What Makes a Tomorrow Person?
The Tomorrow People Initiative (Part 3)
“When you define something, you make it real. When you describe it, you bring it to life.” — Unknown
Defining what makes someone a Tomorrow Person is where things get tricky and why it’s taken me so long to actually write this series of posts.
First of all, words mean different things to different people. Their meaning changes based on the context in which they are read or spoken. And interpretations naturally evolve over time as the collective consciousness changes, so words can lose their relevance or significance. So much of how something is understood depends on the lenses and distortions of the interpreter.
Secondly, people also have a tendency to project themselves and what they want to see or hear onto those words and use them to justify whatever it was they were going to do anyway. This is why things like quotes, books, laws, and holy texts get distorted and bastardized to push different agendas, regardless of the original intent that was communicated. This is how movements get hijacked and misdirected.
And lastly, the vision I’m trying to convey feels big and difficult to condense. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I am saying that my perfectionism or at least desire for excellence can make it difficult to know exactly when I’ve communicated everything I intended. In a way that’s not too broad or too narrow. And not too lofty, but not too limited.
Because what I’m talking about is designing a new kind of human organization for the 21st century and beyond.
This a design document. A blueprint. A recipe. An algorithm. A brain dump.
But it’s also just a starting point.
Now I can’t take credit for actually coming up with the term, but it doesn’t seem to have widespread adoption. Its original meaning had a racial connotation, meaning a person who was mixed race. Best I can tell, the term exists because people in the future will tend to become more and more mixed up because of globalization.
At first, this seemed like a great categorization. It was future-oriented, and something I could easily identify with given my mixed ancestry.
But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted the focus community to be about race. Sure, where our ancestors come from influences the values and culture they’ve passed down to us is important and informs who we are as a people.
But the future isn’t just about walking in old footsteps. While there are lessons in the past of what to do, there are just as many, if not more, on what NOT to do. There is baggage we can unload and leave behind us. Because we will need to be lightfooted when treading new ground. We’re facing new challenges and opportunities, many of which are greater than ones anyone has ever faced before.
We’re all individuals at the end of the day who are not bound to the fate of our predecessors. And that freedom means we can pick and choose what beliefs we hold and which ones we want to discard if we have the courage.
So I thought being a Tomorrow Person should be a series of choices. It’s an attitude. A mindset. Something that could be developed over time and which you have to live up to. Not something you have to be born into. It’s something anyone can be a part of.
I also wanted it to be aspirational. To define a set of concrete values and principles that I, and others, could work personally towards. Something that would inspire me to be better. I wanted to lay the foundations for a community that could grow beyond my limitations and could outlast my own lifetime.
Right now, I’m probably one of the only people who call themselves a Tomorrow Person. But my hope is that more people will identify with the term, and start to create their own meaning for what that means to them and that helps them connect with others. I think it’s something that I plan on coming back to and re-examining because as I change, I expect that so too will my understanding of what this initiative means.
So with all that said, I think I’ve managed to narrow what being a Tomorrow Person means down to three basic criteria, each of which exists informs, and amplifies the others in a feedback loop.
I’ve expanded on what I think each one of them means to the best of my ability in separate posts below that go into way more detail. But I think the important thing to keep in mind is that these documents should be treated like living things. They need to be nurtured and revisited from time to time. They can’t be left to stagnate, because they will only make sense when re-evaluated within some larger context.
So, as it stands today, being a Tomorrow Person means being :
