GROW
Co-creating the next now!
The World as we knew it is over!
Everything feels uncertain, and what comes next cannot be seen until we can let go of our limiting views of the past. We have been conditioned to see only our respective parts of the puzzle without understanding the whole. Our limiting ideas about innovation, investments, institutions and more have fused into our identities, and letting go is anything but easy.
Yet, this is exactly how life moves forward.
Today, the cost of access to everything is technically plummeting as you read this. Just about anyone can communicate with just about anyone else to project their perceptions into reality. This is been happening for a hot minute… People who couldn’t do stuff because it was “too expensive” to access before, have created everything from Apple to Google to Tesla, and now we’re seeing everything from crowdsourced car companies like Uniti in Sweden to entire global economic and governance platforms like Etherium in the U.S. In the age of AR/VR, A.I., Blockchains, Nanotech, Biotech, Sentient Robotics, 4D Printers and more, science fact today is moving faster than science fiction.
So why aren’t we all living within that future of possibilities right now?
If we can directly contribute to leading that charge now, what’s holding us back? Why are we seeing a $35billion valuation for SNAP, an app that lost almost half a billion dollars last year, with users either leaving or are never going to pay to make up the difference…why does that make the news? Why are all the protectionist, almost fascist regimes now popping up around the world, when the premise of national economics, or the idea of protecting geo-specific assets hasn’t been true ever since commerce went global? Why are there more homes than homeless people, more cars than drivers, more clothes than bodies, and more food wasted everyday than the hungry mouths that need it? Why are more irreplaceable materials and more energy wasted to produce technology that can do more and more work with less and less materials?
How does any of that make sense?
Maybe it’s because we’re not asking the deeper questions of WHY, WHAT and HOW. WHY do we still hold on to limiting beliefs that no longer serve us? WHAT closes that knowledge to action gap? HOW do we reconnect our technologies to transformation, science to art, wealth to wellness, knowledge to wisdom and thoughts to feelings for lasting systemic impact?
Let’s first start with WHAT we resist and WHY.
If we are honest with ourselves, what we resist the most is the truth. The truth is what is, regardless of what we think, or what we want to believe that it is. We can jam every media channel with our biased opinions, yet the truth still is. As the late philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurthi had put it:
“When we hear a truth and do not act upon it, it becomes a poison within ourselves, and that poison spreads, bringing psychological disturbances, unbalance and ill health”
So now, here’s a truth that is now blatantly evident :
Every resource on this planet is networked, interconnected and interdependent, or in other words, common. So why do we continue to operate as if it was only yours, mine, or that it belongs to only “our” tribe? Does anyone ever own the atmosphere? Isn’t that like holding your breath because you want to “own” the air? Of course, there’s a direct correlation between stewarding and nurturing resources in order to ensure future access, though does that have to look like every person pursuing financial profit? Why do we think that rule of collecting energy in our favor is going to deliver on that promise? So that we can have a way to predict that the earth’s gifts will be there for our children’s children? Or is it to simply serve our fear of the future by taking a preventative measure we agreed to call property? What happens to that idea when what could only be known in the future, can and is known in the present?
The next is now in many aspects of our modern lives.
Crowdsourcing, for example, lets producers secure buyers and suppliers before a single unit of their product is created into existence. We can now book everything from rooms to rides on the fly without waiting for days or traveling long distances to find out their availability. Instead, we now know instantly. We no longer have to guess whether or not something exists, we just Google it! So then in such a real time responsive reality, why do we still hedge bets against an unlikely future, when the information from the future can be known in the present?
Is that why we are resisting the reality of more than 50% decline of IPOs over the last 5 years, while still believing in venture capital? Or making less than 2% returns on hedge funds, while insisting that pumping more money into R&D will somehow make investors wealthier? What does that even mean? If all capital moves to the top, and everyone else is on the hook to pay it back, how’s that even wealth? Isn’t the whole point of wealth to provide a higher quality of life for future generations? If our system of agreements to create that wealth is creating a reality where we can’t eat the food, drink the water or breathe the air, obviously there’s a disconnect between what we want and how we agreed to get it!
What if we looked at our problems from another perspective?
What if we focused on achieving our intent, instead of giving our power away to some old rules that no longer apply? For example, if I wanted to secure my retirement, what is more valuable to me? Having direct physical access to the food, shelter, healthcare and mobility options of my choosing, or the imaginary numbers of an account balance that may or may not guarantee them? Are we really seeking returns on our investments or returns on the experience that the investment vehicles represent? Why not just cut out the middleman proxy and go directly for the real deal?
In other words, why can’t we honor the intent and break the rules?
