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

by Thomas L. Friedman

Amory Lovins likes to say whenever people ask him if he is an optimist or a pessimist, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, because they are each just different forms of fatalism that treat the future as fate and not choice—and absolve you from taking responsibility for creating the future that you want. I believe in applied hope.”

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.’”

Indeed, Itasca is a thoroughly twenty-first-century network. It has no by-laws, board of directors, executive director, CEO, or office space—no formal structure in any sense. It’s got a laughably bad website. Indeed, the group notes that it needs to exist only if there is work to be done—that is why it is called a “Project.” It’s made up almost entirely of volunteers. The volunteers are very senior leaders from nearly every part of the community—business, government, and nonprofit. The only full-time staff are two project managers seconded to Itasca by McKinsey. And because there is very little staff, these volunteer leaders actually do the work. It manages itself through a Working Team that meets nearly every Friday at 7:30 a.m. for ninety minutes. “Yes—quite senior volunteers meet nearly every Friday morning,” noted Welsh. “All of them describe this as one of the most interesting meetings on their calendar, a meeting they ‘genuinely look forward to.’”

time in the Middle East led me to realize that, with a few rare exceptions, the dominant political ideology there—whether you were talking about Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds, Israelis, Arabs, Persians, Turks, or Palestinians—was “I am weak, how can I compromise? I am strong, why should I compromise?”

This is awful and has become totally debilitating at exactly the wrong time. We have so much work to do. We need accelerated innovation in so many realms, and it can only happen with sustained collaboration and trust. So, as I said, I went back to my roots in Minnesota to

That’s why I wasn’t surprised that when I asked Surgeon General Murthy what was the biggest disease in America today, without hesitation he answered: “It’s not cancer. It’s not heart disease. It’s isolation. It is the pronounced isolation that so many people are experiencing that is the great pathology of our lives today.” How ironic. We are the most technologically connected generation in human history—and yet more people feel more isolated than ever. This only reinforces Murthy’s earlier point—that the connections that matter most, and are in most short supply today, are the human-to-human ones.

Of course, that is hard to see right now. The most dangerous time to be on the streets of New York City was when cars were first being introduced but horses and buggies had not yet been fully phased out. We’re in that kind of transition now—but I am convinced that if we can just achieve the minimum level of political collaboration to develop the necessary social technologies to work through it, keep our economies open, and keep lifting learning for everyone, a better life will become more available than ever to more people than ever—and the second quarter of the twenty-first century could be an amazing time to be alive. The transition will not be easy. But human beings have made transitions like this before and I believe they can again. “Can” doesn’t mean “will,” but it also sure doesn’t mean “can’t.”

Those trees and I had both grown up and out from the same topsoil, and the most important personal, political, and philosophical lesson I took from the journey that is this book is that the more the world demands that we branch out, the more we each need to be anchored in a topsoil of trust that is the foundation of all healthy communities. We must be enriched by that topsoil, and we must enrich it in turn.