My mother loves to tell a story about brushing my hair when I was a little boy. I was in my grandmother's house, and my mother was brushing my hair, when I piped up with this little gem.
Yesterday is but a dream. Tomorrow is just a vision. But Today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
She was blown away that such a young boy could come up with such a profoundly worded statement, until she turned around and realized I was reading a plaque on the wall. I read that plaque every time I was in my grandmother's house until she passed away in 1994. When I think of it, I still think of her, because she was an incredibly optimistic woman who dealt with the pain of polio her entire life, but did so with a warmth and joy that overwhelmed all of her grandchildren.
Hope is a powerful emotion.
I'm here at the People Report Summer Camp, listening to Amanda Hite of Talent Revolution and Paul Barron, the founder of FastCasual.com. They're on stage sharing stories of personal growth, individual improvement, and charity. They're inspirational. They're challenging us to be our best. They're believing in the idea of human power.
While listening to them, I skimmed my Facebook and saw that Thomas Friedman, the respected New York Times columnist and author, has written an article bemoaning the state of the world. Friedman quotes a man who predicts societal collapse and resource restriction will alter our entire economic system into a happiness-based, sustainable, eat less, drive less, own less, work less world.
This is nothing new. Some people just can't help predicting the end of the world, whether it's Harold Camping or Thomas Friedman. Doom is coming, and the fault is always the sinners, whether that be eco-sinners or the religious ones. Friedman, for all of his sophisitication, is yet another in the a long string of prophets who suggest the end is coming.
It was a very odd contrast for me - to be listening and watching a message of hope, while skimming through an article of doom. Should I build a bunker, or go out and feed a child?
Friedman, for all his wisdom and travel, misses the point about systems. Every culture, at every time, is in a race against decay. Every generation faces the dilemma between finding new technologies and new ways of doing things and running out of a resource that they used to power their current lifestyle. Don't get me wrong. Our system may crash. No one has been right about it so far, but someone, somewhere, eventually will be. Where Friedman errs is his approach. He believes in a top down system change, and if it takes a crisis to get that change, that's because we weren't smart enough to give the elite control in the first place (that's the genesis of the idea that we deserve to suffer).
I believe in something different, and I believe social media, while not the source, is a training tool that is showing us the way.
In August of last year, I realized that social media is the human version of Moore's law. Moore's law talks about the advances in computer chips that has powered our technological rise. Chips get faster and smaller, letting us do more and more. Our technology improves, but human beings do not. We're not upgraded versions of ourselves from the 70's. And yet, we could be. Social media shares information at unheard speeds, demolishing power hierarchies and unleashing a wave of creativity simply because a population of connected people can test something, modify it, and adopt or discard it while learning from others. This is why businesses so badly need to understand social media. The public is faster and smarter than we are in aggregate, which means we will forever be playing catchup.
That's a good thing. The same public that can outlearn a company can outcreate the problems that face us. To achieve that, we need a functioning society. We need power and water and food and housing and social concerns and families and hope. The problem with a crisis is that people stop thinking about improving their lives and start thinking about saving their lives. A crisis that is big enough to remake the free market system is one that is big enough to plunge the world into centuries of darkness, as has happened before.
And if that's coming, there's little you can do about it as an individual. As a group, though, as a society, you can stave off disaster by altering your behaviors when you are not in a panic mode. What I saw and heard from Paul and Amanda was a clear and shining example of unleashed creativity and optimism in changing the lives of people with our actions. They were doers, not talkers.
We are on the verge of greatness. Some people call it the Singularity. The idea is that technology, from nanotech to networked computers, is going to alter the way we interface with the environment down to the cellular level. It may or may not happen, because it's always a race against time. Can we continue to innovate, to create, to test, to try, and to believe? Can we grow? Or do we slow down, cut back, and accept that it was a nice ride while it lasted?
Columns like Friedman's deflate us. They kill off our creativity and fill us with despair. They sap our will to improve with the message that we're bad people digging our own graves. You can't let that stop you. You have to seek out people like Amanda and Paul, people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Tony Robbins and Joel Osteen and Pamela Slim and John Jantsch and Bill Whittle. All of them believe in the future.
We have endured a terrible economy for years, but in that time, unbridaled creativity is blooming. The social world I've lived in for a decade is that promise of a better future where exciting people are shedding their old selves and recreating themselves in a new image. We do not have to be oblivious about the world around us, but we should never fall prey to the decay of the spirit that leads us to forecast doom.
We cannot alter yesterday. We can only prepare for tomorrow. Approaching today with optimism is the only way to ensure it is well-lived.
