"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.”
General Eric Shinseki
[The following post is excerpted from my upcoming book 'Avoiding the Enemies to Happiness']
The world is changing, and changing at a massive and accelerating rate. More information, more stimulus, new ways of doing things, faster ways of doing things in an ongoing race that touches us in every way. Technological change is driving business change, societal change, environmental change and even personal change. It can be a struggle to just keep up.
To understand how massive this change is and how it’s accelerating at an ever growing rate, to get a graphic sense of just how fast the change is accelerating, you need to see a few graphs. Let’s start by looking at the amount of invention in the world. Technological invention drives change in our lives. New ways of doing things change the way we work, the way we live and just about every aspect of our lives.
Below is a graph of the number of patents filed in the United States per year. You can see that the graph starts relatively flat, with a small rate of growth over the last 100 years. Indeed, the amount of invention over the last couple of thousand years has been relatively small compared to recent growth. But look what happens from about 1980 onwards. The graph starts to rise and rise at a sharper and sharper rate.
[Source: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (http://www.uspto.gov)]
The shape of this graph is known as an exponential curve. This shape comes about due to a process of growth in which the size increases by a fixed multiple over time. For example, in computing there is a law known as ‘Moore’s Law’, coined by Gordon Moore, one of the inventors of the Microprocessor. Moore’s Law predicts that the power of computing will double approximately every 2 years. To get a sense of this, imagine that we start off with 1 unit of computing power. In 2 years time this will have doubled to 2 units. In a further 2 years, we will have 4 units of computing power. Two years later this will double to 8 units, then 16 units, 32 units, 64 units and so on. You can see from this that at first things appear to be growing slowly, but as the size increases, the doublings really start to make a powerful difference. This is the power of exponential growth. Once you reach the turning point, the graph just takes off and explodes upwards.
Importantly, it turns out that exponential growth – that is massively accelerating growth and change – is not just happening in the price/performance of computing. As you’ve seen from the previous graph, the number of patents for inventions is changing at an exponential rate and it’s now at the near vertical rate of growth. This accelerating rate of invention is in part what is driving Moore’s Law in the area of electronics and computing. And these massive changes in computing have lead to the growth and uptake of the internet. Let’s take a look at what its growth looks like.
[Source: Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. (http://www.isc.org/)]
You can see from this graph that it’s the same sort of curve and that the rate of growth of the internet is now in the near vertical part of the curve. So what does this mean? It means that the rate at which the internet is growing and changing is massively accelerating. More change and quicker change. Incredible.
The rate of invention development is also feeding other diverse areas such as:
- Genetic Engineering: Number of genes mapped per year
- Medical Technology: Resolution of brain scanning devices
- Industry: Manufacturing productivity rates
- Economics: World Economic Growth in GDP.
You can clearly see that the world is now at a point where the exponential change is producing massively accelerating growth. We are on the steep point of the curve and it’s only going to get bigger and steeper from here. You see, the limits now are not going to be human limits. We are creating intelligent automated systems that are designed to create and generate ideas and knowledge themselves. For example, we now have millions of web pages created each day by ‘know-bots’ (knowledge robots) – automated systems that crawl the web and synthesize, integrate and generate new web pages. Add in Moore’s Law to this and you’ll see that these bots are going to get faster and more powerful and more plentiful.
So what does this mean to you?
Well, as one interesting YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_aiE) created by Dr. Scott McLeod and Karl Fisch puts it: “Shift happens”.
Yes, your world is going to continue to change in massively accelerating ways. Society is changing and changing massively. Work is going to change immensely. Economics is going to change in accelerating ways. The way you live and connect is going to continue and continue to change... massively! You’ll have to keep up. If you don’t you’ll get run over. In order to stay economically viable, you’ll have to continue to learn and adapt. Or like the dinosaur you’ll become extinct. There’s no ignoring it. There’s no escaping it.
This massively accelerating change means there will always be ‘too much, too soon’ in our lives. Unless you become a change master and learn to ride the wave of change, your happiness will suffer. The stress and overwhelm of ‘too much, too soon’ are enemies to happiness. The good news is that there are skills, attitudes and strategies you can use to increase your resilience and embrace change so that it enhances your life. If you fight change, it will literally kill you. The stress of massive change can impact your mental, emotional and importantly your physical health.
"Worry and stress affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system, and profoundly affects heart action.”
Charles W. Mayo, M.D.
There are ways of learning to embrace change, to be comfortable with it, to value it in your heart, to not feel threatened by it at a gut level. You can learn to bring wisdom to how you embrace change and to evolve with it. The neural networks of your head, heart and gut brains (see www.mbraining.com for more info about this) have neural-plasticity. You can literally learn to evolve more complexity and more adaptive ways of processing change. And this is what my upcoming book 'Avoiding the Enemies to Happiness' teaches the behavioral skills and competencies of. So stay tuned for when it hits the Amazon book shelves soon. And in the mean time, if you haven't already, grab a copy of my book 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', co-authored with my colleague Marvin Oka, and learn the skills of connecting with and utilizing the intuitive intelligences of your heart and gut brains.
life enhancing wishes
Grant
Grant, this is something I have to keep telling myself! "You’ll have to keep up. If you don’t you’ll get run over." I'm sort of an 18th-century woman in a cyber-world!
