How to prepare for the next decade

A guide to preparing for the most destabilizing chapter in human history

🌒

🌓

🌔

Editor’s Note: This essay blew up (thank you, all) and sparked an incredible conversation. It is part one of a series I’ve been writing, the follow-up essay explores the deeper psychological implications of acceleration:

The psychological cost of acceleration

Welcome to edition #14 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How we are about to enter a decade of rapid acceleration, the likes of which we have never seen. And ten ways you can prepare yourself to move through it with some semblance of peace and equanimity

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life. Each week I write one non-fictional essay for the mind and one fictional story for the soul.

This week has only one essay. I believe this is one of the most important and urgent things I have written, maybe ever. I never ask my subscribers to comment or restack but if you find this edition helpful, please consider helping to spread the word somehow so it can reach more people.

My hope is that this piece sparks a discussion on how we can co-create this next decade together. We are not merely bystanders, each of our actions matter and have an influence on how the future unfolds.

Thank you for being here, let’s get into it.

---

for.and.from.the.mind.

---

We’re about to enter what I call The Acceleration Decade. It will be one of the most destabilizing decades in human history, particularly on the psyche. The change will be fast, personalized and relentless.

I feel uniquely qualified to speak on this because I just went through my own personal Acceleration Decade and let’s just say, it didn’t end well.

I lived my life in fast forward.

In ten years, I went from a BDR at a small, Vancouver-based start-up to co-founding & building one of the hottest new venture capital funds on the planet. I optimized my entire life for acceleration and outcomes.

On a grand scale, we’re all about to embark on the same experiment and not necessarily by choice. As a species, we are hitting the fast forward button. Our religion has become speed and our God is immediate outcomes.

And I don’t care how fast you’re able to learn or adapt to the change, there is a problem with our biological make-up. I learned this first-hand.

Over the last decade, I essentially turned myself into a machine. I learned fintech, then broader software, then media and finally venture capital. I was able to climb very close to the top of three of those industries. It required an immense amount of sacrifice, an insatiable drive for more and an obsession with learning and optimizing.

Most importantly, it required me to override my basic human needs. The needs of true connection, processing change, dealing with emotions and finding stillness. Those were bugs (or hindrances) that slowed down getting what I wanted. I found that if I kept myself suitably distracted or intoxicated, I could medicate those bugs away.

And it worked, until it didn’t.

Eventually the constant rapid change, the obsession with more, the feeling of being completely disconnected from myself and the insane acceleration caught up with me. I could not focus without a pill. I could not sleep without a different pill. I could not relax without a drink. I could not process without a panic attack. I short-circuited my entire system.

I fear that over the next few years stories like mine will become the rule not the exception. And not by choice or desire either, you will be forced into a high-paced game just to simply keep up with the speed of change.

The evolution of our mind and nervous system is painstakingly slow. We’re stuck with the Mesolithic Era V2 model. The cracks in the model are already showing through increased anxiety, sleep disruption, attention fragmentation, addiction pathways and loneliness. Quite frankly, it’s already not a fair fight for the world we’ve created today and it’s just going to get worse.

In this edition, I will not be teaching you how to acquire more over the next ten years. If that’s what you’re after, trust me, you won’t have to look far. The acceleration itself will take care of that. There will be an abundance of more everywhere you look. More people shilling you ways to make more. More tech, more content, more things to buy, more news, more convenience, more things fighting for your attention, more, more, more.

What I will try to do is use my lived experience and the time I’ve spent disconnected from the system to give you my best ideas on how to prepare yourself against the onslaught of more, and the rapid pace of change. To prepare so that you might find some peace, sanity, and meaning through the next ten years.

Let’s start with what we’re up against:

The Acceleration Decade.

So what is coming?

I will not pretend to be smart enough to know exactly what’s going to happen. I won’t try to predict if we enter a Dystopian or Utopian Era. But what I do know is that we have been compressing time and that will continue to accelerate.

