The Idea Starts Here

"I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us, albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness and they most certainly have will.

“Ideas are driven by a single impulse, to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner.

“And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, 'Do you want to work with me?'"

-- Elizabeth Gilbert.

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I’ve been working on an idea for a book (or should I say the idea has been working on me?) for the last few years. It started when I was working on my most recent book, Being Essential: Seven Questions for Living and Leading with Radical Self-Awareness. It was an idea that the fifth of the seven questions in the book – What Wants To Happen? – would become a book in itself. Not could, but would.

For the last month, through a series of synchronistic events, a number of things started to move the work forward. I was preparing to give a talk to a leadership team in California, when I thought of a book I had quoted before. The book, by Don Fabun, is The Dynamics of Change and it was part of my family history growing up in the 1960’s. When I opened it, it was as if a bolt of lightning had struck. What occurred to me as I turned the flaming pages was that here was a framework 60 years old for how to think about change and the emerging future. And how to think about it today.

Then, while I was speaking in Los Angeles, I told a story about Carl Jung and the idea of synchronicity, a word he coined in 1952 for his book, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. His interest in the subject grew out of conversations he had had with two renowned physicists, first Albert Einstein when they were both young men and later in his long friendship with the Nobel-laureate Wolfgang Pauli. I talked about how Jung was suggesting that synchronicity, at some level we don’t fully understand, is a matrix of consciousness where experiences can be more than just coincidence, where our internal experience intersects with external occurrences.

Just like Elizabeth Gilbert says in the quote above: ideas are an energetic “life form” looking to be made manifest.

And then, as I was collecting notes from both those books, I started looking through other notes I had made over the past few years. As I did so, I realized I had more than 70 pages of notes already written. Another lightning bolt and, as the thunder rolled away in the distance, I realized I was ready to start writing now.

And that’s what I’ll be doing here in these posts over the next few months. Manifesting the ideas I’ve tucked away in my notes and, as you share your comments, the ideas that spark in your own mind as you read.

Some of the questions I’ll be asking are already here, others will surely be coming as we look for them or they look for us.

For instance, how much of the future can we find in the present? “The future is already here,” the steampunk author Willam Gibson may have said, “it’s just not evenly distributed.”

As early as 2000, virtually all the technology that would lead to the 2007 launch of the iPhone was already here and in use. The Palm Pilot I had in 2000 already had Bluetooth with which I could send messages to friends who were in the same room. It was handy for taking notes and could connect to the Internet through nearby cell phones. I remember holding it in my hand and thinking all we needed was to build cell phone capabilities into the Palm Pilot itself and we would have it all.

But even though the pieces were all around us it took a few years to put them all together, and Apple wasn’t the only one trying to bring that future into the present.

So what wants to happen now? We’re so used to talking about the future in terms of technology (“AI will change everything!”) that sometimes we miss what matters more. What’s going to happen with people? Who do we need to be to see a better future for ourselves? And what will that look like?

In asking these questions together, we might just find that the future is not only already here but eagerly waiting for us to notice it with curiosity and courage. (Note that this last sentence was generated by AI, which is certainly something that wants to happen.)

Eric McNulty -- Leonard Khirug -- Brian Cunningham -- Mark Lipton -- Kevin Freiberg PH.D