Risky is the New Safe (4 page)

Obviously I'm joking, as flight attendants play an important role in maintaining passenger safety. (And I'm writing this from seat 5G of an American 777 right now.) But make no mistake: There are millions of jobs that can and probably someday
will
be performed by monkeys—or dogs or cats or dolphins. Think about it: We've been using camels, horses, and mules as beasts of burden for centuries, so training animals to perform more sophisticated jobs is a logical next step. As new developments expand the number of species with which this is possible, chaos in the workforce will ensue.

Oh, there will always be jobs for humans. But there will be far fewer of them, and they'll be quite different from the ones we have now. Some of them will be designing the robots that will replace the humans in their jobs. Some of them will be working at the animal training farms. And some of them will be at the animal cloning farms.
Oh, and some will be at the human cloning farms . . .

Why will Jones & Sons Hardware on Main Street need to hire any outside employees when Mr. Jones, Sr., can clone all the boys he needs? Why keep paying average employees if you can clone six more of your best one? Why give tenure to a college professor when you can roll a brand new one off the assembly line whenever you need one?

These developments will create a sea change in every sector of every industry in the world—and every sector of every industry off-world as well. Everything you now know as safe is about to become very risky.

Look around you everywhere. What do you see? Millions of lifeless zombies drifting through lives of quiet desperation. These people are dead, but they don't have enough sense to lie down. They think
The Matrix
was a science fiction film, when actually they're living (or undead) proof that it was actually a documentary.

They work in dead, lifeless companies that have shrinking market share and declining profits, which they attribute to increased competition, a tough economy, or variables like rising price of materials. But those things are the symptoms, not the cause.

These companies lack a pulse because they're operating in an economic model that was designed for another time. The model they follow was built when goods were produced in Europe and traveled by ship to the New World, where they were transported by stagecoach to population centers and sold in general stores. And even though stagecoaches gave way to trains or trucks, and general stores evolved into shopping malls, the basic system never changed. But the world did.

Developments like fax machines, overnight shipping, and toll-free numbers, and now mobile phones, the Internet, and social media have altered everything about the way we do business.

But no one noticed the target had moved . . .

People continued to elect representatives or follow benevolent dictators, confident that government would provide security and take care of their needs. They spent years of their lives and went into debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars to get diplomas that are no longer viable in the employment world. They kept pledging their loyalty to corporations, thinking that would provide for retirement security, because that's what their parents had done. And once they went to work for those dead, lifeless corporations, they were indoctrinated with the same mind viruses as the old-timers working there.

Airlines kept doing hub-and-spoke operations because they had always done it that way. TV networks broadcasted by satellite to affiliates and sold commercials because that's how it was always done. Travel agencies opened more offices; video chains kept stocking DVD stores; and newspapers continued to print large sheets of paper with day-old news. Retailers continued the system of warehouses, rack-jobbers, distributors, and stores because they were invested in it. Some of those retailers even built large spaces to sell nostalgic, novelty items (you're holding one now), which, in the not-so-distant future, half of the potential market will only have seen in a museum.

Everybody is playing it safe, because they think that's the smart thing to do. But in today's new economy, playing it safe is the
riskiest
thing you can do.

All the rules have changed and they're going to change more tomorrow. Disruptive technology, changing cultural trends, a breakdown of the education system, government corruption and malfeasance, and a society that is in some ways evolving—and in other ways devolving—has moved the target. And it keeps moving, faster every day.

Millions of people have been assimilated by the Borg and wander aimlessly through life as worker drones in the collective. And the companies run and staffed by all these people are facing extinction because they can't compete in the new world. If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, these people and companies are stark, raving mad.

It's not unlike the analogy that Dr. Ken Dychtwald (a brilliant guy, by the way) uses when he relates how companies reacted to the age wave caused by the millions of baby boomers. He paints the picture of a huge elephant migrating across the decades. Most companies are desperately chasing after the elephant, shooting arrows in its butt. What they really need to do is get in front of the elephant and dig a big hole.

The people who create prosperity in the new economy will be in front of the trends, anticipating them instead of naively reacting to what happened yesterday.

It doesn't matter whether you're an individual or a company. To create wealth or success today, you have to become a critical thinker and blow up conventional wisdom. Because not only is the current economic model not working well; it's actually moving toward a serious breakdown.

I'm not a futurist, but I'll make a few predictions . . .

Hundreds of millions more jobs will be eliminated by technology, or will require complete retraining or certification for workers to continue doing them. Complete industries will disappear. State-sponsored education will be unable to remain relevant. The euro (and perhaps some other currencies) will collapse within the next two to three years. Tens of thousands of companies will go bankrupt, as will some countries.

Every challenge creates a corresponding opportunity. Some of the greatest wealth was created during the Great Depression—just as many fortunes are created in every recession.

When everyone is zigging, you want to be zagging
.

At the exact moment you're reading this sentence, you're living in the greatest time in human history. There has never been a better time to be alive. The speed and scope of changes taking place in the world (and solar system) today offer unprecedented opportunities for living a life of prosperity.

Advances in science, medicine, and nutrition will offer breakthroughs in longevity, health, and wellness. Technology will create new business models and recreate old ones, offering extraordinary avenues for creating wealth. And all this development will provide you with yet more ways to live a life of meaning, growth, and adventure.