It’s not only sensible, it’s technically possible now. Once we open our eyes to the possibilities right in front of us, our fears of a risky, uncertain future can literally vanish! For example, we already have a global town hall called Facebook, where we can choose to use it to govern ourselves both locally and globally, instead of giving away our most precious attention to it without compensation. If Amazon can deliver our purchases hours after we make them, why then, in the age of blockchains and smart contracts does it take over a week for my out of state check to clear? When the world is now bubbling over with possibilities, why do we continue to pump irrational fears into our collective consciousness?
How about instead of saying automation and robotics will kill jobs, why can’t we call it for what it really is: We now have the technology to stop dehumanizing ourselves by working shitty jobs and then justifying them as a means to an end. If we can invent our way out of rote work, can we not also invent our way out of the 14th century economics and governance models that assume humans need to do them? In an era where we need less and less materials to do more and more work, why do we need to produce and waste more? Why do we need to do it by pumping in extra energy from dead dinosaurs instead reflowing the surplus energy from our efficiencies back towards life?
Maybe we can.
Maybe you too are seeing what I’m seeing and you too are realizing the obvious. The world is as we are, and who we are is revealed in our relationships. Relationships to ourselves, to each other, and to all life within this living, breathing planet we call home. Right now, our technologies are starting to reveal ourselves to us in ways we could have never imagined.
Do not underestimate the power of media and technology to transform consciousness.
This is already happening. The reaction to the current tech narratives mining our attention without compensation is resulting in a resurgence of inner reflection and modern mysticism. That has an effect on how we use these tools to shift consciousness. VR, for example, has the potential of feeling another person’s experience in our own bodies, which can create a more compassionate society. Companies like OneReality are already pioneering the use of immersive learning environments to solve for the most complex problems of our times with everyone’s help. When we can enable anyone to contribute, regardless of academic or professional status, the entire game changes! When everyday citizens can simulate alternate reality models on the fly, we empower an entire generation to unleash the full force of their human creativity on the world. The memes and media we often see circulating on social media are now also speaking to a post patriarchal, more balanced and inclusive narrative. Regular exposure to multiple points of view is both common and necessary to any creative undertaking, and that is consistently helping us see beyond the socially learned versions of our identities. Our only responsibility in this era of possibility is to stay open and curious, because if we are, this can truly be a conscious evolution. We can each play a significant part in directing that next story of us forward.
Honoring the intent and breaking the rules.
At the least rewriting them together to reduce the friction and increasing the flow back to life. Returns over experiences. Access over ownership. Prioritizing the WHAT rather than just accepting the HOW. Sharing both risk and reward alike, because we finally realize that we are not in this alone. In fact, we have never been. The opportunities for recirculating a rich, regenerative reality is really upon us.
For example, we now have the mechanisms for investors, innovators and their intellectual capital to be part of the same equity pool. Each participant can directly benefit both themselves and their shared mission by pooling their collective resources together. Shifting their activities from hunting for the next unicorn that does not exist, to cultivating a shared value context where everyone gets their needs met and then some.
In fact, that’s exactly what my ecosystem partners and I are creating with GROW. Both through leadership education and digital application, and we are not the only ones. When we learn to see that everything connects to everything else, the world we can co-create looks a whole lot different than the one we find ourselves in now.
This is not fantasy, it’s simply reframing reality, and this is not the first time we’ve done it.
The difference between organizing ourselves for a flat earth and a global one is simply our worldview. Our perspective on globalization forever changed the moment we saw a picture of the earth from space. This has been true in every other instance of human evolution. The difference between feudalism and capitalism was simply seeing the possibilities from democratizing our access to the knowledge and tools of our feudal overlords. The difference between this paradigm and the next is no different. So HOW do we see the next era of planetary prosperity when everything in our world seems to look like anything but?
Here’s a little secret. We are more powerful than we have been told and sold. Each of us have superpowers. We only fail to access them, because we think we can apply them to ourselves. We cannot. Our egos, while necessary to maintain our identities, do not allow us to see ourselves as we are. However, we can and do see them in each other. That’s the beauty of it.
Co-creation is about just that. Beautifully holding the trusted spaces for us to be who we are so that we can each benefit from the gifts of the other. Many narrow views into seeing the wider whole. Seeing more together so that we realize that the world is and has always been about the story of us in it. We can rewrite that story in our favor, anytime we choose to see what is, instead of believing in what we thought it was. The difference between what we think and how nature actually works is a gap we have been closing at each iteration of human history. It’s time once again to close that gap. There’s nothing else to look for. We already have everything we need.
There’s nothing in our way other than ourselves. This is as true for us in our individual evolution as more complete people, as it is for the society we can co-create together. Right now is an epic point in human history to harness our collective resources to co-create a reality that works for everyone. There is no better time than now to allow ourselves to get out of our own way, and living into the true nature of ourselves. Nature does only one thing. It grows. We can too.
This is our time NOW. Let’s GROW.
