Design a business model based on abundance

I can think of no better, optimistic, uplifting book than “Moonshots: Creating a World of Abundance”. It has everything. Science, future, entrepreneurship, innovation, mindset, sustainability, leadership. It will cheer you up no end.

Abundance

I have never dreamed of a book. Until “Moonshots”. The question that kept coming through was; what if we had an abundance of energy, food, water, land, computing power, minerals, clean air, etc.? How would the world look like in the future?

Pessimistic

The book is a wake-up call. I have found myself increasingly pessimistic (and I am an optimist by nature) in my lectures and talks. I am reading too much pessimistic news about climate change and sustainability. It is wrecking my head.

Sustainability and scarcity

Because sustainability is actually not sustainable, the principles of a scarcity economy cannot work on a planet of soon 9 billion people. We have to create more of what we need rather than consume less of what we have. Sustainability is a synonym for the conservation of scarce resources, and you cannot achieve sustainability with conservation alone.

Natural capital cost as part of your business model

That does not mean we should make our business models sustainability and apply the natural capital cost to your cost pricing. There is no escaping carbon tax and polluter pays principles. Watch how regulation and consumerism will drive this to a tipping point within five years.

Entrepreneurs needed

SDGs express a beautiful vision, but they offer no blueprint for achieving any of them. Moreover, they do nothing to address the underlying causes of the 17 critical challenges they identify. It is not governments, corporations, or private individuals who will solve the sustainability crisis. Only creative, resourceful entrepreneurs who dare to dream big, audacious dreams can do it.

Forget current economics

We have to create more of what we need rather than consume less of what we have. To do that, we are going to have to adopt a fundamentally and radically different way of thinking. Forget current economists. They are constrained by linear thinking, and that linear thinking is applied strictly in the context of scarce resources.

Scarcity mindset as a scourge

A mindset of scarcity is the true scourge of the world. It is also big business. Artificial scarcity is created in order to restrict supplies and drive up prices. To the mindset of scarcity, everything is a zero-sum game (become a Zeronaut). We are racing toward a world of abundance, and we are going to be increasing the quality of life for everyone on this planet. Just look at our progress over the last 100 years: we’ve seen a doubling of the average human lifespan and a tripling of average per capita income. Infant mortality has plummeted. We’ve seen massive cuts in the cost of food, electricity, transportation, and communications. What’s more, according to the Flynn effect, we’re all getting smarter, too—at a rate of three points per decade. Scarcity, though it produces anxiety about the future, is paradoxically an artefact of the past.

A world of abundance

It needed Machiel Tiddens of Albert Heijn to shake and wake me up. Imagine a world of abundance. Virtually every resource we need to run this world is either in abundance now, or soon will be. However, the one thing we cannot renew, extend, or expand is time. The only thing that you cannot abundancise (new word) is time. That is always limited. The question is how we spend that time and with what mindset. Most of us are approaching the future with the wrong perspective.

Adjust the lens

Which means you need to adjust the lens. My next version of the strategic box has abundance as one of the frames. As humans, we are the top of the food chain now, and yet, as animals remain attuned almost exclusively to the bad news. That is our brain doing its job. Our human minds are also designed to think linearly, not exponential.

Dream

We need to fundamentally change the software of our mental and instinctual programming from one based on threat and survival to one of promise and prosperity. We need to dream big dreams, the really big dreams. The kinds of dreams that show that mankind can reach for, and actually touch the stars. Empowered by exponential technologies and entrepreneurial creativity, we should begin to see that there’s really nothing we cannot achieve.

Exponential

In 1825 it was believed that the human body would not withstand travel at the extraordinary speed of 30 miles per hour, a pace faster than a galloping horse. Since then:

