Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

The three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change—are all accelerating at once. As a result, so many aspects of our societies, workplaces, and geopolitics are being reshaped and need to be reimagined.

“We live as human beings in a linear world—where distance, time, and velocity are linear.” But the growth of technology today is on “an exponential curve. The only exponential we ever experience is when something is accelerating, like a car, or decelerating really suddenly with a hard braking. And when that happens you feel very uncertain and uncomfortable for a short period of time.”

“When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,” argues my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership. “You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to reimagine a better path.”

Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.” We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, “but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.”

And it is not just knowledge that is improved by pausing. So, too, is the ability to build trust, “to form deeper and better connections, not just fast ones, with other human beings,” adds Seidman. “Our ability to forge deep relationships—to love, to care, to hope, to trust, and to build voluntary communities based on shared values—is one of the most uniquely human capacities we have. It is the single most important thing that differentiates us from nature and machines. Not everything is better faster or meant to go faster. I am built to think about my grandchildren. I am not a cheetah.”

“We have never seen a time when more people could make history, record history, publicize history, and amplify history all at the same time,”

Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both.

This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them.

“What comes from the heart enters the heart.” What doesn’t come from your heart will never enter someone else’s heart. It takes caring to ignite caring; it takes empathy to ignite empathy.

you’ll never have an opinion column that works unless it is inspired and informed by real people. It can’t just be the advocacy of abstract principles.

When you put your value set together with your analysis of how the Machine works and your understanding of how it is affecting people and culture in different contexts, you have a worldview that you can then apply to all kinds of situations to produce your opinions. Just as a data scientist needs an algorithm to cut through all the unstructured data and all the noise to see the relevant patterns, an opinion writer needs a worldview to create heat and light.

you have to be constantly reporting and learning—more so today than ever. Anyone who falls back on tried-and-true formulae or dogmatisms in a world changing this fast is asking for trouble. Indeed, as the world becomes more interdependent and complex, it becomes more vital than ever to widen your aperture and to synthesize more perspectives.

Wells describes three ways of thinking about a problem: “inside the box,” “outside the box,” and “where there is no box.” The only sustainable approach to thinking today about problems, he argues, “is thinking without a box.”

According to AT&T, mobile data traffic on its national wireless network increased by more than 100,000 percent from January 2007 through December 2014.

The resulting flows of information and knowledge are making the world not only interconnected and hyperconnected but interdependent—everyone everywhere is now more vulnerable to the actions of anyone anywhere.

‘Disruption’ is what happens when someone does something clever that makes you or your company look obsolete. ‘Dislocation’ is when the whole environment is being altered so quickly that everyone starts to feel they can’t keep up.”

Indeed, there is a mismatch between the change in the pace of change and our ability to develop the learning systems, training systems, management systems, social safety nets, and government regulations that would enable citizens to get the most out of these accelerations and cushion their worst impacts. This mismatch, as we will see, is at the center of much of the turmoil roiling politics and society in both developed and developing countries today.

Indeed, the good news is that we’ve gotten a little bit faster at adapting over the centuries, thanks to greater literacy and knowledge diffusion.

Today, said Teller, the accelerating speed of scientific and technological innovations (and, I would add, new ideas, such as gay marriage) can outpace the capacity of the average human being and our societal structures to adapt and absorb them.

even though human beings and societies have steadily adapted to change, on average, the rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes. Many of us cannot keep pace anymore.

But when the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning.

There is a whole group of people—judging from the 2016 U.S. election—who “did not join the labor market at age twenty thinking they were going to have to do lifelong learning,” added Teller, and they are not happy about

Every institution, whether it is the patent office, which has improved a lot in recent years, or any other major government regulatory body, has to keep getting more agile—it has to be willing to experiment quickly and learn from mistakes. Rather than expecting new regulations to last for decades, it should continuously reevaluate the ways in which they serve society.