Four Food Groups For The Future
I and a few others have written about how humanity has entered the Exponential Age (previous essay). What that means is that change is snowballing to the point where humans can’t keep up with technological progress. What we need to do is develop strategies to:
Build resiliency
Withstand uncertainty
There’s also so much choice in selecting what to learn, while at the same time being limited by our biology (availability of time and attention). The question becomes what do you focus on in order to build resiliency and withstand uncertainty?
Design Thinking
Security
Cycles
Economics
When you put these four broad general skills together, you can predict, adapt, and overcome just about anything. There are no silver bullets, but these four food groups will provide a solid mental arsenal.
All these tie back to building sufficient value given that all fiat currencies eventually go to zero. Ie paper money eventually always becomes worthless (previous essay):
Time
Energy
Mind
Health
Relationships
Design Thinking
Design is about solving unmet needs, specifically those of people. By putting people at the center of your investigations, you ensure that you’re actually addressing problems people have. The alternative is usually some cool tech widget, but no unmet need. This is effectively a solution in search of a problem.
Security
Awareness of the environment and awareness of self. With increasing uncertainty, building solid systems that protect us, and ensure we can continuously resonate in our natural state are key. Maslow put security needs at the base of his pyramid. Hacking also grows a set of problem solving thinking that enables you to fix anything, because you are having to invent novel solutions with limited resources.
Hacking also teaches Synthesis, the art of making solutions from two different things that shouldn’t work together. Hacking is also the other side of the Design Thinking / User Experience coin. Where a design thinker sees a bug, a hacker sees an exploit. Being able to hold both in your mind at the same time will unlock new hidden solutions and ensure you build more resiliency (bc you’re subconsciously thinking about security).
Cycles
There’s an old saying that history doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme. By studying cycles you begin to learn how to read the rhymes of history. I advocate more specifically to study real astrology, not horoscopes from teen vogue or some random tabloid. If you follow the planets’ orbit around the sun, what is revealed is a cosmic clock with many hour hands. You can correlate the position of the planets to date past events and begin to see even more cycles.
Cycles can also infer discipline and consistency. Ie you keep up with a habit to improve yourself a little bit every day. Over the long run, bigger improvement cycles emerge from the little ones. These can be as mundane as brushing and flossing your teeth, to getting 10k steps a day, to saving 1% of your paycheck to reinvest it back into physical assets like real estate.
Economics
Unit economics matter now. The age of borrowing free debt and rolling it over in perpetuity is over. Therefore getting efficient with all your systems is key. You have to produce more than you earn or burn. If you work out, party, but don’t eat well or sleep - you’re going to hit a wall at some point. Real economics helps with growing wealth and improving your longevity because you are getting honest with your resources and burn rate.
When you put these four food groups together, you can see and adapt to almost any changing circumstance. If anything is certain about the future, it’s that change isn’t just constant - it’s exponential.
In a future essay, we will examine how to move from a surviving mentality to one that thrives amidst all the apparent chaos. Before we get there however, we have a few more ground level bases to cover.