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

by Thomas L. Friedman

‘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.”

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. “And that is causing us

This is a real problem. When fast gets really fast, being slower to adapt makes you really slow—and disoriented. It is as if we were all on one of those airport moving sidewalks that was going around five miles an hour and suddenly it sped up to twenty-five miles an hour—even as everything else around it stayed roughly the same. That is really disorienting for a lot of people.

Okay, it wasn’t that simple. He wanted to talk about “the connected cow.” The story Sirosh tells goes like this: Dairy farmers in Japan approached the Japanese computer giant Fujitsu with a question. Could they improve the odds for successfully breeding cows in large dairy farms? It turns out that cows go into heat, or estrus—their period of sexual receptivity and fertility when they can be successfully artificially inseminated—only for a very short window: twelve to eighteen hours roughly every twenty-one days, and often primarily at night. This can make it enormously difficult for a small farmer with a large herd to monitor all his cows and identify the ideal time to artificially inseminate each one. If this can be done well, dairy farmers can ensure uninterrupted milk production from each cow throughout the year, maximizing the per capita output of the farm. The solution Fujitsu came up with, explained Sirosh, was to fit the cows with pedometers connected by radio signal to the farm. The data was transmitted to a machine-learning software system called GYUHO SaaS running on Microsoft Azure, the Microsoft cloud. Fujitsu’s research had established that a big increase in the number of steps per hour was a 95 percent accurate signal for the onset of estrus in dairy cows. When the GYUHO system detected a cow in heat, it would send a text alert to the farmers on their mobile phones, enabling them to administer artificial insemination at exactly the right times.

With every passing day, explained John Donovan, AT&T’s chief strategy officer, we are turning more and more “digital exhaust into digital fuel” and generating and applying the insights faster and faster. The American department store owner John Wanamaker was an early twentieth-century pioneer in both retailing and advertising. He once famously observed: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” That needn’t be the case today.

to open up the iPhone, as the venture capitalist John Doerr had suggested, to app developers everywhere.

the equivalent of a “phase change” in chemistry from a solid to a liquid. What is the feature of something solid? It is full of friction. What is the feature of a liquid? It feels friction-free. When you simultaneously take the friction

As a result, the motto in Silicon Valley today is: everything that is analog is now being digitized, everything that is being digitized is now being stored, everything that is being stored is now being analyzed by software on these more powerful computing systems, and all the learning is being immediately applied to make old things work better, to make new things possible, and to do old things in fundamentally new ways.

And that is the point, concluded Wujec, with the advances in sensing, digitization, computation, storage, networking and software: all “industries are becoming computable. When an industry becomes computable, it goes through a series of predictable changes: It moves from being digitized to being disrupted to being democratized.” With Uber, the very analog process of hailing a cab in a strange city got digitized. Then the whole industry got disrupted. And now the whole industry has been democratized—anyone can be a cab driver for anyone else anywhere, and anyone can now pretty easily start a cab company. With design, the analog process of rendering a dinosaur got digitized, then thanks to the supernova it got disrupted, and now it is being democratized, so anyone with a smartphone can do it, vastly enhancing the power of one.

God always forgives. Man often forgives. Nature never forgives.

A “black elephant,” it was explained to me by the London-based investor and environmentalist Adam Sweidan, is a cross between a “black swan”—a rare, low-probability, unanticipated event with enormous ramifications—and “the elephant in the room: a problem that is widely visible to everyone, yet that no one wants to address, even though we absolutely know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.”

