a.k.a. A Futurist’s Survival Toolkit
As a self-proclaimed Futurist, it used to be pretty easy for me to keep up. Back in the 70s if you could Google the subject, you’d pretty much get Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock to come up, and just about nothing else. These days, my favorite coping strategy, namely future forecasting – I mean what better way of securing my livelihood than anticipating what shocks to the economy are coming around the bend – isn’t enough to sort through the information overload. You would think futurism is a pretty narrow topic. You’d think it’d be a great way to eliminate 99% of what I even need to consider reading. The problem is, that remaining 1% is still enough to drown me in a sea of information.
So, much like an architect uses layers and layers of gelatins to blow up or expose each section of his building diagrams to get a clearer picture of how the whole structure comes together, I have to add forever more filters to my sorting and packaging of useful information.
Hence this article. I want to share with you some of my better coping strategies for riding the cresting wave of change, in order to prevent being thrown from the surfboard. And I want to encourage you, the reader, to, using the comments field below, to add to this repository of information. Let’s call it our Survivalist’s Toolkit – one that is likely to be far superior to any the back-to-nature survivalists are using camped out in the woods with years of canned foods and lead bullets siphoned through repeating rifles.
A Futurist’s Survivalist Toolkit:
1. Read high up the food chain. Find the big picture thinkers to end all big picture thinkers. These are the integral thinkers who think across various disciplines and specialties. More to the point, they read voluminously, and have taken the time to connect the dots in the constellations of other fine minds out there. The world is complex these days. And it can’t be understood from the perspective or blinders of any one field of endeavor. So big picture thinkers think of the future more as an n-dimensional fractal than a 3-D picture, or worse, a 2-dimensional plane. They keep shifting the Rubik’s cube, not looking for any one position to solve it, but to consider how all the “wrong” positions add up to the “grand unifying theory of everything.”
A true master of the game is a man who goes by the name of Ken Wilber. He is perhaps the first and last word on integral thinking, and on voluminous readers. His method is dutifully outlined in his text, A Theory of Everything, as good a jumping off point to the rest of his writings as any. You can’t get any higher up the food chain than this guy. But you can emulate what he does by following in his footprints. “If you want to see farther than others, stand on the shoulders of giants…” is the cliché worth recontextualizing here.
2. Set aside a time each day for mind-storming. Just like you set aside a time for yoga, tai chi, or some other calming, centering ritual, in which you shut down your mind entirely, focusing on just your breathing – on just being. This is the anti-pole to your quiet time. This is your overload time. When you get so crazy with free-associating from one website, link, article, blog, post, Google-chasing-idea to another that you fry your neuronal circuitry, and overwhelm any capacity to process it all, remember it all, far less sort and collate it all.
The point of this little exercise in measured insanity is precisely that – to overwhelm your brain, so that, in a Piaget-like manner, you can grow new neuronal structures, new linkages in your brain to better channel, collate, sort, and make sense of information the next time you tackle this exercise. The brain, much like any muscle must be exercised. It must be stressed to the point of having to develop new coping strategies. If not, it will continue to rely on strategies which it has not outgrown, which continue to be adapted to survival.
You’re saying with this exercise in essence, “I’m not settling for whatever degree or measure of success I’ve attained in life, or this feeling of being on top of the world – because I know it’s illusory, and it won’t last.”
This exercise forces a paradigm shift in how our brains are ordered, moreover, when incremental shifts won’t do it anymore. Not only do Piaget’s theories speak to this need, and the wisdom of this approach, but so does modern day complexity theory, chaos theory, quantum dynamical theory, systems theory, punctuated evolutionary theory, even memetic theory (as populated by Richard Dawkins.)
So get with the program already, and develop habits for keeping yourself perpetually off balance. This is just one-such method of doing so. Like tai chi, and other forms of meditation mentioned above, it will allow you to absorb any shock to your system by learning the timeworn art of non-resistance. Of complete surrender. Don’t clench and tighten the next time you feel overwhelmed. Just ride it out until the surge subsides. The longer you can endure the surge – the greater your chances of finding yourself transported to a Narnia like world relative to your prior humdrum reality.
One in which your brain no longer requires steroids to channel “the force” as Yoda would have it.
