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DESIGNING THE DASHBOARD OF YOUR DESTINY
I am a Futurist. Futurism is part of who I am as well as my profession. I spend my time studying, researching, thinking, writing, consulting and speaking about the future, a future that is coming into existence far faster than the second by second movement of the clock would indicate. Anyone who has lived more than a very few years can see that our present is quite different from even our recent past. If you’ve got more than a decade of years behind you, you’ve witnessed transformations—technological, economic, social, geopolitical—unimaginable to your parents when they held you as a newborn. How do we best prepare ourselves—and our families, children, colleagues and co-workers and employees, our businesses and institutions, the world at large—for the dramatic transformations and disruptions that will accompany the enormous opportunities and possibilities the will present to us?By learning how to think differently about the future.Specifically, by developing the tools, skills and abilities—intellectual, intuitional, psychological, emotional—that enable us to participate in the development of the future coming our way, not simply to experience it, or, unfortunately for too many, let it wash over us or, sadly, let it wash us away."Epiphany Z" is my framework for developing those tools and skills and abilities, those qualities that will be necessary, even essential, if your dashboard is to really provide you with the information you need to control your destiny, or if it will only provide you with information about the forces controlling you.And the first step toward taking control of your future is to re-think your relationship with the future. We live in a very backward-looking society. We are backward-looking because we have all personally experienced the past. When we look around us, we see evidence of the past everywhere. All information is essentially history. The past is very knowable and very comfortable. Yet, we will be spending the rest of our lives in the futureFrom everything I’ve studied, past observers have focused on the concept of the future as being a consequence of time, rather than a stand-alone force of nature. But—is the future merely the result of the movement of time, or is the future itself a definable force?My raising of this question has led more than a few of my colleagues to think of me as that crazy guy who assigns human attributes to this thing we call the future. I don’t think I’m crazy, but I will admit that on occasion you can hear me uttering phrases like, “I know it’s going to be a great day because the future is clearly happy with me today.” Or, “No, that’s not a good idea because the future is probably going to push it off a cliff.” I don’t really think that the future is deliberately smiling upon me some days, frowning in my direction on others.I do think that the future is a definable force, and that by studying the future we not only prepare ourselves to better handle the changes it brings our way, we also equip ourselves to, as the chapter title says, design the dashboard of our destiny. Why is it so important to study the future? For starters, we all have a vested interest in it. We will all be living in the future.