Yes, you’re not losing your mind. Time is compressing.

That is essentially the job of all technology: to compress time.

I’m not talking physics, I’m talking about our subjective experience of time. Not that hours are shorter, but the distance between desire and fulfillment is collapsing. And our nervous systems were not build to handle it.

As my friend, Richard Banfield at Second Harvest, just put succinctly:

“Technology shrinks the time between what you want to happen to it actually happening.”

In sci-fi movies, we’ve always been obsessed with time travel. Turns out humans have been time travellers since our first inventions.

Take something as rudimentary as a small wooden raft that one of our ancestors used to float across a raging river. In one reality, his clan could not risk the cross so they took two days to walk around the river. But in the new reality, they crossed on the raft in twenty minutes. They just time travelled forward one day, eleven hours and forty minutes. We’ve been obsessed with accelerating time since the very beginning.

For a long time though, there were barriers that helped slow down that compression. Those barriers were mainly 1. Invention and 2. Adoption

People had to actually invent the technology which took time then people had to adopt the technology which took more time. The extra time that invention and adoption gave humanity, was used to adapt both ourselves and our society. So by the time the next thing came along we, as humans, and we as a collective, felt ‘ready’.

But now invention is speeding up exponentially and adoption can be almost instantaneous, particularly with consumer AI. The buffer or integration zone is gone.

Why are they speeding up?

Invention speeds up in a few ways but mainly through ‘combinatorial innovation’.

Combinatorial invention is the process of creating new technologies, products, or processes by recombining existing components, knowledge, or technologies in novel ways. It posits that few technologies are created from nothing, but rather constructed from pre-existing parts, driven by need and the interplay of experience. This approach allows for a nearly infinite space of potential technological configurations.

An oversimplification but essentially, steam power accelerated the invention of electricity, electricity accelerated the invention of computing, the internet accelerated the invention of mobile, mobile paired with the internet accelerated the invention of AI and so on, and so on. Each wave combines to accelerate towards infinitely more variants that can then go on to combine into even more.

Adoption speeds up through distribution and education.

The agricultural revolution took thousands of years to spread. The printing press took over a century to make its way across Europe. Then electrification took around forty years to reach most households in America. ChatGPT reached 100M users in roughly two months. The difference comes down to efficient distribution and education.

One of the more insidious things that technology is doing now is it’s saving us time, then quietly spending it for us. It does this by expanding what is now possible and what is now expected of us.

So technology itself is a fast forward button and the two pause buttons we had in the past have become a 2x speed and a 10x speed button. That is why we are entering warp speed. That is why we are entering the Acceleration Decade.

So what can we do to prepare ourselves?

Below I’ll explore ten ideas that have helped me return to a healthy baseline. A baseline where my mind, body and soul feel calm, at peace and inspired again. I believe these same ideas are perfectly suited to helping you navigate the future.

Each idea will have an exercise that will help you in your preparation.

What we’ll cover:

1. Slowing down as a strategy

2. Build depth, not route skills

3. Train your nervous system

4. Invest in real connection

5. Foster an anti-fragile identity

6. Learn to separate signal from noise

7. Redefine your definition of success

8. Analyze the trades you’re making

9. Cultivate longer time horizons

10. Do not give in to cynicism

+ a bonus one that trumps them all

---

1. Slowing down as a strategy

We’ll start with the one that feels like common sense. If you were in a car that was going 100mph and accelerating more and more every minute, what would you do? You’d probably try to slow down. Unfortunately, for many of us, this goes against everything we’ve been taught.

Until now, the rewards went to those of us who were masters at compressing time. If you were able to delegate, automate and move faster than your competitors then you would outcompete them.

The modern world programmed us for efficiency. Efficiency is the ability to achieve a desired result with the least possible waste of time, energy or resources. The more output you get from the same (or fewer inputs), the more efficient you are. The problem is that efficiency has become confused, and almost synonymous with speed, but they are not the same thing.

