It’s now time to give back: Lessons from Diamandis and Kotler’s Abundance
Welcome to another book review.
I’m excited that you’re here because that means that a part of you is considering reading this book, and that is the first step to actually doing it, which would eventually make you grow a little bit more as a person and fellow human.
This review is FILLED with spoilers (which in the case of non-fiction book reviews is actually a good thing), so please enjoy them.
You have only one job after you’re done reading this review: you need to point out a mistake on it and let me know on the comment section. Why? Because I think we’re all here to learn, so thanks in advance.
Without further ado, welcome to Abundance.
THE FUTURE IS BETTER THAN YOU THINK
The general message, which from the book’s sub-title should be quite predictable: we’re not so screwed up. The book takes you through an exploration of some of the technologies currently being developed by top scientists around the world, and their potential to radically change the odds of overcoming problems such as overpopulation, global warming, food and water shortage, world poverty, etc. It also builds a compelling cases on how radical innovation through focus sprints can be instrumental for overcoming the most complex challenges of humanity.
Overall, I found quite refreshing to read a book filled with optimism and numerous examples of how the human race has again and again, against all odds, adapted to survive.
What is Abundance?
The core premise is quite simple: time is the most valuable asset.
The authors rely heavily on Matt Ridley’s “Rational Optimist” (which I’ll review soon) to start building their case for prosperity. To connect with this idea we have to think of the products and services that surround us not as how much they cost in monetary terms, but in time units. This means the time we’d have to work in our own crafts to save enough money to pay for things. Which brings us to another core concept behind prosperity: job specialization. We are so much better off today that we’ve been at any point in the past because we’ve solved nearly all of the time consuming tasks that our ancestors needed to carry out on a daily basis (hunt for food, collect wood for fire, walk great distances to fetch clean water, etc).
Abundance is about creating a world of possibility: a world where everyone’s days are spent dreaming and doing, not scrapping and scraping.
By far the part of the book that I found the most interesting was the exploration of the “well being pyramid”, which is basically a compressed version of Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Human Needs”.
On the end of the spectrum where our needs are not met we virtually could not produce much if, for example, we had to spend four to six hours every single day just fetching clean water from the nearest source located a couple of miles away from home. And although a situation like this might sound absurd, almost medieval, statistics show that it is real and contemporary in some parts of the world. In contrast, on the opposite side of the spectrum we have philantropists and other public figures who after (either from luck or sweat and tears) accumulating enough wealth to meet their human needs, started pushing the boundaries of social responsibility by working on large scale noble causes.
We need to help others progress in their own checklists of human needs, because by doing so we enable them to reach their top section on the pyramid, and at that point we all win. Diamandis and Kotler energetically call these people the rising billion. It’s a beautiful concept that encapsulates the vast amount of people who as of today don’t have several of their basic needs met, but in turn are gradually coming online, thanks to the expansion of the internet and the comoditization of smartphones. The rising billion is the literal billion plus people that are now contributing from their phones to make the world a better place by sharing ideas and knowledge. So think about this coupled with fascinating education initiatives such as Khan Academy or YouTube, and the status of that global needs checklists starts to look better.
The Most Effective Contraceptive
A fact that I was not aware at all, and really blew my mind, is that overpopulation is best fought through increasing access to education and healthcare in the poorest populations. This seems counterintuitive because at first it sounds more coherent that if you increase the quality of life of those populations who tend to have more children, they’re going to go on a reproductive spree. Yet, data presented by the authors shows a different picture using Morocco as an example. Over the 40 years starting in 1971 population data was studied to reveal that as child mortality goes down end so does the birthrate. This means, that by ensuring that kids in the poorest corners of the world don’t die from drinking contaminated water or malnutrition, their parents can have one less problem to think about and have more time in their hands to work, produce, but more importantly, they don’t need to have another child to replace that son or daughter who died a preventable death. It sounds harsh, but statistics presented by the authors back these statements, which I found simply mind blowing.
Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism
Technology makes a once scarce resource now abundant.
The authors make a fascinating case around technology and innovation as enablers of scarce resources. This basically questions the concept of scarcity and narrows it down to a problem of context, in which the availability of an appropriate toolkit could perfectly eliminate it.
As discussed on the book, take the example of Nanotechnologies, and the way they could entirely cause a paradigm shift on both clean water access and garbage management. This technology offers the panorama of a world where water filters so are precise that they can catch every single harmful organism out of any substance, enabling us to literally turn disposable waste into potable water.
Yeah, you read that right.
If everything goes according to the plan of inventor and philanthropist Dean Kamen, we’ll be drinking our own piss a la Waterworld, thanks to his Slingshot project.
Educating for challenge
In a world flooded with a rapidly changing technological culture and ever-growing information-based economies, educating fact-based children is short from a misguided approach. We need to nurture creativity and curiosity in the young minds so that they can grow up to become problem solvers and thinkers with the resolution to take action, not only remember facts and ace tests. The authors quote Sir Ken Robinson’s work by bringing to the conversation the fact our current traditional schooling systems are killing creativity and squelching talent. Robinson’s argument goes by stating that, in order for us to access our immense potential, we need permission to explore our interests and nurture them to a point where we can truly know ourselves. Only at that point we’ll be able to tap into our true potential. Experimentation and exploration like these ones are not precisely the most important thing for traditional schooling systems and standardized tests.
There is one aspect of the book that the authors made very clear throughout the entire manifest: Singularity University and the X-PRIZE Foundation are the way they are contributing to the acceleration of the innovations that they present as foundation for their optimism.
Preparing Global Leaders & Organizations for the Future
(title directly taken from the SU website)
Singularity University is a not-for-profit organization co-founded by Peter Diamandis (one of the book authors) and Ray Kurzweil (a Director of Engineering at Google, renowned futurist and best selling author). Its main focus is the dissemination of awareness about new technologies through preparing its students with the tools and resources to deal with the challenges of the future. The organization has tremendous impact on humanity through the leaders and startups it support through their programs, where the main objective is to create a business that would grow to impact at least 1 billion people in 10 years. What I found the most remarkable about the programs (after I read about them on the organization’s site) is the absolutely clear focus on impact and massive results; anything short of that simply doesn’t make the cut.
Prizes as Innovation Mechanisms
The X-Prize Foundation main value proposition is to solve the hardest challenges by bring together people from all backgrounds to tackle problems that they know they can’t currently solve, yet they have the conviction and determination to try anyway. This is fascinating because not only it plays out in the most economically efficient way (only one winner receives the prize if it meets all the criteria) and it more often than not
greater than themselves, and promises exuberant amounts of money as reward, in collaboration with sponsors that not only contribute the cash prize, but also represent a central user of the technology being developed for the competition, and this represents an additional revenue stream down the road of the winner’s path. Competitions attract participants from non traditional backgrounds, which is more than desirable since new ideas come into the table.
You and me can innovate too
This approach to innovation through accelerated, laser focused efforts with pretty narrow and highly elevated standards are seen also in corporations as a way to foster growth and the creation of novel solutions. Developed by the MIT’ Center for Digital Business, the 5x5x5 Rapid Innovation Method is a powerful tool to stop having low stamina brainstorming sessions, and start having super charged innovation sprints instead, that ensure actionable proposals with execution plans to create new value.
So, you have one job now that you’re done reading the review: you need to point out a mistake on it and let me know on the comment section.
So go ahead 👇
Thank you for reading and if you found this interesting, don’t hesitate to comment or reach out. I’ve found that a healthy discussion about a topic of our interest is the best way to digest the content.
I’m a Product Manager with a proclivity for web design and programming. I live in Japan and currently help a number of tech startups in AgTech and EdTech get off the ground. Happy to connect on LinkedIn or Instagram. And while you’re at it, here’s my website and YouTube channel as well.
