It’s somewhat surreal watching in 2017, or really, examining any sci-fi predictions. The world, in a very clear way, never turns out the way we expect it to. Back to the Future Like, what is everyone in the 20th century’s obsession with flying cars. Humans can barely drive on flat roads, and yet everyone thought it was a good idea to let them zoom around in three dimensional space? Our 21st century self driving road cars are certainly much less exciting, but also tend to get a lot less people killed. Things just get weirder the further back you go in time. I’m not even going to try to explain this: Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons The point is that we as humans suck at prediction. We just can’t do it, the world is too complex. We can’t even understand things that have already happened, never mind things that haven’t taken place yet. The is just too full of random events that come out of nowhere and change our entire conception of what is to come. Almost no one in the 1800s was predicting how our would come to be defined by computers, how could they? What then are missing about the next 100 years? Probably a lot. future society we Despite this, as companies and individuals, we always strive to be ahead of the curve. For good reason too, it’s essential to any entrepreneurial success. So what can we do to remain forward looking, if the future is unpredictable? For starters, we need to stop pretending we know what the next century is going to be like: who’s going to rule the world, what companies will be dominant, what products people will want. We need to accept that the further we move forward, the less our already flawed predictive capacity will be. This allows us to instead focus on more manageable time frames of 1–10 years. Secondly, in coming to terms with our difficulty in prediction, we need to be prepared for massive unexpected changes, even within short time frames. If we think our plans are rock solid, then we are insufficiently preparing ourselves for the unexpected. Be prepared to change your plan on the go, whether it is a personal plan or a business plan. Life is not a game of Monopoly, where all the rules are known. Life is a messy swirl of unclear cause and effects. Prepare for the latter. Building off that, don’t allow the inherent unpredictability of the future to make you stuck in the past. Innovation and vision are the rewards of those who do not follow the patterns of yesterday. Try new things, move in different ways, do something no one else is doing. This way, rather than being buffeted by the winds of the unexpected, you will be the unexpected. The unpredictability of the future is what makes this period in time so exciting, embrace it. Prepare yourself, act boldly, and in the meantime, don’t waste your time with flying cars (those mechanical wing things look pretty cool though, maybe work on those).