Going back to the car example, if your desired output is to make a right turn and you’re already going 100mph, then increasing your speed is not the answer. The most efficient way to get to your desired output is to decelerate so you can identify the exit, change lanes and execute the turn safely.

The environment we will be in is going to have the acceleration covered for us. Your job will be to know when to decelerate so you can see where you’re going clearly, make crucial adjustments and arrive safely at the outcome you desire.

Do this to prepare:

For the next month, find one afternoon in your busy schedule that you can carve out. Do not schedule anything and let your immediate family know that you will be practicing silence and would appreciate not being disturbed. If needed, go to a different environment.

For six hours, do not speak to anyone, do not write anything, do not read anything, do not make this a thinking session, let thoughts come and go without attachment. No technology. Try not to ‘consume’ anything at all through all of your senses. There is nothing to do. There is nowhere to be.

You will find that ‘answers’ to the big question or decision you’ve been thinking about will slowly arise. If they don’t, that’s ok. You’re building the new skill of slowing down and ‘being’, like any skill it will take to foster. This afternoon will become your edge.

---

2. Build depth, not route skills

Again, this one goes against what we were taught would make us successful in the modern world. Go learn one skill, become really good at it and that’s the path to success. Niche down. Focus all your efforts in one area. All of this advice has become irrelevant.

What happens when the skill you spent your life learning can be done at 80% proficiency by a novice in a matter of minutes. We’re already there across most disciplines. AI and robotics will eventually flatten all surface-level skills.

The skills that will matter in the future will be things like judgement, taste, the ability to make connections across disciplines, story telling and moral/ethical reasoning. Going back to the car example, the skills you will need will more closely mirror a navigator than that of the actual driver.

Taste, judgement, cross-disciplinary connections, story-telling and moral reasoning are much harder to foster. These require life experience, failures, interests in many different areas and a lot of time spent in contemplation. It will require you to understand how you actually view the world, what you stand for and who you are.

Do this to prepare:

Choose one big question: What is success? What does power mean to me? What is a meaningful life?

For the next 14 days, explore that question deeply through various lenses. Look at it from the lens of philosophy, science, history and your own personal experience. Read from a wide variety of sources. It’s ok to use AI as part of your curation but I strongly encourage you to not use that as your only gateway to information.

---

3. Train your nervous system

Focusing on your nervous system felt like a luxury in the past. It was something you did if you had the time to alleviate stress and improve the quality of your life. It was usually priority number ten or twelve on the list. This will have to become priority number one for all of us.

When you reach a certain level of velocity, as we all will be forced into, this becomes a necessity. Take it from someone who, at one point, had a therapist, a spiritual advisor and a coach (all at once) just to try to regulate my nervous system so I could continue to function. There is no escaping the havoc that the speed and pace of change will have on our nervous systems.

However, we are lucky that our ancestors did not grow up in the environment we have so they had time to go inward, understand themselves and build/teach timeless practices that nourish our souls and nervous systems. We must adopt these ancient practices with urgency.

Meditation. Silence. Solitude. Yoga. Long walks. Sweating. Sleep discipline. Nature. Disconnection. Contemplation. Healthy discourse.

Sounds simple but these practices will require more and more discipline as the acceleration continues. Everywhere you look, there will be ‘solutions’ to the increasing feeling of overwhelm, anxiety and the fear that ‘you’re falling behind’. It will come in the form of one to one customized entertainment, new social distraction apps, pills, shots, bio-devices, etc. Everything will tell you that there’s something wrong with you, not the environment. That it’s you that needs to be fixed, not society.

We must take care of ourselves. Yet we cannot fall into the trap that fixing ourselves is all that is needed. The solutions are not only at an individual level. We need folks to get involved in their corner of the world to improve our systems for community design, regulation/guardrails around tech, education that focuses on being not just doing and building institutions worth trusting again.

