Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

The Power of Constraints Creativity, we are often told, is a kind of free-flowing, wide-ranging, “anything goes” kind of thinking. Ideas must be allowed to flourish unhindered. There’s an entire literature of “think-outside-the-box” business strategies to go along with these notions, but, if innovation is truly the goal, as brothers Dan and Chip Heath, the best-selling authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, point out in the pages of Fast Company, “[D]on’t think outside the box. Go box shopping. Keep trying on one after another until you find the one that catalyzes your thinking. A good box is like a lane marker on the highway. It’s a constraint that liberates.” In a world without constraints, most people take their time on projects, assume fewer risks, spend money wastefully, and try to reach their goals in comfortable and traditional ways—which, of course, leads nowhere new. But this is another reason why incentive prizes are such effective change agents: by their very nature, they are nothing more than a focusing mechanism and a list of constraints.

The time limit of a prize competition serves as another liberating constraint. In the pressure cooker of a race, with an ever-looming deadline, teams must quickly come to terms with the fact that “the same old way” won’t work. So they’re forced to try something new, pick a path, right or wrong, and see what happens. Most teams fail, but with dozens or hundreds competing, does it really matter? If one team succeeds, within the constraints, they’ve created a true breakthrough. Having a clear, bold target for the competition is the next important restriction. After Venter sequenced the human genome, many companies started selling whole genome-sequencing services. But none of their products had sufficient fidelity to be medically relevant. So the Archon Genomic X PRIZE was created. It challenges teams to sequence one hundred human genomes accurately (one error in one million base pairs), completely (98 percent of the human genome), rapidly (within ten days) and cheaply (and a cost of less than $1,000 per genome)—a quadruple combination that’s a 365 millionfold price-time-performance improvement over Venter’s original 2001 work. Moreover, as the genomes to be sequenced belong to a hundred healthy centenarians, this competition’s results will further unlock the secrets of longevity and drive us to our goal of health care abundance.

The point is that incentive prizes have a three-hundred-year track record of driving progress and accelerating change. They are a great way to steer toward the future we really want. So start your own. Help with ours. Whatever. In areas like chronic disease, where governments spend billions of dollars, the offer of a massive incentive prize seems like a no-brainer. AIDS costs the US government over $20 billion a year; that’s more than $100 billion during a five-year period. Imagine, for example, a $1 billion purse offered for the first team to demonstrate a cure or vaccine. Sure, the marketplace is vast and the corporation that develops this cure will reap huge rewards, but what if the government’s $1 billion was paid directly to the scientists who made the discovery? How many more brilliant minds might be turned on to this problem? How many graduate students might start daydreaming about solutions? Now apply this thinking to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or your cancer of choice. Whatever you like. The advantage here is an army of brilliant people around the world thinking about your problem and working on their own nickel to solve it. Properly executed, this mechanism offers the potential for fixed-cost science, fixed-cost engineering, and fixed-cost solutions. I’ve always believed (to paraphrase computer scientist Alan Kay) that the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself, and in my five decades of experience, there is no better way to do just that than with...

RISK AND FAILURE The Evolution of a Great Idea Sir Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the geostationary communication satellite and author of dozens of best-selling science-fiction books, knew something about the evolution of great ideas. He described three stages to their development. “In the beginning,” says Clarke, “people tell you that’s a crazy idea, and it’ll never work. Next, people say your idea might work, but it’s not worth doing. Finally, eventually, people say, I told you that it was a great idea all along!”

Demonstrating great ideas involves a considerable amount of risk. There will always be naysayers. People will resist breakthrough ideas until the moment they’re accepted as the new norm. Since the road to abundance requires significant innovation, it also requires significant tolerance for risk, for failure, and for ideas that strike most as absolute nonsense. As Burt Rutan puts it, “Revolutionary ideas come from nonsense. If an idea is truly a breakthrough, then the day before it was discovered, it must have been considered crazy or nonsense or both—otherwise it wouldn’t be a breakthrough.”

