How to Get Ready for 2030
A couple of nights ago I assisted Tom Triumph in a workshop for CUBE, UNC’s Social Innovation Incubator. Tom spoke of Mastery as he has masterfully to my students when I was still teaching courses in creativity and entrepreneurship at Duke. He told stories that distilled the lessons found in the lives and achievements of Nelson Mandela and Manny Pacquiao and Richard Branson, among others.
I began my discussion on the fundamental importance of intentionally growing your creative capacity and developing your entrepreneurial instincts by asking the workshop participants to imagine the year 2030. After giving them a few quick moments to ponder what life might be like 14 years from now I named the growing realization I could see in their eyes by declaring “Of course there’s no one who can provide us with any accurate prediction about what the year 2030 will be like.”
To make that case I simply offered up the first deflection points I could think of, ones certain to occur between now and then because we can see them already.
A transportation transformation just got a step closer with the successful shipment of a load of Anheuser-Busch beer over a 120 mile route by an autonomous tractor trailer. So what happens when this technology becomes commonplace on its way to ubiquity? Do we become gentler folk, because we avoid all that daily road anxiety and even rage that driving conjures up for so many?
Do we choose to become more creative when given all our commuting time back? What new business opportunities are created by this shift—does regional tourism boom because it’s easier to travel? What do professional drivers do? A-B says they could save $50 million a year using autonomous delivery technology and that assumes there was still a person in the cab supplementing the technology.
Other transformative innovations that quickly came to mind included:
Neurohacking and Brain-Machine interfaces to (radically?) improve cognition. What if we were all just a little bit smarter?
Artificial Intelligence! (Or AI yie yie?)
I like to image the day when RFID chips are even more deeply penetrated in products and processes and all their data is met by ever more advanced predictive analytic tools. What if we this results in just a .0001% efficiency in each inch and every minute of daily life so that with a complex systems’ aggregation of benefits something quite extraordinary would be accomplished in achieving new efficiencies and effectiveness in everything we do.
And those are just the deflection points easily seen by us all; they will spawn others, and as the scholar, philosopher and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out so powerfully in his groundbreaking book The Black Swan, the events that make the greatest historical impact are always unforeseen.
Add to that, this: Who knows which of the world class problems waiting for us outside our door will be twice as bad by the year 2030 as we’ve allowed ourselves to believe.
“And so none of us”, I offered to the workshop participants, “can have any idea at all about what the year 2030 will bring which means there is only one thing you can be sure of about the year 2030 and it’s a very important thing: regardless of what you find when you get there, you will be most likely to make your way on your terms, you will be more capable of discovering opportunity and building advantage for you and your communities, when you are the most creative, the most entrepreneurial, the most resilient and adaptive and generative and innovative version of yourself you can be.
“And since quantitative and qualitative research concludes you are all born with creative genius, all it takes is your intentional practice and you’ll find immediate growth in your creative capacity and your entrepreneurial instincts.”
Part of my calling is to help folks embrace the importance of this intentional commitment to becoming the most creatively entrepreneurial version of themselves they can be; the other is to provide the content that helps accelerate your growth. We’ll be adding content at the site regularly and would love to hear from you about your creative adventures and please share any thoughts about what you find here.
And check out Tom’s blogs. They are entertaining and informative. https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_0TLhCRP7hPmNUxfy_GvDnT?trk=prof-sm