ReplyDeleteHeya Jean, you make a great point, this is something we all need to keep reminding ourselves about and becoming comfortable with. And I have to say, for an "18th-century woman in a cyber-world" you are doing superbly well. You have embraced the world of blogging and all the cyber tools for sharing your message and building your digital tribe with alacrity. So keep up the great work of riding that accelerating digital wave of changing :-)
DeleteAnd also, thank you so very much for contributing and commenting, it is really appreciated!
smiles, Grant
Grant your observation is so timely.We all have ourselves to blame if we do not key into this present mode or not accepting this fact.Thanks for calling our attention to this happening.
ReplyDeleteHey Clara, thanks for your feedback and comment. You are so right, we ignore these facts at our peril and impact to our peace of mind. As a good friend of mine often says, "the facts are our friends!"
Deletesmiles, Grant
Hey Grant!
ReplyDeleteGood to see you back on the blogosphere--or is has that been left long behind (smile). I too, like Jean, need to tell myself to keep up. But more and more I trust things will have simpler solutions so I just have to trust my gut to know how to figure it out and not let my head do too much thinking about it. Hope all is well. Sue
Heya Sue, thanks, yes it's been a while since I did a blog post, I've been incredibly busy and focused on getting mBIT and mBraining out across the world and working on some new books. And yes, trusting your gut (and heart) to know where to focus your limited attention, using your intuition to know how to go with the flow, and feeling deeply comfortable that you'll be able to figure out what is needed, are all key parts of coping with accelerating change. Thanks for sharing and commenting.
Deletesmiles, Grant
Grant - I don't see the number of patents for inventions applied for as any valid measure of information increase. It is more a finer dividing of base concepts already understood - technology (application of invention) is not invention. In fact the exponential growth in patents applied is simply symptomatic of an outdated legal framework totally out of control & inevitably en-route to imploding. The current archaic throttling of information flow is the challenge
ReplyDeleteHeya John, good to hear from you, nearly time to go have a red up the snow. I don't disagree with you on the patents issue, indeed I think the current patent system is incredibly flawed as a way of supporting the promulgation of innovation into society. However, it's a moot point, since that graph, like every other graph of 'measures of knowledge', whether its number of ideas, number of books published, etc. etc. etc. all show the same curve. We are now on the assymptote of the exponential, and that's the real point. That's what my post is pointing out. Whether number of patents is a true and fully valid measure of information increase is kinda not the point. By any measure of information increase, we are exponentiating. And not surprising really, since knowledge begets and supports the process of knowledge'ing. And the absolute changes in amount of knowledge per unit time in society are now such that they are massive in extent. Knowing this and finding ways to flow with this is the import of my point.
DeleteI'll shout you a glass of red up at Jungfrau and we can debate the ways we might measure 'real information increase' :-)
smiles, Grant
Very cool Grant. thanks for sharing. I may have missed it, when is your new book due?
ReplyDeleteI guess it's time to trade in my 1980's brick phone :).
Love what you and Marvin are doing with this new technology. People and business are using outdated strategies (like my brick phone) to cope, survive and compete in this fast changing world.
James Marris
Hey James, thanks for the positive comment. New book is not far away, only half a chapter to go! It's been a long term project, one that I decided that since it was a book on Human Happiness, that I would only do in a happy and relaxed way, so I only ever work on it when I have the time and happy inclination to do so. It combines the best of Positive Psych, NLP, mBIT, CBT/REBT, Cog Sci etc. focused on looking pragmatically at what the enemies to human happiness are, and how to pattern interrupt them and replace them. People who have previewed the chapters already written have given it rave reviews. It also has what I call 'Notes from the Field' sections at the back of each chapter, that have interviews with exemplars of the topic of the chapter. I've done some really fascinating interviews with some really cool people. So I'm looking forward to it coming out before the end of the year. Of course, in the mean time I'm also busy researching and writing the 'mBIT Coaching Workbook' and Facilitators Guide to it. That's coming along really well too. Ah, so much to do, who would ever have time to watch TV? :-)
Deletesmiles, Grant
You know MAG and info overload are into a quantum leap – even in reference to themselves – when Grant Soosalu writes an entire article about it without mentioning Toffler’s 1970 classic FUTURESHOCK. As I recall we keyed off that for half a night a couple years back, and for me it’s still seminal to the subject. Looking forward to reprising that event in January! Stay cutting edge, my friend. Whatever the changes, you will be relevant and in sight of the horizon.
ReplyDeleteHey my friend, thanks for the insightful comment and the fond memory of us discursing into the wee hours, waxing lyrical about human process and the human condition. It was a brilliant adventure, both informationally and behaviourally, as we drove the highways in search of the elusive iconic ice-fishing experience and went off-piste across the emerging prairies :-)
Deletesmiles, Grant