sometimes crazy ideas are just that, crazy. Some are plain bad. Others are ahead of their time, or miss their market, or are financially impractical. Whatever the case, these notions are doomed. But failure is not necessarily the disaster that everyone assumes. In an article for Stanford Business School News, Professor Baba Shiv explains it this way: “Failure is a dreaded concept for most business people. But failure can actually be a huge engine of innovation. The trick lies in approaching it with the right attitude and harnessing it as a blessing, not a curse.” Shiv studies the role that the brain’s liking and wanting systems play in shaping our decisions, a field now known as neuroeconomics. When it comes to risk, he divides the world into two mind-sets: type 1 people are fearful of making mistakes. For them, failure is shameful and disastrous. As a result, they are risk averse, and whatever progress they make is incremental at best. On the other hand, type 2 people are fearful of losing out on opportunities. Places like Silicon Valley are full of type 2 entrepreneurs. “What is shameful to these people,” says Shiv, “is sitting on the sidelines while someone else runs away with a great idea. Failure is not bad; it can actually be exciting. From so-called failures emerge those valuable gold nuggets—the ‘ah-ha!’ moments of insight that guide you toward your next innovation.”

You’ll never be able to achieve big-time success without risking big-time failure. If you want to succeed big, there is no substitute for simply sticking your neck out. Of course, nobody likes to fail, but when the fear of failure translates into taking fewer risks and not reaching for our dreams, it often means never moving ahead. Fearlessness is like a muscle: the more we use it, the stronger it becomes. The more we are willing to risk failure and act on our dreams and our desires, the more fearless we become and the easier it is the next time. Bottom line, taking risks is an indispensable part of any creative act.

Tony Spear never would have achieved his breakthrough by taking incremental steps. He did it by facing his fears and facing down the parade of experts who discouraged him along the way. So if you’re interested in solving grand challenges, driving breakthroughs, and changing the world, you’ll need to get ready. Go to the gym, start working out your fearlessness muscles and thickening your skin against the rain of criticism to come. Most importantly, do not seek to change the world unless you seek it, to paraphrase the nineteenth-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna, “as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.” Ultimately, one must have passion and purpose in order to convince the world of anything—which is, of course, the first step to changing it.

Each of us has an internal “line of credibility.” When we hear of an idea that is introduced below this line, we dismiss it out of hand. If the teenager next door declares his intent to fly to Mars, you smirk and move on. We also have an internal line of supercredibility. Should it be announced that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Larry Page have committed to fund a private mission to Mars, “When is it going to land?” becomes a much more reasonable question. When we hear an idea presented above the supercredible line, we immediately give it credence and use it to anchor future actions.

a powerful first impression (in other words, announcing your idea in a supercredible way) is fundamental to launching a breakthrough concept. But I also saw the importance of mind-set. My mind-set. Sure, I had wanted to open up space since my childhood, but was I really sure this approach would work? In getting to supercredibility, I had to lay out my ideas before the aerospace industry’s best and brightest, testing my premises and answering uncomfortable questions. In doing so, whatever doubts I’d had vanished along the way. By the time I was on stage with my dignitaries, the idea that the X PRIZE could work wasn’t a hopeful fantasy, it was the tomorrow I was certain would soon arrive. This is the second thing I learned that day: the awesome power of the right mind-set.

Think Different In 1997 Apple introduced its “Think Different” advertising campaign with the now-famous declaration: “Here’s to the crazy ones”: Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes . . . the ones who see things differently— they’re not fond of rules . . . You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things . . . they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do. If you were to just hear these words, they’d seem like bravado— marketingspeak from a company not known for marketingspeak. But Apple coupled sight to sound. Accompanying those words were images: Bob Dylan as a misfit; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a troublemaker; Thomas Edison as the one without respect for the status quo. Suddenly everything changes. Turns out this campaign is not all bluster. In fact, it seems to be a fairly accurate retelling of historical events. The point, however obvious, is pretty fundamental: you need to be a little crazy to change the world, and you can’t really fake it. If you don’t believe in the possibility, then you’ll never give it the 200 percent effort required. This can put experts in a tricky situation. Many have built their careers buttressing the status quo, reinforcing what they’ve a...

Getting Comfortable with Failure Almost every time I give a talk, I like to ask people what they fear most about failure. There are three consistent answers: loss of reputation, loss of money, and loss of time. Reputation is a quality built through consistent performance and serial successes. One big failure can topple decades of effort. Money, a scare resource for most, comes more easily to those with a track record of success. And time is just plain irreplaceable. Blow your reputation on the front page of the newspaper, file for bankruptcy, or waste years chasing a bad idea, and you too are likely to become risk adverse. Since the creation of abundance-related technologies requires taking risks, figuring out how to convert what Baba Shiv calls type 1 riskphobic individuals into type 2 riskphilic players is vital to this effort. There are a number of approaches now gaining favor. Some companies are focusing on how to make their working environment more tolerant of failure. At the financial software company Intuit, for example, the team responsible for a particularly disastrous marketing campaign received an award from Chairman Scott Cook, who said, “It’s only a failure if we fa...