But there is one big difference between these two forms of technology, he added: Physical technologies evolve at the pace of science—fast and getting exponentially faster, while social technologies evolve at the pace at which humans can change—much slower. While physical technology change creates new marvels, new gadgets, better medicine, social technology change often creates huge social stresses and turmoil, like the Arab Spring countries trying to go from tribal autocracies to rule of law democracies. Also, our physical technologies can get way ahead of the ability of our social technologies to manage them—nuclear proliferation, bioterrorism, cyber crime—some of which is happening around us right now. Our physical technologies won’t slow down—Moore’s law will win—so we’re in a race for our social technologies to keep up. We need to more deeply understand how individual psychology, organizations, institutions, and societies work and find ways to accelerate their adaptability and evolution.

from new materials to energy storage, and energy itself is undergoing profound changes affecting all of society. Collectively, the rates of technological change in just these five areas—bio, robo, info, nano, and energy (BRINE, for short)—pose legal, ethical, policy, operational, and strategic opportunities, and risks, that no company or individual can address alone.

But in this next section of the book I will offer some of the best adaptation ideas I have gleaned that are surely necessary in five key areas—the workplace, geopolitics, politics, ethics, and community building—to help people feel more anchored, resilient, and propelled in this age of accelerations. The last thing we want is for everyone to stick their paddles in the white water to slow down. That is exactly how you destabilize a kayak and a country.

Within the next decade that digital divide will largely disappear. And when that happens only one divide will matter, says Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, and that is “the motivational divide.” The future will belong to those who have the self-motivation to take advantage of all the free and cheap tools and flows coming out of the supernova.

Since the emergence of the supernova, that dial has whipped sharply to the right, and the sign it points to today says “You live in a world of defined contributions—your wages and benefits will now be more and more directly correlated to your exact contribution, and with big data we will get better and better at measuring just exactly what your contribution is.” It’s a 401(k) world now. To paraphrase an old World War II poster,

On a personal level, the example I use is a billboard that used to be up on a highway here in Silicon Valley which asked a simple question: ‘How does it feel to know that there are at least one million people around the world who can do your job?’ While we might argue whether it is one thousand or one million, it would have been an absurd question to ask twenty or thirty years ago because it didn’t really matter—I’m here and they are somewhere else. Now it is increasingly a central question, and one might add, ‘How does it feel to know there are at least one million robots who can do your job?’ We are all feeling mounting performance pressure at a very personal level.”

For starters, middle-class jobs are being pulled up faster—they require more knowledge and education to perform successfully. To compete for such jobs you need more of the three Rs—reading, writing, and arithmetic—and more of the four Cs—creativity, collaboration, communication, and coding.

Moreover, there are now game platforms such as Foldit, the crowdsourcing computer game, that enable anyone to contribute to important scientific research.

Concluded Ringwald: “Everyone needs someone who says, ‘I believe in you’ … There is not just a skills gap—there’s a confidence gap.” And you can’t sustainably fill one without the other.

“Our institutions spend so much time working on how to optimize returns on financial capital,” said Auguste. “It is about time we started thinking more about how to optimize returns on human capital.”

We are going to have to discover the inherent dignity of work that is people to people rather than people to things. We are going to have to realize that engaging with other people, understanding their hopes and their needs, and using our own skills, knowledge and talent to give them what they want at a price they can afford is honest work.

Finally, we will need a new social contract between governments and citizens: we need to create every possible regulatory and tax incentive for every company to provide, and every worker to get access to, intelligent assistance, intelligent assistants, intelligent networks, and intelligent financing for lifelong learning.

And two experiences stood out from the poll of more than one million American workers, students, educators, and employers: Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school. The most engaged employees, said Busteed, consistently attributed their success in the workplace to having had a professor or professors “who cared about them as a person,” or having had “a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams,” or having had “an internship where they applied what they were learning.” Those workers, he found, “were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.” There’s a message in that bottle.

“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” the Syrian economist Samir Aita explained to me, but the government’s failure to deal with it was a critical stressor fueling the uprising.

The idea of state government “was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic task.” Young people and farmers starved for jobs—and land starved for water—were a prescription for revolution.

