Category Archives: Planning

Want to be free? Embrace uncertainty

Decision making, Failure, Planning, Uncertainty

Uncertainty is the price of freedom

I read somewhere that the price of freedom is uncertainty.  I have been reflecting on that a lot over the past few weeks and I agree with the statement.  When you have a nice steady job that pays the bills, you can live comfortably.  You have certainty.  Your salary will come into your bank account at the end of the month.  You can book your foreign holiday in 6 months time.  You can get a loan to buy a new car and know that in 3 years time you will be  happily paying off your car loan – ‘no worries’ as the Aussies say.

However if you are feeling unfulfilled and bored out of your mind and want to leave that job to start a business you will be trading your nice certain situation for uncertainty.  You may not know in 6 months if you can cover your bills let alone go on a foreign holiday.

The best advice is to start your business on the side as you keep your day job.  That way you can allow your business to grow as you keep your secure position.  When you see that the business works and can support you and when the demands of the business are such that you must leave then leave.  Your job is your safety net if the business fails.   The reality is that many businesses do fail or at least struggle to survive.  Statistics from the U.S. Small Business Association (SBA), show that 30% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 50% during the first five years and 66% during the first 10.

No regrets

Of course even if your business does fail it is not the end of the world.  Take the lessons of that failure with you and start again.  In many ways the worst failure of all is to live a life controlled by your boss which is safe comfortable, certain and ultimately boring.  Do you really just want to tip toe quietly towards death?  One of the top five regrets of the dying (from a book by Bronnie Ware) is not having the courage of living a life true to yourself and not pursuing your dreams.  The price of freedom is uncertainly.

Best wishes,

Tom

Check out my course 30 Experiments in personal change.  Get the course at the special price of $9.99 for readers of this blog.

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