3. Sic your left brain on it. Futurists tend to be very right-brained, needless to say. That’s where all that pattern recognition comes from, and the ability to see the hidden pictures in the chaos/noise of black and white dots. We intuit the right answer from a countless many instantly, often earning us the ire of folks who insist we eliminate by trial and error all the other alternatives first, that we apply investigative methodologies in tandem with statistical analysis, meetings with remarkable men, all filtered through software designed to boost our abilities to see the woods for the trees – only to find out that the intuitive futurist was right all along. The human mind is THAT good at making sense of an overwhelming abundance of data. Provided we can slip into the eye of the tornado, (another reason for putting aside time for Tai Chi and Yoga). Even so, we do have our blind spots. The biggest of them is our over-reliance on intuition at the expense of our rational thinking. So consider a more analytical approach as supplement. Hell, consider a job as an analyst, to force a little more brain-balance.
One such exercise might include prioritizing your favorite websites according to usability and prolificness of posts to get as close to one-stop shopping as you can. So if time doesn’t allow for additional browsing, you can make sure you’ve made the most of your limited time. Keep a log book of how much time you spend at each site to absorb the cornucopia of information. This way, over time, you’ll get a sense of how much time you need to give to your “regulars.” That task accomplished, don’t forget to leave some of your research time for “new discoveries and exploration” of websites that have come into being since you put on your blinders. That list of favorites after all needs to be added to on an ongoing basis – but in a way that is useful. Now do the same for your favorite writers, come time to check for their latest titles.
4. Consider a news aggregator. While in their infancy, news aggregators have the potential of doing all this filtering and sorting of your favorite websites and articles for you, relegating it to an automatic function, much like your medulla oblongata takes care of a lot of autonomic processes which would bog you down otherwise. Now, that’s that much more free time you have for reading, rather than chasing down the articles you want to read. I’ve spoken elsewhere on the importance of this particular app for managing information overload in the near future. It’s so important in fact you can trust that it will continue to evolve until it eliminates the need for search functions. Google might see some of its traffic shrink as a result.
News aggregators have the added convenience of bringing this filtered intel to your cell phone, moreover, so you can feed your brain on the go, in short little bursts, instead of “time out” periods that may be easy to talk your way out of later in the day when you’re too tired to do anything but collapse and zone out to World of Warcraft. Some android contenders among news aggregators: BuzzBox, News Reader, FeedR News Reader.
5. Make sure to have your meetings with Remarkable Men. Whether or not they are the most visionary people on the planet, or they depend on people like you and me to guide them, these are the movers and shakers who are making the future happen. So it wouldn’t hurt to get their at-times-misguided and wrong-minded view of the future – especially if they’re likely to manifest it at the expense of your much “prettier” take on tomorrow. What’s more, how else to change their minds before they bring that future into being than by finding out what’s on their minds, and the future they have in store for us, and then arguing vehemently against it in your latest blog? Well, obviously, you want to protect client confidentiality, and find a tactful way of doing this that makes your movers and shakers not want to decline your next request for an interview. More of the time, I imagine, because they have been informed by folks like you and me, you can save yourself a lot of groundwork, and help them promote a future you can both buy into by getting the word out. So it’s a win-win situation. That next CEO or marketing director or COO discussing the future of work in the workplace might have attacked the problems of tomorrow with teams of research analysts that get paid – in shifts, mind you, to work around the clock, to come up with what you may have come up with on your own in a fraction of time – using my standout methods… but why stress yourself?
6. Let your uber-mind guide you. There is a transhumanist in you. There is the witness state from which all is known – if you can just get outside your own head. So why not put meditation to work for you in a very specific way. There are many types of meditation, but insight meditation is particularly suited to futurists. All you need to do is pose the question, then quiet your mind, and wait for the answers to arrive. Doesn’t that just beat all kinds of mental wizardry to the contrary? Doesn’t that just trump all the “brain-food” “mind-growing” techniques I and others have outlined elsewhere?
The secret to the method: You have to be non-attached to the outcomes. There are times when you can barely keep up with the data dump. And there are times when nothing comes. And all those in-between times when you want to pull the information faster, but it’s just coming at a trickle. This is because the God within you has a higher agenda than satisfying your immediate needs. If your body and your mind needs rest, you must trust the God inside you to lead you, and just be happy with what you get. If you try to force this technique, it simply doesn’t work.
The truly amazing thing is that even before you drill down to true pay dirt – the God within – you press through areas nearly as helpful. The shared unconscious, for instance, that Carl Jung talked about. The archetypical or “false” gods have much to offer us long before we reach the unity of the one God – a Carol S. Pearson has pointed out in her seminal Awakening the Heroes Within, borrowing not just from Jung, but from Joseph Campbell. In this group mind that we share with the human race, and possibly with all sentient and non-sentient life on the planet, we encounter templates, not unlike those used in Tarot, and other forms of divination, for the primary archetypes from which all human personalities and “thinking styles” emerge.
