30 linear steps gets you to 30. 30
exponential steps gets you to a billion
the same amount of steps gets you to a
billion and technology advances as
this exponential rate so that is the
reason why the smartphone in your pocket
today is a million times cheaper a
million times smaller and a thousand
times more powerful than what used to be
a 60 million dollar supercomputer that
was half a building in size 40 years ago
new construction kits for our reality
are now in our pockets
the folks at singularity university like
to say that a young kid in rural africa
or bali with a smartphone has better
communications technology
than a head of state had than a
president had 25 years ago
because these tools and technologies
they're stand-ins they're metaphors they
are representative of human creativity
externalized and exteriorized
david deutch in his book the beginning
of infinity talks about how if you
consider the topography of a modern city
like manhattan or dubai
that's a physical topography where the
forces of mind creativity human agency
have trumped geology
if you could time lapse human progress
it would literally look like we're
shrinking the lag time between what we
can imagine what we can envision and
what we can't create
how about we redefine the term
billionaire because one of the sort of
incidental cool side effects of this
exponential age especially among young
people is they all want to be the next
billionaire they're like i want to start
a company be like mark zuckerberg like
how cool to aspire to like
become that successful
it's not i want to be a cowboy when i
grow up
you know it's like i want to come up
with an algorithm that impacts a billion
lives cool become a billionaire great
what if we redefine the definition and
we say being a billionaire is not making
a billion dollars that's incidental
that's a side effect that's just the
icing on the cake cool buy yourself a
jet love it make sure it's an
environmentally friendly one but
what if in the age of exponential
technologies being a billionaire means
positively impacting a billion lives and
that's a beautiful thing right it's like
duh right like bumper sticker
put it on the front of your wall like
yes
you know
positively impacting a billion lives and
the thing is i've now given you the
understanding i hope
that this is not a lofty goal
that this is possible that this is
doable that each and every one of you
when looking in the mirror
when you have that faint disquiet late
at night when you haven't slept and
you're anxious and you don't know what
your purpose is or you think you might
not be able to have enough of an impact
think exponentially understand that it's
not just metaphysical lofty spiritual
bumper sticker lingo although that's all
good too but this is all grounded in
tangible fact also it's both
it's poetic truth
built on data-driven extrapolations but
it's actually possible the tools are
there you can take action don't just
stay at home like reading the secret and
hoping for a transformation like
go do it that the brain is essentially
like an artificial intelligence program
right it takes in data from the present
compares it with data from the past and
uses it to make predictions about the
future and it does this automatically
all the time and so our baseline is a
default of low level anxiety
a consistent future tense
very rarely in the present
see on the one hand this capacity to
imagine our future to leave the present
and imagine what might be is a gift
but it can also be a curse
when it robs us of ever being in the
moment and never smelling the flowers
because if we can't see the world in a
grain of sand or heaven in a wild flower
if we can't hold infinity in the palm of
our hands if we can't hold eternity in
an hour like blake said then what the
are we building anything for
because then we're never here to enjoy
any of it damn
consciousness
is a new space for exploration
so michael pollan says that one of the
things that commends intense experiences
transformational experiences psychedelic
experiences even travel and beauty and
love
is that these kinds of experiences they
block all signals forwards and backwards
right they get you out of thinking
always of the future and out of always
ruminating from the past and instead
hurl you into the flow of the present
that is literally wonderful
wonder being the byproduct of exactly
that sense of unencumbered first sight
or virginal noticing to which the adult
brain has closed itself
so you get to see the world as if
through the eyes of a child
you open yourself up to the miraculous
once more
and that's intoxicating
this notion of flow
this is perhaps the greatest state of
consciousness to aspire to
so for those that don't know flow is a
state of consciousness in which you feel
your best
and you perform your best
it's ecstatic
it's characterized by a sense of
selflessness when you're in the zone
when you're in the pocket when you're
the jazz musician who's tapped into the
the perfect space right
when you're in flow your sense of self
vanishes the inner chatter disappears
and you experience that as liberation
you're free from the monkey mind
torso lateral prefrontal cortex that's
responsible for the constant
self-editing that constantly keeps us
gets in our way right people say get out
of your own way everything you want is
on the other side of fear stop second
guessing yourself but when you're in
flow that immediately goes quiet
your sense of time disappears so you're
free from the tyranny of time you're
free from the tick tock tick tock tick
tock that everything is passing you're
in forever now
it's intoxicating
there's this sense of effortlessness
right when you're in flow you don't feel
the labor everything is just flowing
whether it's your creativity or your
work or your relationship it's just
flowing you're surfing that wave and
it's magnificent
and there's a sense of richness you get
more information you process more data
you get more insights you're more
resilient you're optimized
the seminal writer on flow his name's
chiksen mihai wrote a book on the
subject he called it beyond boredom and
anxiety
the problem with human beings is we tend
to oscillate between boredom and anxiety
but there is this state beyond and you
know it when you're there i feel it
sometimes when i give my talks i know
you feel it when you sing your favorite
songs
when you have love when you make love
with somebody you really have chemistry
with
you're in flow
playing that instrument you lose all
sense of self all sense of time
everything is awesome you feel the pull
of now you feel the pull of purpose
you're tapped into your passion
so flow is huge
so we can't build these tools we can't
architect this future we can't envision
all these possibilities unless we figure
out how to harness our minds now today
psychology technology neurobiology and
pharmacology the four forces of ecstasy
that are allowing us to look underneath
the hood and figure out the cycles of
flow how it works get a better
understanding of where the flow triggers
and how we can optimize to have more
flow more often right
the work of the neurohacker collective
does a lot of this same research as well
and the key idea then is if we could
change our self-systems from leaky
buckets into chalices how might we
render ourselves whole and how might we
render ourselves holy
and so this is what we can aspire to