Run From What's Comfortable

Dear reader, I asked a simple question last week: “What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?” The idea was not to indulge in idle fantasies, but to try to enlarge your thinking and expand your horizons. Too often we allow our goals to be limited by a sense of what is “possible”. This constrains us into thinking about linear improvements.

Instead, if we 10x our thinking, we are forced to act and innovate in radically different ways.

If a man wants to run 10% faster, he can train harder and longer; if he wants to run 10x faster, he has to invent the car.

We live in a world of rapid technological change. Industries that have stood for centuries are being disrupted by startups run out of garages. Dave McClure wrote about the “Unicorn Hedge”: the phenomena in which public companies are increasingly buying out their startup competitors, in hopes of avoiding being disrupted by them. He argues that the real bubble is not in tech companies (although there are certainly many that are overvalued today), but instead in traditional industries that have yet to embrace the new world of rapid change and innovation.

The rate of change itself is increasing. Ray Kurzweil’s predictions are rapidly coming true. His predictions about today, made 10 years ago, seemed absurd at the time and were widely ridiculed. They have almost all come true. It’s worth a look at the list linked above: his predictions about 10 years in the future might seem similarly far-fetched today, but he has certainly been right about the exponentially increasing rate of technological progress.

I encourage you to consider, in your own life, how you can 10x your thinking. What can you do today that will have an impact in 100 years’ time?

Yours Sincerely,
Henry Chong