During their lifetime, the vast majority of people who read this book will have the opportunity to vacation on the moon, buy a condo on the ocean floor with a spectacular coral-reef view, or take a feed from the midfielder and score the goal that wins the World Cup for their country. (Although this last one will probably be done via virtual reality in a holo-suite.) This is the fascinating world we will explore together.

If you are willing to take risks and become a contrarian, there are—and will continue to be—extraordinary opportunities for success and prosperity. Because in the new economy, risky is the new safe . . .

Anyone who fights for the Future lives in it today.

—Ayn Rand,
The Romantic Manifesto

Be nice to that impudent teenage store clerk who's playing
Angry Birds
on his iPhone instead of paying attention to you. Chances are good you'll be working for him one day.

We could talk about travel agents, video store clerks, and the millions of other jobs that have been eliminated by technology and won't be replaced. But that's so 2012 . . .

The real disruptions caused by technology are only just beginning
.

If you're a parent who wants to help your 14-year-old son or daughter plan for the future, you're about to tackle a difficult feat. Because the best jobs of 2018 haven't even been invented yet. But we do know one thing for sure: Taking the safe path won't get you there.

We are entering an era of technological advances so profound it will be breathtaking. And the opportunities this era brings will be just as breathtaking, because wealth is the product of humankind's capacity to innovate.

The major factors driving these opportunities are:

• The explosion of smartphones and tablets
  
• An abundance of bandwidth
  
• The attention-deficit-disorder generation coming of age
  
• Advances in video resolution
  
• The elimination of division between broadcast, cable, and Internet content providers
  
• The love affair between people and mobile apps
  

Let's start with television: The average person in the developed world now watches five to six hours of television a day. But what we're talking about is bigger than TV.

We can look at the Internet as an example as well. Probably nothing has changed the world more in the past century than the web. But the change on the horizon is bigger than the Internet. What we're really talking about isn't the technology itself, but how people use that technology. Two-screen viewing, using a TV and tablet or smartphone together, is increasing rapidly. This creates many new possibilities for interaction, and where it will end up remains to be seen.

We're now entering the third wave of tech companies. Wave one was the portals like AOL, Yahoo!, and Google. They attracted us by helping to make sense of the web by organizing and aggregating it into categories we could understand and access. The next generation was the social web, an area in which probably no one has done better than Facebook. But Facebook will become the new MySpace, if they don't morph quickly into mobile. The big winners in the third generation will be the companies that figure out how to monetize mobile.

This is why Facebook recently shelled out a billion dollars to buy Instagram, a photo-sharing program that allows users to digitally filter their photos and share them via a number of social networking services.

So yes, we're talking about mobile and the cloud, but this change is bigger than even that. Mobile transformed the Internet, and the cloud will transform both to mind-boggling degrees. (Cloud computing is digital file storage as a service, hosting a user's data on an external network allowing them access from their own devices.)

Things are moving at breathtaking speed from the Internet to mobile apps. In the very near future, if you were to force a person to choose between giving up their favorite apps versus their favorite websites, they will likely keep their apps. Meanwhile, broadcast networks are trying to figure out how to compete with cable; cable networks are trying to figure out how to compete with the Internet; websites are trying to figure out how to offer themselves via mobile; and mobile sites are trying to figure out how to do apps. They're all like the wagon train under attack. They've circled the wagons, but they're all shooting inward.

This isn't about broadcast versus cable, or Apple TV. Consumers don't care about a company's turf wars. They just want to be informed and entertained. They want to sound like they know what they're talking about when the subjects of politics or their favorite sports team come up. And most desperately of all, they want to be distracted and entertained every waking moment of every day.

There is now a whole generation of people who are tethered electronically, 24 hours a day. Suggest to them that they should leave their cell phones at home when they go to the opera or church, and they'll look at you like you're eating spiders. The very concept is so alien to them they can't even process the request.

They'll argue something about how necessary their phone is in case of an emergency, disregarding the 5,000 years of human history we survived before the cell phone. The real reason that they need to take it everywhere is simply that they have become addicted to their electronic pacifier.

We are more connected than ever, yet we are lonelier than ever. The average person is bored to death, insecure, and can't stand to have a moment alone in quiet thought. People need to be BUSY all the time. So whether it means sending and checking text messages while eating dinner with their spouse, replying to emails while they're in line at the checkout counter, or watching cat videos during a red light, they want content—and an endless supply of it.

Now, this raises the issue about video. We are definitely a visual society nowadays, and we're becoming even more so. Radio continues to exist, but only in the shadow of television and movies. Pretty much everyone under the age of 35 is part of the Internet/texting/TV/video game generation. That's a nice way to say they have the attention span of a gnat.

You have to figure that video is the best way to capture their attention. My friend and bestselling author Brendon Burchard predicts that 95 percent of everything on the Internet, including email, will be video within a couple years. Now, Brendon's a clever fellow, so I'm inclined to agree with him, but as a critical thinker, I have to assume everything will be video—unless it isn't.

Personally, I hate getting video emails. The lighting is usually dreadful, they take too long to watch, and I can't start to reply to questions without stopping the video and having to replay it from the beginning. I'm old enough to remember a time—specifically, the fifth grade—when people talked about video telephones as though they were the stuff of science fiction. This was something you'd see on
The Jetsons
. Now we're in 2012, the technology has been available for years—and no one wants it.