thinkfuture: technology, philosophy and the future

Rudy describes his purpose in life in three simple words; “Change. For Better.”   No stranger to change, Rudy is an entrepreneur and Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. He has co-founded two highly successful companies (in completely different industries) and produced over two hundred hours of documentary productions that have covered a wide array of topics. An adept innovator and storyteller, Rudy has become an expert at pulling disparate resources together and merging them into his projects.   His passion, professional skills, and sixty years of life experience are the driving force behind his latest project entitled, Embracing Change: Your Go-To Guide To Your Desired Future.  The project (both the book and companion online video course are available at embracingchange.io is designed quite simply to foster positive change in our rapidly-evolving world and to help those who wish to navigate these sometimes treacherous waters toward the place he calls, “Your Desired Future”.   Rudy has taken a documentary approach to Embracing Change as the pages include the wisdom and perspectives of world-renowned entrepreneurs, philanthropists, entertainers, scientists, and professors drawn from his personal video library.  Quotations and facts have also been culled from a wide variety of sources to provide readers with additional inspiration and a path toward deeper insight.     Providing additional insight and levity to Embracing Change, Rudy’s unique cast of colorful characters he affectionately calls, “The Voices in your Head”, are certain to both entertain and help you understand yourself and why change can be so difficult to master.  linktr.ee/rudypoe

And I think we need to start with definitions because if you don't define something properly, how can you possibly determine what it is. Because I think we're in this current malaise, we haven't fully defined the problem we're trying to solve. 

So one of the things about the future, one of the things about strategic planning, one of the things about trying to figure out where we're going what we're doing is that uncertainty is huge, right that's why a lot of people say it's challenging to think about the future how are you going to think about the future if you have no idea what's going to happen next?

Enterprise Podcast Consultant, Serial Entrepreneur, Blogger, & Creator.  A powerful new business building framework: a must-read for all startup founders.   https://jake-jorgovan.com/blog/my-framework-for-starting-a-new-business

Is the reason why things are crazy right now that we are approaching post-scarcity?

Instead of creating easily solvable problems to solve, we should try to solve the big problems we already have. 

Your job and mine are impacted by accelerating, converging technologies, and may not exist in a few years' time. We all need to develop different mindsets to thrive in this difficult work environment and to make wise next-job and next-career decisions.

If we could, if it was an easy thing to do, everybody would do it, and we'd be able to figure it out and the scenarios and the plans and the strategies that we build for these futures. But, no, I can't tell you exactly what will happen on the exact date I will tell you. All of these things will happen, will we?  So it's almost impossible to figure out what the future holds, but you can throw a few things in there and say, well, we can assume that human beings will. So continue to use their inventive powers their big brains to figure out some of the biggest problems all the day, so that's why I'm optimistic that's when the optimistic futurist you see I see all these problems of people or drip pulling out. Still, I also see solutions for all these problems that people are bringing forward. The solutions are there. We just have to apply ourselves to them we can do this. We have the capacity to do this, and if we don't have the capacity to do this, we can build eyes that will have the capacity this; in fact, one of the things about climate change I'm thinking is that maybe we should just get in an I or a bunch of ice together have them figure it out. Don't. Human ingenuity will go a long way to solving a lot of the problems we have today. Still, the other thing you should understand is that you have to factor in surprise you have to be ready for shocks you have to be ready for major changes you have to be ready for the shock, and all you have to be ready for things you never expected to happen to happen. So expect the unexpected, but what you can do is that when the unexpected comes at you.  Now that that happened, what can I do to mitigate that if it's a negative thing, or what can I do to enhance that it's a positive thing? So you have to look at it in a more Zen-like way that these things that are out of our control will occur many many things are going to occur they're going to be a complete surprise to you you'll never have thought that this thing will happen some people call them blacks ones if they're massive events these massive events will occur. And when the surprises occur you have to think to yourself, how will I deal with these surprises? Am I going to allow it to completely derail me? Well, in some cases, it might depend on what the problem is. It depends on what it is that's happening, so if you build something on top of any API which suddenly goes away, you might have to do something completely different.

So I talked in the past about low-hanging fruit. I talk about how the heat the term low hanging fruit because everybody uses the term low hanging fruit. It's always it's the easy stuff. Let's go after the easy stuff. Everybody's okay with going after the easy stuff. Nobody has a problem with the low-hanging fruit; in fact, everybody loves it because it's easy. Human beings, that's what we're like we'd like easy we don't like doing anything difficult we don't like doing anything hard well it's so hard I hate doing it because it's hard. Here's the problem, though. The high hanging fruit, the hard stuff, the stuff it takes work to get to the stuff we've got to pull out the latter you gotta get somebody to brace for you we've got to go to the very top with high-value high-risk stuff is we never seem to get up there we do the low hanging fruit. Then we stop in the midst of what happens to the high-hanging fruit nobody gets up there and get the high-hanging fruit, and you know why nobody goes up there to get hang fruit is too much of a risk.  When you start looking up for the high-hanging fruit, you start looking at the high-hanging fruit. You realize what you have to give up what you have to change to get to the high-hanging fruit. That's when he gives you pause. It gives you pause because most likely, that high-hanging fruit is up there for a reason because it's tough to get to. It may not be that valuable. After all, what am I going to get out of it? Is it going to help my company? Am I going to make millions of dollars out of it? Who knows, we don't know we know it's going to be hard to get to, and we figured that I will be super profitable because it's high-hanging fruit that we never touched before. Still, we don't know. When you do a patent valuation, I come up with a great idea, and I've had that idea, so he says, well, how much is the idea of value? I said I don't know. And because human beings being what they are, we don't like things in their heart. We like doing the easy stuff, but what do you do next once the easy stuff is done? You have to do the hard stuff, and it takes courage to do the hard stuff, and the question is, do you have the courage to do the hard stuff? Do you have the courage to fight through the fear that you might have to get to the hard stuff? Do you have the courage to discard what you need to discard to get to the high-hanging fruit? I'm done with the low-hanging fruit. I'm only going after the high-hanging fruit, and if I go up to the high-hanging fruit, what do I have to give up to get to that high-hanging fruit. Slight. Human beings invented the computer-human beings invented the internet. It's the high-hanging fruit that's where the good stuff is

Your job and mine are impacted by accelerating, converging technologies, and may not exist in a few years' time. We all need to develop different mindsets to thrive in this difficult work environment and to make wise next-job and next-career decisions.