• Now we are witnessing the advent of quantum computing, which will amplify Moore’s law by a serious factor.
• We are seeing the development of the brain-computer interface
• In physics, we’ve finally realised the long-sought metallic hydrogen, a “Holy Grail” room-temperature superconductor that will also enable deep space launches with a single-stage rocket.
• In 2010 it was estimated that a lunar mission would cost a billion dollars, it now costs under $10M (and decreasing).
• Once we go to space, we can harvest Helium -3. Helium-3 is the feedstock for nuclear fusion, a clean form of energy production that can supply the world’s energy needs for millennia. In 15 years we will have a fusion reactor.
• The global market for gold, iron, copper, and a dozen or so other metals is on the order of $600 billion, yet just one near-Earth asteroid is believed to contain more platinum than has ever been mined in the history of the world.
• In our lifetime, people will be living on the moon, Mars, Europa, Titan, and possibly beyond.
• There are companies aiming to make illness “optional” through the tuning of the gut microbiome, the forgotten but newly rediscovered seat of both health and disease,
• There are companies that seek to solve the world’s energy problems by mining the astounding wealth of resources that presently lie untapped in our own backyard, the moon.
• We are grafting “smart skin,” we are growing muscle tissues in bioreactors, and we are now capable of re-inserting entire chains of foreign DNA into our own.
• Neuroscientists have already managed to graft human brain cells, lab-grown “brain organoids” sourced from human skin stem cells into the brains of mice.
• Senescence is a hot research space. The discovery of a new class of drugs called senolytics has demonstrated a remarkable potential to reverse the effects of ageing by clearing out zombie cells.
• We can already see machine intelligence approximating that of humans in many respects.
• With CRISPR and Zinc Fingers gene-editing tools, it is now possible to modify, delete, insert, activate, or inactivate any gene—and do so with great precision
• These technologies will make us better, faster, stronger, and smarter will also be decidedly organic, as we’ll also be able to replace and enhance (via 3D printing, CRISPR, and other biotechnologies) diseased, damaged, or tired organs—a development that may have many marketers rethinking the concept of the lifetime guarantee.
• Today we can perform genetic sequencing in one location, electronically transfer the resulting genome data to another location, synthesise that DNA in the new location, and voilà, we have effectively wirelessly teleported bacteria from one place to another.
• As biology is becoming the new digital (in many respects biology is following the path of the computer industry but with DNA as the programming language), new possibilities abound.
• In time, a bioreactor half the size of a swimming pool could produce enough beef to feed 20,000 people for a year (it takes 2,500 gallons of water, 12 pounds of grain, 35 pounds of topsoil, and the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to produce one pound of feedlot beef).
• Already we can create food out of thin air, using hydrogen-oxidising bacteria, that is, bacteria that feed on hydrogen. The bacteria are placed in a bioreactor the size of a coffee cup filled with water. The hydrogen food source is created by an electric water splitter that splits the water into its constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen. Atmospheric carbon and a dash of ammonia, phosphorous, and salts fertilise the culture, which ultimately produces a dry powder that is 50 per cent protein, 25 per cent carbohydrate, and 25 per cent fats and nucleic acids. In other words, a complete food. Moreover, the protein can be consumed “as is” by humans. The mixture is actually very nutritious. And because the raw materials for the process are available from the air, the technology can be transported to deserts and areas facing famine.
• Conventional approaches to irrigation waste 60 per cent or more of the water to runoff and evaporation. Micro-irrigation technologies, on the other hand, deliver with nearly 95 per cent efficiency.
• Current osmosis technologies yield a freshwater cost of less than $2 per 275 gallons.
• Properly trained deep learning algorithms are able to detect even the most fleeting of these expressions—including micro-expressions and so derive a great deal of information about a person’s state of mind.
• Sensors in the car seat can take your temperature, monitor your pulse rate, and even your breathing, further augmenting the system’s cognitive computing abilities, providing additional channels of interactivity in the bargain.
• Audio sensors can tell if you’re talking aggressively or with anger or frustration. And if the microphone can’t pick up any of this because the windows are rolled down, and the kids are screaming, then the system can actually read your lips.
• Already a pianist could download a musical score from a skills database into an exoskeleton that would move the wearer’s fingers until the muscle memory is trained.
• Nissan has developed a new paint formulated with nanoparticles that generate a layer of air between the coating and anything the road might splash upon it.
• Neuralink is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.
• Scientists have created entangled pairs of photons and were able to teleport.
• Augmented and virtual reality technologies are starting to change the need for anything we currently recognise as a user interface (including Alexa)
• With virtual reality, you soon will be able to simply conjure up the experience you desire. Watch video, check your mail, augment your real-time environment, follow virtual directional arrows to get to your next destination, everything.
• Distance won’t matter, because they could be holographically present anywhere. Holographic telepresence platforms are already proliferating, allowing people to appear in virtually any location without physically being there. Soon we will be able to appear instantly, anywhere, holographically.