It is impossible to disconnect the Arab Spring from the climate disruptions of the years just before, 2009–2010. For instance, Russia, the world’s fourth-largest wheat exporter, suffered its worst drought in a hundred years in that period.

the International Rescue Committee, which oversees relief operations in more than thirty war-affected countries, more people in the world today are “fleeing a conflict” at a time when

which oversees relief operations in more than thirty war-affected countries, more people in the world today are “fleeing a conflict” at a time when wars between nations “are at a record low.” That is because we now have nearly thirty civil wars under way in weak states that are “unable to meet the basic needs of citizens or contain civil war,” a sign of states cracking from inside under

in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, the report said, it would be the world’s twenty-fourth biggest.

But when it comes to politics, the freedom people cherish most, he argues, is “freedom to”—the freedom to live the way they want because their freedom is anchored in consensual elections, a constitution, the rule of law, and a parliament. There are growing swaths of the world today where people have secured their freedom from, but failed yet to build the freedom to. And that explains a lot of the spreading and stubborn disorder. Seidman calls the gap in those countries, such as Libya or Syria or Yemen, or Egypt after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, that have secured their freedom from but not their freedom to, “the inequality of freedom.” And it may be the most relevant inequality in the world today. “‘Freedom from’ happens quickly, violently, and dramatically,” notes Seidman. “‘Freedom to’ takes time. After the Jews got their freedom from Pharaoh in Egypt, they had to wander in the desert for forty years before they developed the laws and moral codes that gave them their freedom to.”

Alas, the euphoria soon faded, said Ghonim, because “we failed to build consensus, and the political struggle led to intense polarization.” Social media, he noted, “only amplified” the polarization “by facilitating the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers, and hate speech. The environment was purely toxic. My online world became a battleground filled with trolls, lies, hate speech.” Supporters of the army and the Islamists used social media to smear each other, while the democratic center, which Ghonim and so many others occupied, got marginalized. Their revolution was stolen by the Muslim Brotherhood and, when it failed, by the army, which then arrested many of the secular youths who first powered the revolution. The army now has its own Facebook page to defend itself.

Ghonim sees five critical challenges facing today’s social media in the political arena: First, we don’t know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people’s biases are now believed and spread among millions of people. Second, we create our own echo chambers. We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, unfollow, and block everybody else. Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. All of us probably know that. It’s as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars. And fourth, it became really hard to change our opinions. Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in one hundred forty characters about complex world affairs. And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet, and we are less motivated to change these views, even when new evidence arises. Fifth—and in my point of view, this is the most critical—today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other. There’s a lot of debate today on how to combat online harassment and fight trolls. This is so important. No one could argue against that. But we need to also think about how to design social media experiences that promot...

Removing tyrants sometimes does indeed lead to freedom. At other times it merely leads to new kinds of tyranny. Happy the revolution where the revolutionaries are both freedom-loving and effectively organized for the long haul of political struggle.

As Friedman put it, “The essential problem has been a persistent misunderstanding of radical Islamism. It is a movement, not an organization.” Organizations can be penetrated, broken and their leadership structure and headquarters annihilated. That is much harder with a diffuse movement. It is why the Pentagon keeps announcing that it killed this or that “senior ISIS leader,” but the movement only continues.

As for the breakers, be they individuals or groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, they cannot be deterred. They can, though, be contained and degraded in their various theaters of operation, by using air power, special forces, drones, and local forces. In the end, however, they can only be sustainably destroyed by their host communities’ delegitimizing their narrative and ultimately killing or jailing their leaders. Outsiders can help degrade them, but ultimately only the village can destroy them. Yes, it makes for a rather messy strategic environment. Which only reinforces why, as Waylon Jennings might have put it in song, “Momma, don’t let your daughters grow up to be secretaries of state.” You need to juggle drones and walls where you must; invest in chickens, gardens, and schools where you can; amplify islands of decency wherever you find them; deter competing superpowers—whenever you’re not also enlisting their help; learn to live with the fact that a foreign policy of amplify, deter, and degrade will more often than not require us to side with the least bad over the worst; and finally, appreciate that widening decency is the necessary precursor to electoral democracy—and in many places is more important.

