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

by Thomas L. Friedman

Hattie was a woman who believed that the secret of success in life was getting the fundamentals right. And she pounded the fundamentals of journalism into her students—not simply how to write a lede or accurately transcribe a quote, but, more important, how to comport yourself in a professional way and to always do quality work.

These conditions also obtained—not perfectly, but for the most part—in the neighborhoods, in the public schools, and in most of the places we inhabited. It made for an inadvertent education in democratic citizenship.

vote. And do you want to know who was the idiot who cast the deciding vote for that? That would be me.’ We had a council member at the time who was an engineer, Loren Paprocki, and he had said during our meetings [deciding on the system], ‘I just can’t support this. I don’t think it will work.’ And he said something that I will never forget as long as I live. He said: ‘We robustly debated it. I want you guys to know I am not going to support it. I just want you all to know that until this passes, I will be against it. But once it passes I will be 110 percent for it, because I don’t want it to fail. [Afterward], he was the last guy in the world to say ‘I told you so.’”

Pires recalled for me the day they announced the system was being dismantled—and before his heart gave out: “After we made the announcement, I went over for lunch to a coffee shop next to City Hall. It was called the Harvest Moon. And a guy at the counter there recognized me. He said: ‘Aren’t you the Wi-Fi guy?’” And then the man said something that blew Pires away. He said: “Too bad the company failed to get it to work. What is the city going to try next?” Too bad that didn’t work out. What is the city going to try next? “I never forgot that,” Pires told me. “The community can tell when you are trying to work for them and being responsive.”

If you are terrified all the time of being excoriated in the press for some minor screwup, well, I have news for you, all progress happens in fits and starts … The space project would never have happened after the first rocket blew up if people did not accept that.”

has this place remained so progressive over three generations, spanning Swedes, Jews, Latinos, African Americans, and now Somalis? His view is that when St. Louis Park back in the 1950s and 1960s learned to absorb and accept the sudden wave of Jewish immigrants, with their emphasis on education, it changed the town forever. Now that the new wave consists of Africans from Somalia and Ethiopia, Latinos, and African Americans, that imbedded habit of inclusion just got applied to

The story also pointed out that most big cities and towns have chambers of commerce and economic development offices, but what makes Itasca unique, participants say, is a commitment to hard data and McKinsey-style analysis, as well as a willingness to depart from the script that drives many private sector lobbies.

Small errors in navigation can have really serious consequences when the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law are all accelerating at this speed.

Looking back on all my interviews for this book, how many times in how many different contexts did I hear about the vital importance of having a caring adult or mentor in every young person’s life? How many times did I hear about the value of having a coach—whether you are applying for a job for the first time at Walmart or running Walmart?

How interesting was it to learn that the highest-paying jobs in the future will be stempathy jobs—jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being?