WHICH WAY NEXT? The Adjacent Possible At the very beginning of this book, we argued that the true promise of abundance was one of creating a world of possibility: a world where every-one’s days are spent dreaming and doing, not scrapping and scraping. Never before has such promise really been in the offing. For most of human history, life was a constrained affair. Just finding ways to survive took most of our energy. The gap between one’s day-to-day reality and one’s true potential was vast indeed. But in these extraordinary days, that chasm is beginning to close. On a certain level, change is being driven by a fundamental property of technology: the fact that it expands into what theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman calls “the adjacent possible.” Before the invention of the wheel, the cart, the carriage, the automobile, the wheelbarrow, the roller skate, and a million other offshoots of circularity were not imaginable. They existed in a realm that was off-limits until the wheel was discovered, but once discovered, these pathways became clear. This is the adjacent possible. It’s the long list of first-order possibilities that open up whenever a new discovery is made. “The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them,” wrote author Steven Johnson in the Wall Street Journal. “Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open...

The Pursuit of Happiness A few years ago, Kahneman set aside the question of cognitive biases and turned his attention to the relationship between income level and well-being. By analyzing the results of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which asked some 450,000 Americans what brings them joy, he discovered, as the New York Times aptly put it, “Maybe money does buy you happiness after all.” With maybe being the operative word. What the data show is that one’s emotional satisfaction moves in lockstep with one’s income—as income rises, well-being rises—but only to a point. Before the average American earns $75,000 a year, there is a direct correlation between money and happiness. Above that number, the correlation disappears. This tells us something interesting: that in the United States, the freedom to flourish—to truly enjoy a life of possibility—costs roughly $75,000 a year in 2008 dollars. But what’s really important is what that money buys. The typical American spending breakdown shows that 75 percent to 80 percent of the money we earn goes to meet basic needs such as water, food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education. It’s over 90 percent in most developing countries. But many of the technologies investigated in this book have dematerializing properties: they service fundamental needs without costing us much beyond an Internet connection. Take health care. In today’s world, quality health care is about access. Access to transportation to the hospital, acc...

In our abundant future, the dollar goes further. As does the yen, the peso, the euro, and so forth. This happens because of dematerialization and demonetization; because of exponential price-performance curves; because each step up prosperity’s ladder saves time; because those extra hours add up to additional gains; because the close ties between categories in our abundance pyramid produce positive feedback loops, bootstrapping potential, and the domino effect, and for a thousand other reasons. So you have to wonder: what does it take to make a real difference? Not much, actually. Daniel Kahneman’s calculation has lately been extended to the rest of the planet. On average, across the globe, the point on the chart where well-being and money diverge is roughly $10,000. That’s how much the average global citizen needs to earn to fulfill his or her basic needs and gain a toehold toward much greater possibility. There is no debate that life has gotten considerably better at the bottom over the last four decades. During that stretch, the developing world has seen longer life expectancies, lower infant mortality rates, better access to information, communication, education, potential a...

“humans have consistently demonstrated an ability to find new things to do that are of greater value when jobs have been outsourced or automated. The industrial revolution, outsourced IT work, China’s low-cost labor force all ultimately created more interesting new jobs than they displaced.”

I understand we all want paychecks—or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs? We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that’s even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books. Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff—it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

“In the past, we have tended to see ourselves as a final product of evolution, but our evolution has not ceased. Indeed, we are now evolving more rapidly, though not in the familiar, slow Darwinian way. It is time that we started to think about our new emerging.”

“It will be hard to snuff out the flame of innovation, because it is such an evolutionary, bottom-up phenomenon in such a networked world. So long as human exchange and specialization are allowed to thrive somewhere, then culture evolves where leaders help it or hinder it, and the result is that prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves, and wilderness expands.” Sure, there are always going to be a few holdouts (again, the Amish), but the vast majority of us are here for the ride. And, as should be clear by now, it’s going to be quite a ride.