The scariest thing in the world is you. Let me explain why.

Think about the scariest movie you’ve ever seen. Whether it had a clown, a shark or an alien entity that laid its eggs in your stomach, it was terrifying, at the beginning. You saw it as a shadow, or out of focus, it was unknown, unseen and super scary as a result.

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But why was it so scary when you couldn’t see it properly? Because your imagination was working over time, and actually made you more scared than any writer or CGI creator ever could. Once the monster was known it was a situation to be managed not feared, however scary it seemed at first.?

The future is the same, it’s always unknown, but as the monster comes into focus, whether that’s climate change, the Corona Virus, or changing how your organization operates it becomes less of a scary thing and more of a problem to solve. Your brain moves from panic to action.

This fear of the unknown future is one of the reasons why so many people prefer the idea of the past to the future. After all, the past actually was, and let’s be honest here, generally dreadful, but it was known. There is comfort, certainty, in that knowing.

It is human nature to hark back to some mythical past, a golden era when things were better. Even Geoffery Chaucer, writing in the 14th Century, wrote of a golden era before his own. The Roman’s harked back to ancient Greece.

It is said that half of solving a problem is to recognize that you have one. So perhaps the biggest single step we can all collectively take now is to recognize that there is no “normal”, that all forms, environments and setups are transitions, there is no fixed state, and that to survive better in the future we need to move from the panic stage of the unknown, to the the thinking stage of practical resolution.?

Harking back to some mythical past does us no good, we can not return to it, even if we wanted to. It is gone, all we can do is learn from it, and step forward into the unknown.

The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.

The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can start.

Simon Dudley likes to think about stuff. He believes in the future, that taxation is the cost of civilization and that we're all in this* together.

Simon has spent 35 years at work trying to out think, not out work the problem. Sometimes it's worked.

Originally from London, Simon has lived in lots of different places, and is very happy now living in Austin Texas.

*When "this" means everything.