and becomes an input. You brace, or you relax, or you quietly work to prove it wrong, and whatever happens next includes your response to being told, so the prediction can never be checked cleanly against a world that did not hear it. Knowing changes the thing known.

Be careful, then, with the forecasts you accept about yourself. Someone’s estimate of how you will handle a job or a relationship can become the reason it goes that way. When you notice a prediction shaping your behaviour, name it out loud, and decide whether you are responding to evidence or to a story you were handed.