Here’s a rule of thumb that works for me: everything you need to control your nervous system is free and available to you at any time. The only cost is time. Everything else is a parlor trick.

Do this to prepare:

Build a daily one-hour practice that encompasses movement, stillness, breath and solitude. Guard that time as if your life depends on it. I believe it does.

Get involved in one social impact initiative within your community. Purpose can change how your body interprets effort and stress.

---

4. Invest in real connection

Now I don’t want to sound dismissive of online connection and community, for many it can be a much-needed lifeline. Those relationships can be real and meaningful but they are not sufficient on their own. It can be dangerous to mistake broad connection for deep connection. The danger of making that mistake is going to be amplified.

There will continue to be mass lay-offs across every sector of the economy. The whole idea of ‘new jobs will be created just as fast’ is just not true. We will not need as many humans in the loop to get to the same outputs. Full stop.

Work and employment, as we know it, has changed forever. What I think will happen is that more people will be forced into entrepreneurship, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For much of the history of human commerce, this was the case.

As a byproduct of this, there will be tens (maybe hundreds) of millions of people who simultaneously have to promote, market and sell their goods or services. They will not have big marketing or advertising budgets like corporations, so where will they turn? They’ll turn to social media.

If we’ve been in the consumption era of social media, we’re about to enter the creation era. Not necessarily as a creative outlet but as a means of survival. Competition will be brutal and ruthless. Supply of content will go way up but demand of consumption will stay the same, maybe even decline slightly as more people understand the impact on their mental health.

The more time you spend on social media platforms, the larger your social footprint and web of connectivity grows. We are not meant to manage hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of relationships. And it’s incredibly exhausting. We have to pull that energy from somewhere. More often than not, we pull that energy away from the real connections in our lives. The connections with true close friends and loved ones.

I saw this first-hand. As my ‘community’ or ‘following’ on Linkedin grew, I gave my time/attention to tens of thousands of connections yet barely had time to call my mom.

Do this to prepare:

Curate a list of ten people that you really enjoy having in your life. Set a reminder/alarm on your phone for a time that’s usually not that busy. Each day when that alarm goes off, reach out to one of those ten people. It can be a call, a message, a voice note, anything.

Also set three healthy boundaries for the rest of the relationships or social connections in your life ie. deleting social apps from your phone, a dedicated day or time slot to engage with your broader network, no email/imessage/whatsapp after 8pm, etc.

---

5. Fostering an anti-fragile identity

This is a big one. My friend, Chris Walker, talks about identity a lot. You can check out the podcast I recently recorded with him on the topic.

This idea also pulls from Nassim Taleb’s thoughts and ideas in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

Careers and ‘work’ as we know it will become completely nonlinear. Entire industries and sectors of the economy are going to be reorganized. Most of the roles we know now will disappear. New roles will get created, emerge quickly then disappear just as fast.

Many of us have our identities overly wrapped up in our careers. I know I did. I was successful tech/vc/sales guy and when that was no longer the case, it felt like a part of me died and it was very disorienting. Luckily, I had the time and space to examine that identity, grieve it and start to build a new one. Not everyone will be so lucky in the future. Get ahead of it and start to de-couple your identity from work now.

If your identity is:

I am a lawyer, I am a doctor, I am a marketer, I am a salesperson

You will experience a lot of suffering.

You’ll have to shift towards a new identity that goes beyond the roles you play in society:

exp. I am someone who can learn, adapt and thrive in new environments or to borrow from Ram Dass, I am loving awareness

Nassim defines antifragility as systems that benefit from disorder. If your identity is I thrive in new environments then you actually benefit from the change. You will want to build an identity that strengthens under the pressure of constant change and chaos.

Lastly, play around with the feeling of no identity. What if you did not need a label at all? That just being is enough. That in every present moment you decide through your actions who you want to be.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Write down your top 5 identity labels (founder, investor, writer, athlete, father, etc). Now cross them all out. If all of these disappeared tomorrow, who would you still be?

