The Future is a series of Probability Streams

The Best Way to View The Future

Listening to Elon Musk’s TED Talk from this past April really struck a chord with me. His aspirations to be a space-bearing civilization, a multi-planetary species, and a solar, electric, environmentally conscious planet has inspired thousands of people around the world.

My favorite line is his question at the very end of the interview:

You’ll tell me if it ever starts getting genuinely insane right?

And that’s it right there. His personal brand. The one that he’s built up over his entire lifetime. He dares to dream big dreams. He simply does things in order to inspire humanity to something greater.

When asked, why do you do it? He answered:

I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

Which is such an incredible statement and one that I think, by the very nature, is a good enough answer in itself to drive us to do anything other than nothing. To strive for something greater than ourselves because it’s the larger picture that will give us the reasons to keep on living.

One of my favorite Jim Rohn quotes is:

If you have enough reasons, you can do the most incredible things…

And it’s so true. Again, all you need is a reason for being, your ikigai, and a semblance of knowledge of who you are, and you’ll be able to create a better future for anyone, from just one person, to potentially millions of people.

We need to sometimes stop living in the past and look towards the future.

As they say in my favorite Disney move, Meet The Robinsons:

Those 3 simple words of “Keep Moving Forward” help in any situation where you just need to Let It Go and move on :)

Probability Streams

All our actions mean something, and our future is made up of endless possibilities. In fact, as Elon Musk says, there many different paths our lives can take, each with their own probability.

I look at the future from the standpoint of probabilities. It’s like a branching stream of probabilities, and there are actions that we can take that affect those probabilities or that accelerate one thing or slow down another thing. I may introduce something new to the probability stream.

Sustainable energy will happen no matter what. If there was no Tesla, if Tesla never existed, it would have to happen out of necessity. It’s tautological. If you don’t have sustainable energy, it means you have unsustainable energy. Eventually you will run out, and the laws of economics will drive civilization towards sustainable energy, inevitably.

The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy, faster than it would otherwise occur.

So we all can influence our futures by influencing the probability that a certain future (one of the many possible outcomes) will more likely happen than the others!

Every little bit counts as long as your being proactive and making progress towards your goals, that’s all we can ask ourselves. There might be days where we have more setbacks than we would like, but we just have to remember that it’s all part of a larger picture. The future we want to happen will most likely happen simply because we increased the probability that it will happen!

All we have to do is play our part :)