As science fiction novels are increasingly looking more like everyday user manuals, science fiction writers are going to have to get a lot more imaginative

2050

• By 2050, augmented reality will have given way to augmented humanity.
• Technology will be implanted directly into the body at birth.
• Via electronic neural stimulation; we will improve our senses of sight, hearing, and touch by augmenting our organic capacities with a combination of genetic editing and myriad sensors placed in and on our bodies, enabling razor-sharp acuity as well as the continuous monitoring of all our vital statistics.
• Our smartphones will have vanished, replaced by inconspicuous devices we will wear on our clothing and in/on our bodies.
• Health monitoring and drug delivery will be transformed through the use of nanobots that will circulate in the body, constantly analysing our physiology at the molecular level, making illness a thing of the past.
• Our brains will be connected directly to the cloud, meaning we will be able to upload our knowledge in a “brain-as-a-service” kind of model.
• We will be able to read one another’s minds, with explicit permission from participating parties,
• The lines of reality will have become blurred as we will be able to engage the world in a virtual manner, able to appear anywhere holographically.
• Language barriers will completely disappear because our augmented brains will automatically translate one language to another
• The ability to write a complete human genome will enable the production of designer babies whose “parents” will be computers. As it is, robots are already demonstrating the ability to reproduce.
• We will enjoy augmented capabilities to see and hear across all wavelengths.
• Every type of screen—phone, laptop, TV—will disappear as we will be able to use augmented reality built into our brains to view and experience every form of content as though it were real.
• By 2050, we will have become a multi-planetary society, with regular commercial flights to the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies.
• It will be illegal for humans to drive cars on public roads—they’ll just be too dangerous.
• We will have personal drones and personal jetpacks to take us and our goods from one point to another.
• Artificial intelligence will have substantially surpassed human intelligence in many application spaces.
• We will not be working to earn a living, and therefore, we’ll be dedicating our energies to creative pursuits that we enjoy.
• Virtually every object in our lives and every component of infrastructure will be smart, connected, and controlled via a combination of the cloud and blindingly fast communications—perhaps even quantum—technologies.
• 5G and its successors will enable not only ever-improving communications bandwidth and throughput but previously unimagined applications.
• Through our “embodied” devices, cloud-based AI will constantly monitor all our vital health indicators, including blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar levels, temperature, and more, averting emergencies and dramatically extending the human lifespan.
• Through the use of fully developed nanotechnologies and metamaterials, we will be able to manipulate and assemble objects at the atomic level,
• Metamaterials will allow us to manipulate every aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum, enabling true visual cloaking, noise cancelling on a massive scale, the countering of tsunamis—even the ability to view atoms. Moreover, the associated data can be stored in a “skills database,” ready to be downloaded by medical students anywhere.

You know already

If you trust your gut, you know that blockchain, ICT, internet of things, sensors,3D and 4D printing, AR and VR, nano, genetics, biology, physics, material science, AI. The dots will somehow connect in your future. It is when not if. Every industry is going to be transformed, if not completely dislocated. The collective forces of change are so powerful that over the next decade or so, nearly half of the current Fortune 500 companies will not survive them.

Become a futurist

Every entrepreneur and/or CEO needs to become futurist. It is a skill that anyone can learn and that the entrepreneur/CEO must learn. It is called sensemaking in leadership terms. It is my fundamental belief that a lack of foresight could prove devastating for those who do not plan for this new and rapidly emerging world. Forecasting means engaging in a little chronesthesia—mental time travel. Strategies must always “remember the future”. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Forecasting

Forecasting is not only a matter of recognising emerging trends and following their respective trajectories, but putting into motion the agents that will harness and combine, and enable, those very trends in ways that will synthesise entirely new industries. I would take 180 hours a week to keep up with the scientific literature in just a single field. You need to find other ways of making sense.

Tools

You can use Peter Diamandis’ powerful “Six Ds of Exponential Thinking” to escape the traps of linear thinking and learn how to create maps of the future that one not only can draw but control. You can use Peter Hinssen’s “Day after tomorrow” thinking. You can use this: ACEI lecture.

Time

The future doesn’t care what we do with it. Time may have an arrow, but it has no bias, no agenda, no particular preferences at all. As long as Earth keeps circling the sun, time will just keep flowing no matter what we do, tomorrow after tomorrow, an ever-emerging and rolling reality offering a huge and virtual land grab for anyone who dares to purposefully venture into it. It is what you are going to with the future that is the question.

