You Can Live Without Success, but You Shouldn’t Live Without Trying

Here is the uncomfortable truth.

Photo by Ashton Bingham on Unsplash

The world doesn’t need more mediocre people.

It needs exceptional individuals capable of tackling the new challenges humanity faces:

• Global warming.
• Polarization.
• The infantilization of society.
• Rampant hyper-individualism that hardens people’s hearts, making it impossible to feel others’ pain.
• The ever-widening gap between rich and poor (and the floating ghettos for immigrants some countries have created).
• Rising unemployment due to the surge of AI and robotics.

Each generation passes the baton to the next.

But what were solutions for one become problems for the other.

The solutions your parents and grandparents had to improve things — oil, automation, assembly lines, plastic packaging, air conditioning — end up as the next generation’s problems: climate change, carbon footprints, unemployment, and more.

Solving a problem requires a higher level of thinking than the problem itself. And each solution adds to the world’s complexity.