Epilogue: Your Role in the 400 Year Project

Epilogue

Your Role in the 400 Year Project

 

Head ‘em up, move ‘em out,

rope ‘em in, head ‘em off,

pull ‘em in, move ‘em on.

— Charles Marquis Warren

All the World’s a Stage

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six.

Mother took me to see him in a department store

and he asked for my autograph.

— Shirley Temple Black

Imagine you are now living in 2035 and all I’ve been describing has come to pass: The accomplishments closely resemble what normally would not have occurred until 2435. You have a chance to listen in while three old friends look back on what it has been like to live through these exciting times.

The first friend was a professor when the rapid progress began. The professor was fascinated by all that happened and followed along closely as the changes occurred. However, the professor chose not to participate directly, focusing instead on teaching students in the same old way. The professor is still gratified by all the ways that life has improved … especially the new methods that make it 400 times faster to read and write. The professor has authored 246 books, all of which have sold over 100,000 copies.

The second friend was an engineer in the beginning. The engineer felt that the potential for such rapid progress meant that biotechnology would be much more important than physical technology. The engineer went back to school in middle age and learned biotechnology. In that field, the former engineer helped create biological machines that repair organs inside peoples’ bodies at virtually no cost. The biotechnologist looks back with pleasure on the 12 billion operations that have successfully employed this new technology.

The third friend was a preschool teacher. Realizing the possibilities of the coming age, the teacher saw the potential to ensure full mental and physical development of all children. The teacher formed a nonprofit organization to identify how to accomplish that enviable result and to raise the money to pay for its accomplishment. The teacher looks back with pleasure on how 3 billion people who went through this program have now finished college — few of whom probably would have otherwise.

Isn’t that great? Yes, it is. It’s enough to satisfy the self-esteem of dozens of people rather than mere individuals.

However, even great results can lead to regret when later compared to missed potential. As the friends talk, they speak with reverence about those who were the highest achievers during those years. With more than a little sense of regret, the friends relate how they wish they had focused instead (at least in part) on creating solutions for what no one had ever conceived of doing before rather than only on improving what people had always sought to do. Just think; one of them might have invented a way to identify the ideal sequence for creating 2,000 percent solutions so that improvements for everyone could have deployed at well above 20 times the normal rate of progress. Think of how valuable such a solution would have been!

What part do you want to play in this soon to be born world of rapid progress? No theatrical director will decide; you will; and I’m optimistic that you’ll choose well.

Why do I ask about what role you want to play? That suggests that you may need to change your role. Why would I suggest that? Because the roles you’ve already picked out may not make as much sense when you consider the possibilities before you to make 20 generations’ worth of accomplishments in your lifetime. In considering the possibilities, I encourage you to stretch beyond the obvious. This opportunity to accomplish a great deal in your lifetime is unique in all human experience. Even those who first stumbled into the greatest past opportunities were looking at mole hills of potential compared to what you can start grasping today.

Because the change will be so quick, so substantial, and so unprecedented, it will be easy for you to become stalled in your thinking. Let’s look at a few possibilities to get your mental journey started.

The new realities don’t exist yet. In fact, the pathway to those new realities is still being formed through defining breakthrough processes. That step is like what engineers do while designing a new spacecraft that will revolutionize our knowledge of some far-off world: You need the design before you can make spacecraft for the voyage. If we look for a model of what this work could be like, we can look back to the 1940s when Peter Drucker began defining the tasks, responsibilities, and methods of management.

You could be someone who similarly shapes the future by the methods you create and share for others to follow. Within this part of the opportunity, there are roles for process designers, teachers, mentors, role models, and innovators. You’ll have a mostly empty stage to work on, but the good news is that you won’t have to wait for Godot. Instead, you’ll time and make your own entry onto the world’s stage where your contributions will explode into myriad accomplishments made by others. Then you’ll quickly follow that entrance with your own special magic that will transform the lives of tens of millions who use your methods. And like Shirley Temple learned at six, the world will probably be more impressed by what has happened than you will.

Or you can be someone who takes an existing or conceptual process (such as those outlined in Chapter 11) and creates vibrant, breakthrough solutions by applying the process. There’s room for almost everyone to play a role in this area. You can take several approaches:

• Focus on what you love to do, but learn to apply the improved processes. For example, you might launch dozens of worldwide contests to find solutions in those areas that fascinate you.

• Identify what you want to improve and work on those solutions. Perhaps you’ll need to shift into a new area for you, much like the engineer did in the opening story in the Epilogue. Once again, you’ll use the new processes to make efforts vastly more productive.