Moonshots

There has never been a time in human history when people have enjoyed access to such resources as we have today, and when a small group of people can do things that, in the past, could only be contemplated by the nation-states. You have a moonshot in you. Why not try?

You determine the future

You cannot take for granted that the future will be better by default. Which means we need to work to bring about that better future, that the future we imagine cannot happen absent our active and purposeful participation. It takes a conscious human observer to collapse the quantum options to a single outcome. All the potentialities “exist” simultaneously in the ether of the undetermined future. The reality that is ultimately actualised from the myriad possible futures depends entirely upon our, your, action. That action is precipitated by choice, a decided outcome that is not a function of chance but an exercised will. When we make that choice, we necessarily close out and collapse all other options, including those of our competitors and other potential futures. By making the deliberate choice, or allowing others to choose us, we determine the future state!

Your legacy

Quantum physics and your moral obligation to lead (and to be able to look next generation in the eye). To quote “Legacy”. Leadership is leaving the shirt in a better place. Your choices carry more energy than that released by splitting the atom.

Your mindset

The secret is the entrepreneurial mindset. It is the key to opening previously unimagined frontiers of human prosperity. With as the goal is to achieve something that is an order of magnitude greater than what exists today, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be an order of magnitude more difficult than, say, aiming for something that is just 10 per cent better. If the limits of your vision constrain you to create something that’s merely 10 per cent better, 10 per cent faster, or 10 per cent cheaper, then you’re operating in the biggest possible sphere of competition. Take a moonshot.

Audacious dreams

Moonshots appear to be far riskier simply because they venture into unexplored territory; they aren’t an obvious extrapolation of what’s happening today. They require what is perhaps the scarcest resource of all: the audacious, if not eccentric, entrepreneur with an equally audacious dream.

Opportunity

To audaciously dream you need to cultivate a mindset of opportunity. As distinct from a scarcity-driven mindset. That is a mindset that operates by lazy thought habits, the ones that come most naturally, the so-called “paths of least resistance.” These are the mindsets that resist change, fear the future, and work to preserve the status quo, no matter how bad it is. That lazy mindset is practically a crime to yourself. After all, you live up or down to what you believe.

Practice abundance

A mindset of abundance is best cultivated by building a foundational habit, a fundamental behaviour or practice that, once shifted, has the power to start a chain reaction, transforming many other areas of life and work, thanks to its many ripple effects.

Possibility

Imagine a culture of possibility. Most organisations make choices based on long-held organisational habits, patterns that emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions over time. They ossify and become fixed, leaving them vulnerable to disruption, as we see time and time again in large companies. Read “Breaking bad habits“.

Imagination

The true sign of intelligence,” Einstein said, “is not knowledge but imagination. Imagination is our only limit. Just free your mind to simply imagine, even in a child-like way. Everything begins with imagining the world not as it is, but as you want it to be. Start conversations by saying, “Imagine”. The fact is few resources are truly scarce. They may be difficult to access, but that’s a different problem, a problem that can be solved with technology.

