How to cope with the new Happy Twenties?

9 minutes reading

The Happy Twenties, maybe more known as the Roaring Twenties, celebrate its 100-year-anniversary these days. It was a time of economic prosperity during the time period from 1920 to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The US income grew by more than 40% (1920 GDP in the US summed up to $680b and grew to $920b by 1928), women got the right to vote (in US 1920 and Sweden 1921), the penicillin was detected by Alexander Flemming (1928) and Charles Lindberg manifested the development in aviation by crossing the Atlantic in 1927. Culture evolved with movies and radio but maybe the most significant hallmark was the progression of Jazz music. The twenties was the start of automobile development and manufacturing as we know it today. Mass production started and vehicles become commonplace in US and Europe. Henry Ford mastered the assembly line that led to price decrease of cars by 80% from 1909 to 1929. In Canada, for example, around 300,000 vehicles were registered 1918, but 1929 close to 2 million cars rolled on the streets. 

Right now, we are facing a new twenties. AI, digitalization, robots and climate change will make the new twenties as bewildering as the one 100 years ago. If the last twenties made automobiles available for the general population, the new twenties will most undoubtedly be as revolutionizing as the last, but in a different manner. The previous 100 years of automobile development has been rather linear, characterized by drivers in control of combustion engine propelled vehicles with fossil fuel as energy carrier. Ten years from now, fossil will most certainly be history, and drivers in control more and more uncommon. So, the question is: how should we attack this second Happy Twenties of automobile development in particular and technical development in general? Follow me on a thought journey to learn some strategies that I think will be decisive.

Faster change must be met by larger number of decisions per time unit

We don’t know where the technology in general, and the automobile development in particular, will take us the coming 10 years. However, two things can definitely be concluded. For the first, it will happen more, and be more transforming, the coming 10 years in the car and truck industry than the last 100 years. Secondly, the path of development will be harder to predict than it used to be. Just two examples, will the charging infrastructure expansion support the fully electrical transportation, or will it inhibit the transformation? How will public opinion accept autonomous cars? Will they judge it as suspicious because of ambiguous division of responsibility between driver and producer, or will driving by humans be considered unsafe?

Although, the future is as hard as ever to predict, the speed and uncertainty will likely increase. The only way to manage the pace and unpredictability of change in the development is by making more decisions per time unit.

The future belongs to companies that sense, adjust and execute faster based on change in patterns in the environment. Stifling and hierarchic decision structures mark out the losers.

Two methods are possible to increase the decision pace: 1) either decision makers take more decision faster, or 2) involve a larger cohort in the decision making. I strongly believe that only companies that lean towards the latter strategy will survive. 

Manage not time, manage energy

Last century, most people sold their time. That is true for fewer and fewer of us. Nowadays, we sell our brain power and our thoughts. Jobs have moved from low intellectual tasks to high cognitive processes.

When both work and leisure is leaky, meaning they invade each other’s space, time is no longer the asset to manage. Your energy is!

What you do is more important than the number of hours you put in. If the morning hours are your prime time, spend them on your most demanding thought tasks, and that is usually not grinding mails. Cal Newport can guide us with his concept of Deepwork meaning high concentration, un-distracted productive work. The three concepts of deep work are:

1)    Make Deep work a habit and schedule time for deep work every day

2)    Allow yourself to be lazy in between your deep work blocks

3)    Schedule your internet time and avoid it all other times

Become an infinite learner

Things change faster. One example is the average lifespan of Fortune 500 companies that in the 50’s was approximately 60 years. Today it is less than 20 years. Another indicator is that when me and my wife got married, we bought an encyclopedia (The Swedish Nationalencykopedin). Yes, I know, who buys an encyclopedia today? However, in the binding for G, the article for gender science is two rows long. Since then, a whole scientific field has emerged that hardly existed 25 years ago. New knowledge and technologies come in a steady flow, old get outdated fast. To cope with this as an individual is not easy. The strategy to become an infinite learner can help. 