Let your new ‘identity’ unfold (or dissolve) from that.

---

6. Learn to separate signal from noise

As Yuval Noah Harari said: “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”

The explosion of AI-generated content, news, synthetic media, infinite opinions and infinite ways to optimize has barely begun. I’m sure you’re feeling the wave coming when you go online but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

This content storm is going to get incredible at manipulating your fears and desires to get you to take action.

Ads, videos and newsletters will be customized at a one to one level, meaning something is generated just for you based on everything the internet knows about you. You will need to get really good at navigating your ship through this storm.

Do this exercise to prepare:

List everything you consumed in the last forty eight hours (podcasts, group chats, newsletters, social media posts, TV shows). For each item, ask these three questions:

1. Did this change my thinking in a durable, positive way?

2. How did this influence me? Will I still remember this in 30 days?

3. Did this alter a decision I made for the better?

If the answer is no to all three, it was noise. Then begin to ruthlessly curate what you consume.

---

7. Redefine your definition of success

This list is my guess at what will prepare a person to be successful over the next chapter of humanity. But over the last year or so, I have refined what success means to me. And I would encourage everyone else to do the same. If you don’t you may unconsciously shoot for a target that you don’t even want. I did that for many years.

I defined success for myself when I was very young. It was money, status and the admiration of others. Those became my north stars. I lied to myself along the way about meaning but, in truth that’s what I wanted.

I achieved all of those things and they did not work for me. I was not any more content, happy or fulfilled.

After a lot of personal inquisition, my loose definition of success has become:

Someone who feels deeply connected to themself and the world around them. Who has enough peace and equanimity in their daily life to seek truth and express that truth. A person who has the courage to take action to help create a better future for all. And one who chooses love over fear as often as they can.

Inherently in this list, you’ll see my bias towards that type of success show up. That’s what I’m aiming at and this list is for myself as much as others, so that is what this list optimizes for.

I’m not here to judge anyone’s definition of success. Over this same time period we will see a level of the monetary and status success that we cannot even fully comprehend yet. And even if, like me, those games have lost their allure for you right now, they may come back into style in a big way. Because what they will unlock will be the things of science fiction…

What happens in a world where if you reach a certain level of wealth or status, you can extend your lifespan another 150 years? What happens when money can ensure that your child never has a single disease? What happens when a certain level of status allows you to live out your wildest fantasies every single day? What happens when you can use money to erase every single feeling of pain and discomfort?

It’s human nature to want those things. And, just like we are now, we will be sold on the idea that without those things life is meaningless and the never-ending-pursuit-of-more cycle will begin again. It sounds insane to even write but there will likely come a point in our lifetimes where we will have to decide whether sacrificing our present reality in order to achieve enough money to live another fifty or sixty years is worth it. Years will be for purchase. Does that fit within your personalized definition of success? Only you can decide.

But make the decisions consciously or the algorithms will come up with the answer for you.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Finish this line: “I will feel successful when ______”

Go deep. For everything you write down, ask yourself: “Who taught me this mattered?”

Was it your younger self, your parents, social media?

Now imagine you are 80 years old and you’re about to die. You can only keep three metrics of success from your current definition. Which three really matter? Which feel empty?

Then write it down and build a new definition of success based on those.

---

8. Analyze the trades you are making

Have you seen the movie Click?

Remember the one with Adam Sandler who was given a remote that allowed him to fast forward parts of his life. Naturally he fast forwarded through all the perceived inconveniences and painful parts of life until he ends up in a future he does not recognize (or want). Turns out, that movie was far ahead of its time. If he was consciously aware of the trades he was making by using the remote, would he have still used it?

As outlined earlier, technology allows us to fast forward through our perceived inconveniencies and pain to the outcome we want. But these trades are not free. They come at a cost.