• Imagine a world in which every resource, energy, water, food, land, was in great abundance.
• What will it mean then when we are able to achieve true man-machine symbiosis, where our mental and physical capacities are enhanced in no small way by AI, and our human sensibilities remain?
• Humans will need to embrace cognitive enhancements in order to stay relevant in an artificially intelligent world.
• There is no question that as we eventually come to transcend our “biological roots,” these technologies will also make us better, faster, stronger, and—to take the Six Million Dollar Man one step further—smarter, too.
• There is a resource we have in abundance today that we actually wish were a little less abundant, that is, until we are able to fully exploit its economic potential: carbon dioxide?
• Most drugs have an efficacy rate of only about 20 per cent. In other words, 80 per cent of patients taking the drug receive no benefit at all. Imagine if there is no need for pharmaceuticals. That enables you to totally disregard the infrastructure (and the cost).
• If I could transport my memories and my experience to different places at the same time, have you, in effect, teleported yourself?
• What kinds of possibilities do these insights into the “human body as a platform” open up for the creative entrepreneur?
• The human genome, the number of neural connections in the adult human brain are on the order of 300 trillion! That’s a lot of wiring, wiring that would stretch for millions of miles if you could lay it all out. We may someday be able to do the same with the connectome, literally retrofitting, replacing, and augmenting our brains with complete packages of specialised “off-the-shelf” neural networks.
• Could we perpetuate an Einsteinian brain by transplanting it into new hosts, android avatars or biological hosts grown or 3D-printed whole from the DNA of one’s choice, where it would accumulate new memories over millennia?
• According to one estimate, good typist, for example, can bang out about 80 words per minute—but maybe only a fifth of that rate when typing on a smartphone. We speak, on average, at a rate of about 130 words per minute (even though we can take in spoken content at about twice that rate). But we think somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 words per minute! The brain-computer interface—BCI—could open up previously unimagined possibilities.
• In its telepathic context, though, neural dust will not only speed up typing, but enable the control of robots, prosthetics, home automation devices, and any number of other targets of the brain-machine interface.
• When you consider that all mental processes have a neurobiological basis, it really should be possible to “decode” even the visual and audio content of such neural activity, including memory, dreams, music, and other experiences. And it is. The ability to do so at economic scale, though, would have a massive impact on virtually every field.
• Other approaches involve injecting the brain with thousands of tiny silicon chips—neural dust—that record and reflect neural information using ultrasound.
• Imagine highly individualised, and personalised learning with an interactive digital tutor embodied in a tablet that can tell if a student is getting bored. How much of the teaching burden could be lifted by these means, especially when such means are also exponentially more cost-effective?
• Consider also how games can be personalised.

Weirder

It gets weirder. Read “Sensemaking” which covers similar questions:

• If we admit the existence of the soul, when we treat the human body as a platform, then we’re essentially dealing with the body as an “interface apparatus” and not as part of the true nature or essence of the self.
  If the brain believes that something has happened, did it happen? In a hyper-realistic immersive and virtually enhanced world, how would one know anymore what is real and what’s not real?
• What kind of spatial images do one-dimensional beings have? Such beings would be able to perceive only points, and not their own one-dimensionality, because when we attempt to draw something within a line, points are the only option. A two-dimensional being would be able to encounter lines and thus to distinguish one-dimensional beings. A three-dimensional being, such as a cube, would perceive two-dimensional beings. Human beings, however, can perceive three dimensions. If we draw the right conclusions, we must say that just as a one-dimensional being can perceive only points, a two-dimensional being only one dimension, and a three-dimensional being only two dimensions, a being that perceives three dimensions must be a four-dimensional being. Because we can delineate external beings in three dimensions and manipulate three-dimensional spaces, we must be four-dimensional beings.” How about that as a mind bender?

Curiosity

The entrepreneur’s superpower. Intellectual curiosity Skilled in the art of curiosity! We are, in fact, the only species that asks, “Why?” And why is a question that leads to how, which is the stuff of innovation. Instilling a sense of intellectual curiosity, then, is the greatest gift you can offer to people. Most of the world’s great scientists are not necessarily the most talented, but the most compelled by curiosity. You need to let go of certainty.

Perception is the reality

People have a remarkable capacity to bring themselves into conformity with opinions that are clearly contrary to the evidence if it reduces social dissonance. Everybody passionately seeks to be well-adjusted. Confirmation bias is seductive precisely because it is easy. As you go about your life, your perception is your reality. Research in developmental biology shows that perceptions acquired in early childhood become the fundamental subconscious “programs” that shape one’s character. It is further actualised in your experience and often confirmed by your cohorts. Part and parcel of confirmation bias is a more insidious feature called denial, not seeing what we don’t want to see. It is rooted essentially in the need to preserve one’s sense of identity and security, two things people really don’t like to see challenged.

Reprogramme yourself

By becoming more consciously and competently attuned to your mindset, you can better direct your way forward. Whatever has been programmed can be reprogrammed. The human mind is an unimaginably creative and nimble platform capable of defining its reality, infusing perceptions with imagination to generate unlimited possibilities.

Rebel

You need to become a rebel. A rebel is not only an independent thinker but is determined to overthrow every authoritative, self-limiting imposition placed upon his vision—and disposition.

The rookie advantage

Nullius in Verba—“Take nothing on authority.” You need to be wary of experts. Moonshots by definition—are almost always won by people and teams who have little or no expertise in a prize’s domain. Why is that? It’s because they don’t know what not to try. Domain experts are very good at two things. Telling you why some things won’t work, and coming up with solutions to problems that are only incrementally better than the current state of the art. In short, don’t ever look to an industry expert for a disruptive solution.