Consider your brain as a decision system on computer for a moment. Its ability to make correct decisions is based on the size of relevant data available multiplied by the capacity to process, compare and connect the data. The processor of your brain (i.e. its capacity to process and connect data) deteriorates, as all body functions, somewhere from the age 20-30 years old with a rate of 1% per year. That is why successful mathematicians and chess players peak before age of 30. The data set (i.e. knowledge and experience) however, can be expanded high up in age. Of course, you absorb knowledge faster in the beginning of life, but you can continue to learn high up in age. Researchers judge that from about the age of 65, most humans tend to start losing information (source newscientist.com). 

Below you see a generic plot of the brain power (blue curve that reach its maximum (100%) at age of 20 and lose 1% per year from age of 27), the knowledge (yellow curve that increase until 65 years old and then deteriorates) and the cognitive capacity, which is the product of the two former factors (red curve represent the product of brain power and knowledge). 

Being an infinite learner is to deliberate continue expand your referential experience data set. At some point in life your cognitive capacity (i.e. the product between your brains CPU capacity and your experience and learnings) will degrade due to a fast decline in “processor capacity” (somewhere between age of 40 and 55). However, you can tilt that point in time by continue to learn. Sometimes people talk about a “senator’s brain” to describe a person that continue to have an extraordinary cognitive capacity high up in age. The trick is to continue to learn – to be an infinite learner. Below you find a graph of a Senator's Brain that continue to expand knowledge until age of 75.

So how do you become an infinite learner? There are a number of strategies.

Foster and preserve your curiosity

The fuel for the fast increase in learning in the beginning of life is curiosity. All kids are born curious, but our school system seems to educate us out of our curiosity. Infinite learners tend to preserve their curiosity throughout life. They keep the ability to be amazed and continue to ask why. Start every day by spending 5 minutes on something that stimulates your curiosity. That will set the tone for the rest of the day. One such a curiosity stimulating action could be reading. 

Read

Books are an infinite source of learnings. Not only are there books about all type of subjects, the reading of a book is something completely different than shallow reading on twitter or FB. It takes more effort to read a book but that only stands in proportion to the effort in producing the book. To optimize your reading to support your infinite learning, actively seek out books about subjects you want to expand your knowledge in. Also make your reading a daily habit. Reading is like fitness. You need to maintain it otherwise you lose it.

Learn from others

The best source to learn is by interacting with others. There is almost always someone that knows more about a subject than you. The learning that can come out of a deep analogue interaction with another human being is unprecedented. And most people are surprisingly generous with their time and knowledge if you just ask them. Just try by honestly ask someone the following question: “your life and knowledge inspires me, would you take an hour of your time to share some of your insight?” and most people will give you the time. In case they hesitate, just sugarcoat it with the phrase “I’ll buy you a coffee”. Then you are almost guaranteed an inspirational meeting. This is how I come to meet Professor Theresa Amabile at Harvard. The outcome turned out to be a transformational meeting for me around the subject of creativity. 

If interaction with experts is an obvious fertilizer for infinite learning, contact with youngers might be more surprising. Be course analogue communities like churches and associations are on retreat, fewer middle age professionals interact with young persons other than their own kids. The rationale for learning from the younger is that they are closer to their curiosity and are on a steeper gradient of their learning curve. Moreover, they have higher brainpower and see connections faster.  

Practice new insights

Learn for the sake of learning might give a feeling of joy and satisfaction, but it is also rather self-centric. Puting your new insight into action take them to a whole new level. Your learnings will propagate to others and can there create new learning in a never-ending chain reaction. As a bonus, new learnings will stick better by practice. The learn-do-learn-cycle is the infinite learners gym. Spend time there and you will learn even more.

If we jointly practice these strategies to become infinite learners, the new roaring twenties might not just only be a presentiment for the coming second big depression in the 2030’s, but a true New Happy Twenties.