Thank You for Being Late
Friedman discusses how the key to understanding the 21st century is understanding that the planet's three largest forces -- Moore's law (technology), the market (globalization) and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loos) -- are accelerating all at once. And these accelerations are transforming the five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community. Friedman posits that we should purposely "be late"--We should pause to appreciate the amazing historical epoch we're passing through and to reflect on its possibilities and dangers
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What Hacker News says
- Thomas Friedman's "Thank you for being late" is a massive treatise on the idea that things aren't just changing fast, but that the rate of change is accelerating.
https://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Being-Late-Accelerations/dp...
For a while after reading this, I believed that maybe we were in a bit of a slump and the rate of change wouldn't continue to accelerate. Now, with the societal / technological change brought by covid, the recent wave of building and excitement around Crypto (NFTs, DeFi, Web3), the continued jumps in AI, and a possible shift from phones to AR/MR glasses in the next few years, etc it's hard not to feel that the acceleration is continuing.
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> The Best Investment Writing, Volume 1: Selected Writing From Leading Investors and Authors
by Meb Faber (editor), Jason Zweig (contributor), Patrick O’Shaughnessy (contributor), Morgan Housel (contributor), Corey Hoffstein (contributor), Barry Ritholtz (contributor)
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> Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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> Born to Run
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> Stealing Fire
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> Hit Refresh
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> Thank You for Being Late
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- By not chasing unicorns for themselves. If a founder starts a company looking only for a billion dollar valuation to retire rich and young, they only increase the inequality divide.
Rather, founder should be seeking to start companies that give opportunity to their employees to be empowered. Taking in talent from different sources (not only ivy league) and developing the skills needed for their company.
Another practical way is perhaps to create (insert buzzword here) that will open up learning of important life skills to the large swaths of under/unemployed/employable people. Grit, resilience, creativity etc.
We are in large debt repay cycle, as Ray Dalio describes it, so companies have to be bootstrapped and built with minimum risks. Empowering a generation to become life long learners is perhaps the best thing we can do as engineers. Something else to look at is environmental stability (ie safe communities, stable households etc.)
Inspiration for this post: "Thank you for being late" - Thomas Friedman