I wrote about this a few months back:

Why we can't afford to keep blindly adopting new technology

Every time we blindly adopt a new technology, we are outsourcing a part of our mental or physical ability. Over time, that ability atrophies rapidly. Abilities that have taken 300,000 years of evolution to form can be decimated in one single lifetime. Which abilities are we comfortable trading?

There’s already early evidence that artificial intelligence may be lowering our IQ. MIT Media Lab recently released a report that ‘excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions may contribute’ to ‘cognitive atrophy’ and the shrinking of critical thinking abilities. It’s a small study and yet to be peer-reviewed but it feels directionally accurate when you look at historical examples.

That means we are trading our ability to critically and creatively think for access to answers/outcomes faster. It’s only been four years with a fairly rudimentary version of AI…what happens after another ten years of making that trade?

Cultivating awareness around the sacrifices we are making will be critical if you’d like to maintain some levels of cognitive and physical function.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Pick five core technologies that you use daily and monitor them for seven days. For each one, fill out a grid with Column A) What does this give me? Column B) What is it quietly costing me?

After the week, ask yourself these two questions: “If this technology disappeared tomorrow, what would I regain?” and “Does the benefit outweigh the internal cost for the life I want?”

---

9. Cultivate longer time horizons

Instant outcomes. Our personal innovation cycles tighten. Feedback loops become immediate. The time between you thinking I want and I now have will disappear.

You’ll have a thought and that thought will become reality faster than you can imagine. But many of our thoughts are based on impulse, habit loops and conditioning, rather than true conscious intention. That period of time of not immediately getting what you want was a good thing. It kept us from straying too far away from our North Star. Soon it will be easier than ever to go way off track from the life you intended to build.

Acceleration rewards reaction but true evolution rewards patience. This is why thinking in terms of decades, rather than day, weeks, months or even years will be a competitive moat when building a life of meaning.

Ensure that even with the longer time horizons you are not getting overly attached to the outcome. Focus on the process, feeling and intention.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Pick one project that will take a minimum of a decade to actualize (ie. building a body of meaningful work, mastering a domain of interest, raising children with intention, spiritual development) and commit to it.

Write your obituary. Then ask yourself, through that lens: What am I doing right now that that version of me will find trivial? and What am I neglecting that that version would care deeply about?

---

10. Do not give into cynicism

Candidly, I lost hope six months ago. A few months after the initial excitement of leaving my old life behind faded, I started really thinking about the state of the world, where I wanted to play a role, what impact I wanted to have and who I wanted to serve.

Before that, I had basically tuned the entire world out in order to focus on my own personal growth and development for months. But you can only do that for so long and I was called to examine the state of humanity. I’m talking like, really dive into all of it. Understand world events better, why they were happening, how technology was impacting our lives and where we were headed. And frankly, it looked really f***ing bleak.

Between the increase in global conflict, the World Order being rearranged, the rapid advancement of new technology, our leaders letting us down again and again, our dying planet, humans playing god through bioengineering, the potential for synthetic pathogens, erosion of institutional trust at a massive scale and the crisis of meaning. It’s a lot to take in.

My initial reaction was to maybe stay lost forever, just to opt-out of it all, focus on my immediate friends/family and ride it out in some cabin in the woods. Essentially, to put my head in the sand. But as I sat with it, I realized that’s exactly how we got here. That is what society’s reaction has been. It all feels too overwhelming so we all agreed to just put our head in the sand and pretend everything is fine. That reaction happens when people lose hope.

We must not lose hope. We must not lose hope in the good of the world. We must not lose hope that new leaders will emerge. We must not lose hope that what we do matters. We must not lose hope that we can wield these new technologies responsibly. We must not lose hope that we can save our planet. We must not lose hope that love will beat back fear, as it always does.

You must spread hope in your little part of the world. To spread hope you must take action, however big or small.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Write two letters to yourself. The first one starts with “If the next ten years go badly…”. Go into detail. This will showcase the floor of how bad it could get but also highlight the agency that you have in not making those realities come to pass.

