Category Archives: Goal Achievement

The 4th Industrial Revolution and Change

4th Industrial Revolution, Career, Goal Achievement, Planning, Technology

4th Industrial Revolution

This week I want to introduce a series of posts on what has become known as the 4th industrial revolution.  Much of what I discuss on this website relates to personal change, goal setting, planning and futurology (the study of trying to understand and predict the future). This website and my books and courses look at how to set better goals and how to achieve goals and the psychological pitfalls to achieving goals such as the planning fallacy or motivated reasoning which was the subject of a recent post.  I also focus on how to use self-hypnosis to programme our minds for success.  All of this is future orientated at an individual level but what will our collective future look like?

The 4th Industrial Revolution

According to the World Economic Forum we are now at the beginning of a new age of industrialisation which has become known as the 4th industrial revolution.  This is the age of technologies such as mobile super-computing (yes that smartphone in your pocket is a super-computer ).  We now have intelligent robots, self-driving cars, flying cars,  neuro-technological brain enhancements and genetic editing to name a few.  The evidence of dramatic change in a whole range of technologies is all around us.  Technology is changing at exponential speed. Take for example computer processing power which has been doubling every 18 months or so.  This is because scientists are learning how to pack more and more transistors into a smaller space. This rapid doubling of computer processing power is called Moore’s Law after the famous co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore.  In fact our ever faster computers are based on a new branch of science called nanotechnology.  Nanotechnology operates at the nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers (a nanometer is a hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair!).  The features of a semi-conductor chip today are 7nm (about 3 DNA strands stacked side by side).

The 4th Industrial Revolution and Change

The big question is what changes are rapidly advancing technologies bringing about in our individual lives and in society and how do we prepare for and deal with these changes?  What are the skills that we and our children will need for the jobs of tomorrow?  I recently attended my sons graduation from secondary school (high school) here in Ireland.  During the graduation speeches the audience were reminded that many of the students present will work at jobs and in industries that have not even been invented yet!  How do we therefore teach our children to prepare for a future that does not exist yet?  These are the questions and issues that I want to explore in coming posts.

In next weeks post I will begin looking at the type of skills we need to start preparing for the jobs of tomorrow even if we don’t know yet what those jobs will be.

Best wishes,

Tom

The power of slow

Discipline, Goal Achievement, Habits
Slow down
The power of slow

I came across the saying above ‘One slow thing at a time is a powerful way to live’.  That saying has stuck with me for years and I find that it really helps me when I feel I have too much to do and I feel overwhelmed.  I just tell myself OK Tom just do one thing and do it slowly.   No pressure at all.  The sense of being torn between different things fades away and I get into doing one thing.  Also the sense of pressuring myself to do something quickly fades away.  I have given myself permission to do one thing and do it slowly.

Benefits of slow

Slow takes away the pressure my monkey mind is putting me under.  I have to get this, this and this done today.  Saying one slow thing at a time gives me permission to take my time and relax and do one thing and focus on it and enjoy it.  I become more present in the moment.  It is paradoxical because I find that telling myself do one slow thing at a time actually helps me get more done!  Multi-tasking is a myth.  What multi-tasking really means is rapidly switching between tasks.  Multi-tasking is really switch-tasking.  Every time we switch tasks there is a stop/start process that goes on in the brain and this stop starting process is energy sapping.  I feel that this is certainly true in my own case and I prefer to focus on only one task at a time.

Beating procrastination

I also find that telling myself to do one slow thing at a time helps me beat putting things off.  There is no need to procrastinate because I have given myself permission to do one thing slowly.  I think this reduces the energy barrier to starting something new because you have given yourself permission to do it slowly.

In summary

Doing one slow thing at a time is a powerful way to live.  The next time you are feeling overwhelmed or are procrastinating just pick one thing and give yourself permission to do it slowly.  Enjoy the slowness of it and watch yourself get more done.  Let the power of slow work in your life!

Best wishes,

Tom