There is no perfect human analog to the way nature unconsciously evolves a sense of belonging in ecosystems, but there is a rough parallel—and that is promoting a culture of ownership in human societies, which always creates more resilience. “Ownership is the one thing that fixes more things so other things can be made easier to fix,” argues the education expert Stefanie Sanford of the College Board. More often than not, she says, when citizens feel a sense of ownership over their country, when teachers feel a sense of ownership over their classrooms, when students feel a sense of ownership over their education, more good things tend to happen than bad. You get outcomes that are much more internally generated and therefore self-sustaining. And where ownership

As the Mumbai-based McKinsey management consultant Alok Kshirsagar once remarked to me, if you want to solve a big problem, “you need to go from taking credit to sharing credit to multiplying credit.

She would require labeling on all sugary drinks, candies, and high-sugar-content fast foods, warning that excess consumption can cause diabetes and obesity—just as labels on cigarette packages warn that they cause cancer. On April 6, 2016, a study published in the respected journal The Lancet found that the global cost of diabetes is now

I know—to even talk about scaling the Golden Rule to more people in more situations sounds utterly unrealistic. But the simple truth is: If we can’t get more people doing unto others as they would want others to do unto them, if we can’t inspire more sustainable values, we will be “the first self-endangered species,” argues Amory Lovins.

“The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.”

One practical way to begin is to anchor as many people as possible in healthy communities. Beyond laws and guardrails, police and courts, there is no better source of restraint than a strong community. Africans didn’t coin the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” for nothing.

There is no restraint stronger than thinking your friends and family will hate or disrespect you for what you do—and that can be generated only by a community. “All over the country there are schools and organizations trying to come up with new ways to cultivate character,” my colleague David Brooks noted in his November 27, 2015, column in The New York Times. “The ones I’ve seen that do it best, so far, are those that cultivate intense, thick community. Most of the time character is not an individual accomplishment. It emerges through joined hearts and souls, and in groups.”

Our motto in today’s world, adds Tom Burke, the British environmentalist, should be: “It takes a planet to raise a child.”

Hastening that heavenly day is the moral work of our generation. I don’t know where it ends, but I know where it has to start—by anchoring people in strong families and healthy communities. It is impossible to expect people to extend the Golden Rule very far if they are unmoored, unanchored, and insecure themselves. How to build strong families is beyond my skill set, but I know something about strong communities, because I grew up in one. And so I hope you’ll indulge me if I end this journey by taking you back home with me to discuss the final kind of innovation we need to promote resilience and propulsion in this age of accelerations—innovation in the building of healthy communities.

“Collaboration moves at the speed of trust,” argued Chris Thompson, who works with cities for the Fund for Our Economic Future, in an essay on its website. When people trust each other, they take ownership of problems and practice stewardship. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote a classic book in 1996 on why the most successful states and societies exhibit high levels of trust—Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity—noted that “social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all the other groups in between.” Where trust is prevalent, he explained, groups and societies can move and adapt quickly through many informal contracts. “By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means,” wrote Fukuyama.

It’s for all these reasons that Dov Seidman argues that trust “is the only legal performance-enhancing drug.” But trust cannot be commanded. It can only be nurtured and inspired by a healthy community—between people who feel bound by a social contract. “Trust is something that emerges from how people interact politically, for mutual benefit, through institutions,” adds the Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel. “Healthy communities build civic muscles that lead to greater trust.”

First, as I explained at the outset, a column has to combine three things: your own value set, how you think the Machine works, and what you have learned about how the Machine affects people and culture and vice versa. Well,

It was a powerful lesson in community for me: When you are in a real one, never, ever say to someone in need: “Call me if you need help.” If you want to help someone, just do it.

Is that a bridge too far in too many places? I honestly don’t think so—with the right leadership. But before I could even consider how we rise to this steeper global challenge, I needed this refresher course. I needed to go back and reconnect with that time and place in my life where politics worked, where community spirit was real, where public institutions were respected, where my friends were my friends, not “followers” on Twitter or icons on Facebook, and, yes, where when people really get mad at a reckless driver who almost kills them, they almost honk.