Then write a letter dated 2036 to your present self and begin it with “You were worried about the future. Here’s what you didn’t see coming…” and list all of the incredible things that came to pass that you didn’t expect.

---

WARNING: I use the big G word below. If that word doesn’t work for you, please swap it out with Truth, Love, Reality, the deepest layer of Being or whatever works for you.

---

(Bonus) 11. Look for God

We all worship something. We all have a God, whether we give it that name or not.

“Attention taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” - Simone Weil

Where does the vast majority of your attention flow to? What do you pray to every day?

Whatever that is, that is your God.

For many of us, we spend an overwhelming amount of our time, energy and attention trying to accumulate money and status.

The West may be an increasingly non-religious society, but that doesn’t mean we do not have a God. Our God has become money and status. We worship it every day with our attention.

I’m not here to pass judgement or tell you what God to follow. But I would urge you to look for yourself at what you truly worship.

When I say look for God, I do not mean in the theological or metaphysical sense. I do not care what religion you follow, what belief system you have or what doctrine you ascribe to.

I believe that they are all trying to point to the same thing, which I will paraphrase from Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy:

1. There is a Divine Ground of Being

2. The True Self is Not the Ego

3. The Goal is Realization, Not Belief

Put in very simple terms:

There is an ultimate, divine reality underlying the world. The human soul is capable of directly knowing it and the purpose of life is to realize this union.

I also very intentionally used the language Look for God rather than Find God or Believe in God. I do not claim to know exactly what the divine reality underlying the world is. Nor, will I likely ever come close to grasping it. My understanding will evolve, my beliefs will shift, but in the act of looking or seeking - I have found some peace.

I believe that if you start looking, you will be able to find peace as well. Most everyone I have met on my journey that is on the path of seeking come to a very similar conclusion: that we are all one.

And when you truly embody that idea, when you start to circle around that conclusion, a natural personal transformation follows with a renewed focus on compassion, humility, love and selflessness. More of that is what you really need to prepare for the next decade.

It’s what you need. It’s what I need. It’s what humanity needs. The utopian future is possible. And that is where it starts.

---

latest.podcast.episode

---

This week I sat down Devon Warwick McDonald, Partner at Openview and Co-founder at Second Harvest.

Devon and I talk through identity, listening to you body's warning signs, divorce, walking away from a role people spend decades trying to earn, sitting in the goo of transformation and the work she’s doing now to help other’s find the courage/clarity to write their next chapter.

You can listen to the full episode here.

---

Please support our partners (they are both doing incredible work in the world)

Dreamfuel - the leading mental performance coaching platform for technology teams. As a Wake Up Call subscriber, you are eligible for a free 1-1 or team coaching session.

Enfold - five days can change the course of your life forever. If you mention Wake Up Call, your application will be prioritized.

---

Thank you for reading this.

Now the counterargument here is that humans have always panicked when a new technology is released. The printing press, the factory, the internet, each of these felt destabilizing but went on to improve the quality of life for billions. The Acceleration Decade will also cure diseases, lift people out of poverty, expand education and unlock immense creativity. My worry is not the upside, it’s the pace.

I truly hope that these exercises bring you some peace, contentment and equanimity when things start feeling like they are moving too fast.

I still have to remind myself of these things every day. And I hope this becomes a place you can come back to when you feel a little shaky/unstable and need a gentle reminder.

If you connected with this piece, I would ask you to comment below, share it with a friend, restack it or even just hit the ‘like’ button so that it can reach more people who may feel overwhelmed already.

It really does mean a lot.

Buckle up, it’s going to get weird but I know the future will be beautiful because we get to consciously create it together.

Scott Barker

Note: If you would like to continue to the next essay in this series, the follow up explores the deeper implications of acceleration on the individual and collective:

The psychological cost of acceleration

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)