• Choose a human result that moves you and ensure that effective efforts are being undertaken to rapidly achieve that result, such as by founding a new organization or reforming an existing one. The new processes will again be your key to making the changes.

Perhaps the most intriguing challenge is in a final role: Defining what we should be working on that has already been abandoned because it seems impossible. In the story at the beginning of the Epilogue, I refer to the possibilities of creating an ideal pathway for creating solutions in the optimal sequence. I have no idea whether that will ever be done, but the example is a good one for showing the value of considering metasolutions (solutions that automatically create solutions for billions of other problems), even in areas we’ve been told are impossible to achieve.

As a consultant, I’ve always been struck that clients rarely know what the best questions are to focus on when they hire me. Although they usually hate it, I work with them to define better questions. I’m sure the same problem of being misidentification of focus pertains to the questions that even the most productive pose for themselves.

In the same way that consultants can help clients focus on better questions, we need more people to pose challenging questions to direct our rapidly increasing problem-solving prowess. Would you like to be one of those people? It could be the most valuable role of all.

Play Your Role

Lee [Strasberg] says I have to start with myself,

and I say, ‘With me?’ Well I’m not important!

Who does he think I am, Marilyn Monroe or something?

— Marilyn Monroe

Most people fear public speaking or acting in public more than death. Why? They imagine legions of people being scornful. Such humiliation!

Here’s the good news: Playing your role well for ushering in 400 years of progress by 2035 doesn’t mean that you ever have to speak or act in public. Take a deep breath and relax. Life is good.

But Lee Strasberg’s advice to Marilyn Monroe does apply to you. Preparation for your role in the 400 Year Project is initially all about you. Think about great performances you’ve seen: The artificiality of performance disappears into a perception of watching reality instead. If you can play your part in the project as naturally as you do the most important parts of your life, you’ll be a big success in your role.

Let’s look at a few more things that you don’t have to do. By taking away some of what may be crowding your mind at the present, you’ll be able to see the image of what you are to do.

Many people find it hard to solve problems about how long it will take two trains to meet that are traveling towards one another at different speeds. You won’t ever need to do that kind of calculation. In fact, if you find it hard to calculate what a 20 times improvement would be, just ask someone who is good at math to figure out the answer for you.

Many other people are troubled by putting their thoughts on paper. Well, if you can explain an idea or solution, someone can type up and organize your thoughts into a form that almost anyone can understand.

Still other people find reading to be difficult. If so, get an audio version of material you need to connect with or ask someone to read aloud to you.

Let me generalize for a moment. Start with who you are now as being complete and perfectly capable. Then look around for how you can cooperate with others to accomplish even more. You wouldn’t try to win a tug-of-war contest against 100 people by being the only person on your side. So don’t try to do everything for yourself, even if you are good at lots of things. Collaboration is the thing. Even a one-person play relies on dozens of others.

Let’s revisit our three friends as they talk about regrets in 2035. They have a lot to teach us.

The professor is disappointed by having focused so much on traditional teaching and writing books: Time has shown that most students learn best by a combination of resources (including gaining relevant experience, audios, videos, simulations, role playing, interactive participation, and teaching). The professor didn’t know much about how to do those other things and didn’t reach out to collaborate with others. As a result of not stretching, 99 percent of the potential benefit of the professor’s work wasn’t achieved.

The biotechnologist now realizes that biological machines are also immensely valuable outside of the human body. Many of the breakthroughs the biotechnologist developed could also have been applied to cleaning up pollution, eliminating diseases caused by ingesting toxins, and creating scarce resources from plentiful, inexpensive ones. The biotechnologist feels frustrated and guilty that these other improvements haven’t yet occurred. All that would have been required was to help set up organizations to pursue biotechnology breakthroughs into different areas of human need. This work might have required, at most, two weeks worth of effort a year. What a missed opportunity!

The teacher is very thrilled by having helped so many receive so much education. There is a little regret, though, that those efforts didn’t help the students learn more of the methods for achieving exponential benefits. Had that occurred, more uneducated people would have benefited from the education that these 3 billion people received.

What regrets would you like to avoid?

In my case, I would most regret not sharing this vision of how to grasp great progress through breakthrough improvements developed in cooperative, peaceful ways. I’ll keep sharing this vision so that I won’t have to live with that regret. Stay tuned for updates to the project and detailed advice on how you can accomplish more by registering at www.fastforward400.com.

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.