To Live Your Best Life, Seek Out the Waves of Disruption
The following is adapted from Surfing Rogue Waves by Eric Pilon-Bignell.
Most of us only notice change after it happens. We are not studying waves to see how their disruption will develop and emerge. We are not actively focused on looking for areas of change and building of tension in our lives. We are not actively considering the reasons for the building of these waves of disruption in our everyday lives.
These disruptive waves can be either good or bad, but they have a place, and an influence, in our lives regardless. Unlike surfers who learn from each wave they catch, most of us are not learning from previous changes that have crashed into the shores of our lives. Each change and transition is very different; we fail to view life like a surfer watches the waves.
Every wave a surfer catches is like starting over, and every wave is uniquely different. The difference between someone’s first time out on the water and a seasoned surfer with a collection of wetsuits is how quickly they can adapt to the unique conditions of each incoming wave.
Learning from past experiences allows us to prepare for the unexpected events coming down the pike — like the spontaneous emergence of a rogue wave that could either knock us off the board, or give us the ride of a lifetime. Further to the point, surfers are not merely preparing for rogue waves; they are actively hunting them. They dream about them.
Why not take this mindset into our everyday life? Not only should we prepare for the rogue waves of disruption, but we should continuously seek them out, dream of them, and hunt them down. We can either engage with the change or let it show up as a wipeout surprise.
Without preparation, the only option is to run from the rogue waves before they annihilate us, leaving us vulnerable to the next giant wave building in the distance. Some people aimlessly drift through life, trying not to drown, while others prepare themselves to have the time of their lives, surfing the heck out of rogue monster waves.
In the ocean of our lives, we are experiencing rogue waves building in a full-on mode of complex hyper-disruption. All the changes in our world feel less predictable, more relentless, and more catastrophic than ever before.
We should be concerned, as these changes will transform everything we know about our world and ourselves. We will never be sure how all of this disruption and change will transform our lives, but we know change is happening.
For the first time in human history, there are technologies of exponential capacity that are starting to crash into one another, creating an explosion of amplification of how each technology makes rogue waves. And the frequency of these collisions will only increase in the coming years, reshaping our lives every time.
While we may start to see how these changes happen, there are still countless unseen revolutions happening in distribution, transportation, finance, real estate, retail, education, advertising, food, health, manufacturing, entertainment, and many other industries.
How do we prepare for changes we can’t even see?
As our technologies get faster and develop more rapidly, the collisions get exponentially more catastrophic and impact our day-to-day in further-reaching capacities with less predictability. We don’t know much, we can’t see into the future (yet), but we do know that forecasts have advancements in robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, digital biology, and sensors slamming directly into 3D printing, blockchain, global digital networks, and AI to create an explosion of rogue disruption, unlike anything we have ever seen.
These disruptions will further move the daily life of all humanity into uncharted, unexplored oceans. They will force us to reimagine the world.
Not only will we be presented with technological and systematic challenges, but we will also be forced to rethink everything we know from the human experience, from aging and happiness to artificial human augmentations. These rogue waves of disruption are already making us reconsider how we raise children, how we govern our cities and nations, and how we care for this planet.
What does it mean to be human? Or to have morals and ethics? Whatever the answers, one thing is for sure: we all have to stop watching from the shore and start learning to surf the greatest waves humanity has ever experienced.
For more advice on how to prepare for the disruption that is inevitably coming, you can find Surfing Rogue Waves on Amazon.
Eric Pilon-Bignell is a pragmatic futurist focused on addressing disruption by increasing the creative capacity of individuals, teams, and organizations to ignite change, innovation, and foster continuous growth. Eric has an undergraduate degree in engineering, an MBA in Information Systems, and a Ph.D. in Global Leadership. His doctoral work primarily explored complexity sciences centered on executive cognition and their use of intuitive improvisation, decision-making, artificial intelligence, and data-based decision models. When he is not working with clients, researching, or writing, he can be found in the mountains or on the water. He founded PROJECT7 to raise awareness and money for research on brain-related illnesses. Eric is currently working and living with his wife in Chicago, Illinois. To connect or learn more about this book, Eric, or PROJECT7, please visit www.ericpb.me.