As people accumulate knowledge in their respective fields, they become increasingly constrained by that knowledge, as well as by their practices and thought habits. The brain is the best pattern-matching machine ever created. The nonexpert, on the other hand, lacks that pattern-matching repository. Once you become competent in a particular domain, you can only improve it incrementally—you can never disrupt it. Moonshots happen when curious ignorance meets inspired imagination, qualities the expert now lacks.

Unencumbered

Look to this day as the singular, golden, and evanescent moment when you can be simultaneously fired by passion and unencumbered by knowledge. No history, no precedents, no biases, no evidence to the contrary, just wide open imagination and possibility. What’s more, all the technology you need to start right now is available right now.

Transformative purpose

When you make that vision truly visual, that is, conveyed in a way that allows others to visualise in their minds the world you’re describing, then you also inspire. When they, too, can imagine this world with you, they’ll also want to help you create it. When you share the secret, they become your enthusiastic co-conspirators. That is the irresistibly attractive quality of a transformative purpose. When you are able to inspire others with the vision for your mission, you stimulate the release of oxytocin in your listeners. The so-called “love molecule,” oxytocin is triggered by such positive and stirring encounters, building trust and empathy, and motivating people to want to join you, to work together with you for a common cause.

You are your own prophecy

Create the self-fulfilling prophecy is defined as a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself. But this self-fulfilling prophecy, like the collapsing of quantum options, is active and deterministic. The pessimist takes himself out of that future as a proactive agent. Indeed, identity is nothing but a nested set of narratives, narratives of who you are, what you can or cannot do. In the end, whatever it is that you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right! That is why the stakes of one’s mindset are so unimaginably high. Infinitely high. Your mindset isn’t just your own business.

A life nor lived

Consequently, when you withhold a good idea, something vital is unfulfilled in the world. If people really understood their power and influence in this world, they would be quaking. But they don’t, and they are not. Most people live far within their limits as if they have any idea what those limits actually might be. Their life habit is too often a retreat to comfort. Consequently, they energise far below their potential, completely unaware, or simply afraid, of their actual potentialities.” Each and every one of us has the opportunity to construct our lives and significance in ways that are utterly unique and special. Here’s the rub: the people who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world are the ones who actually do.

Manage your amygdala

So get a grip on your amygdala. It is crucial in the development of an effective entrepreneurial mindset. So how do the SEALs do it? When put into practice, these techniques boosted performance by 80 per cent or more. Here they are in a nutshell:

1. Set challenging but achievable long- and short-term goals.
2. Connect these goals to your life vision.
3. Practice deep breathing techniques to control the stress response and centre the mind.
4. Visualise anticipated experiences and outcomes to improve concentration, reduce anxiety, and build confidence.

These effectively raises the threshold of the brain’s “smoke detector,” the amygdala. The effect of neuropeptide Y—a neurotransmitter associated with reducing anxiety and stress—is so pronounced, they observed, that they can identify a member of the special forces by a blood test alone. And suddenly it becomes clear why special forces need to maintain robust conscious awareness even—and especially—under such conditions. Control these hormones, and you control your performance.

Your moral obligation

The ultimate mark of a life well spent, a truly successful life has nothing to do with money and everything to do with spirit. Take your eyes off yourself and put them on others, in service. Live an examined life. Know yourself, what drives you and motivates you deeply. Master your body, mind, and emotions to excel at an elite level. To do this requires the knowledge, skills, and commitment to a life of training and daily improvement.

The arena

Every day is another day in the arena, and you need to be physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually fit to succeed there. Learn to win in your mind before you set foot in the arena. Learn to select the right targets, connected to your main purpose in life. Employ KISS (keep it simple, stupid) planning and be willing to execute with an imperfect plan. Take massive action using micro-goals, then fail forward fast. Never quit, period.

Answer the call

“So come!” says the old saint. “Never mind weariness, illness, lack of feeling, irritability, exhaustion, the snares of the devil and of men, with all that they create of distrust, jealousy, prejudice, and evil imaginings. Let us soar like an eagle above these clouds, with our eyes fixed on the sun and its rays, which are our duties.”

When you answer that call, it blossoms as a motive life-force, and so decisively so that you come to organise your whole world around it.