So this too is a marvelous way of getting out of your own head, or at least de-localizing your center from ego state to trans-ego state. Even if the dislocation isn’t quite yet so complete as to get you into Witness state. The more perspectives you can integrate into your thinking, the more you approach the integral thinking we talked about above. The more we integrate conscious and unconscious minds, moreover, the more we’re firing on all cylinders. Rational mind, if over-developed, tends to get in the way of this. That’s why artists have known throughout the ages how to sidestep the rational mind by entering flow state (as described by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience). And they make a daily practice of it. Until they can trigger flow state at will. It is arguable, moreover, that genuinely integral thinking is impossible outside of Flow State. That being the case, mastering Flow State is step one.
7. Practice Switching Lanes. Cross-training athletes caught on to this a long time ago. They realized if runners just ran, they wore out those muscles long before they reached their maximum potential. But if they mixed things up, they got a much more effective workout overall, that applied to more than just running. The mind is the same way. If your “tao” is truly futurism, then find a way to express it using a variety of modalities. Not just writing social critiques, or “big picture” exposes in the form of so many non-fiction books. Try writing a screenplay or a poem. Try making a movie with your handheld video camera and some friends, or putting together a slide show or a power point. Write a fictional novel where a futurist is the lead character. Better yet, if the best futurists are integral thinkers, practice thinking from the innumerable fields of endeavor you would like to learn to later synthesize into a greater holistic form of thinking. Moving from the engineering perspective to the mathematical perspective to the spiritualist’s perspective to the philosopher’s perspective, and so on. You can do this all from within one of those novels!
8. Surround yourself with antagonists. Find people who frustrate the hell out of you. And spend time with them. Sometimes debating with other like-minded futurists doesn’t get the thoughts flowing nearly as well as trying to explain the simplest concept to someone who just doesn’t get it. That can force you to reapproach how you think about things in ways the head-nodding-understand-you-to-the-core-of-your-being savant never could. So, stop avoiding all those people who piss you off. And, much as the Pope in The Borgias would advise, consider making friends of your enemies.
9. Strive not to strive. A lesson from the movie, “The Black Swan.” You can drive yourself crazy with being deep and meaningful. And by ordering your life so that nothing irrelevant, or nothing that doesn’t fit your “growth” agenda ever enters it. Those of us big on continuous improvement have gotten so good at filtering our lives, it’s no longer about the noise intruding, it’s about escaping our own efficiency gestalts. Greater efficiency doesn’t mean running on clean burning fuel all the time. Sometimes throwing some garbage into the gas tank can shake you up enough to paradoxically revitalize the engine performance. Any dieter worth his salts has discovered as much by putting aside that one day a week to indulge in the dark side. “I am genuinely repulsed from frivolity. Why would someone who loves doing what they do ever consider taking a vacation from it? My mind is far more intoxicating and exciting than what any vacation could serve up. People need vacations because they don’t have passion, and they haven’t found their calling in life. Because their jobs don’t stimulate them on a high enough level. Work is not play for them; so of course they need a break from it.” You recognize the thinking, or not yet? So be a rebel, and rebel from your own transcendental logic – I don’t care how enlightened it is. And if it’s anything like mine, it’s pretty damned enlightened. Oh, yeah, that reminds me, don’t forget to take a vacation from your ego as well.
10. Evolve your critical thinking. There’s a wonderful book called Critical Thinking: Learn the Tools the Best Thinkers Use by Richard Paul and Linda Elder. They systematically slice through the 101 mistakes in critical thinking we all make all the time. By becoming more conscious of the ways the mind tricks us into “understanding” when we clearly don’t have a clue, we avoid wasting huge chunks of our time – like try most of our lives. From avoiding “group think” and social pressures, to grand over-simplifications, or emotions-led thinking… the list goes on and on. Even practiced philosophers with a PhD in super-reasoning would be shocked to find out just how many of these errors they can be found making on any given day. As the authors point out, this is a lifelong endeavor. No one ever masters critical thinking ever. The skills evolve over time. And the only shortcut is more mindfulness of how we think; is meta-thinking. We must learn to think about how we think; to distance ourselves so completely from our habits of mind that we can genuinely step away from them, and into more artful, empowering, and holistic forms of thinking.
But step one is seeing what we’ve become blind to in ourselves, because we don’t often have others to play mirror games with us, exposing our blind spots. So start with this book. And then, by all means, seek out those peers that are all too happy to hold a mirror up to you. Self-transcendence is painful, but stagnation is death. So what choice do you have, really?
Check back with this article from time to time, as I, and hopefully, you, the reader, update and add to the above list.
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