Heart-Center Thinking: After some reflection, I have decided to share this short, personal story. (The video is only one minute long). For too long, as a professional futurist, I have not acknowledged the essential role the human heart will play in transforming the future. I don’t know what this means for my own future as a “futurist,” but I am no longer going to shy away from the true forces of transformation. (I am sharing this in this newsletter because it is important to me that my clients understand I intend to bring my whole self–not just my mind–to my work.)
Think: This article, The Top Idea in Your Mind, is well worth three minutes of your time. It is not enough simply to think–we must spend our time thinking about the right things. This sounds easy, but it isn’t. If you have ever found yourself thinking about money or how to settle a petty dispute with a friend or an acquaintance, you will understand how easy it is for other issues to hijack your thinking. Controlling your thinking in order to reflect on the most important thing is a powerful first step in becoming a better thinker.
Think Bigger: Advances in gene editing technology may soon make various food types healthier and tastier. Unlike GMOs, gene edited foods have not had any new or foreign DNA added into themselves. Rather, the technology merely enhances a desirable trait (or knocks out a negative trait) by snipping out a small fragment of DNA. In the case of the gene edited tomato, the process has proven effective at enhancing vitamin D in tomatoes. This is a BIG deal because over 1 billion people currently suffer from a deficiency of vitamin D in their diets. Now, imagine–and think about–what other beneficial traits might soon be added to various foods due to gene editing and CRISPR technologies.
Think Convergently: Wearable technologies (such as the Apple Watch) and cloud computing are separate technologies but when two distinct technologies converge special things can happen. This is the case in health care where wearable technology and cloud computing are now allowing patients to continuously track various biomarkers. As this article suggests, patients will soon be monitored more effectively from home than at a hospital.
Think Differently: I enjoyed this article, Navigating the Mysteries, by Martin Shaw. In it, he poses a wonderful question: What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? Shaw offers a host of insights and provides practical tools for “navigating mystery,” but his main point is that the correct response to uncertainty is myth-making. This idea might sound impractical, but the main benefit is rather than trying to deal with uncertainty from the outside, we attempt to navigate it from the inside–by creating our own stories. (As to this last point, one way to “navigate the mystery” is to acknowledge the existence of the human soul–as I do in this 3-minute video.)
Afterthought: “Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.” –Bill Bullard
