Suddenly, there are no more guarantees—and no more hidey holes. No one is vouchsafed a free ride in today’s juggernaut of change. Who really knows whether they’ll still have a job come Monday morning? Those skills you’ve spent a lifetime polishing—will they be nearly enough? Health care? Gasoline? A decent vacation? How long can you afford them? The American dream for your kids? Going, going, gone! they say. And is it even reasonable anymore to dream about retiring?
Questions. Questions. Questions. The books we’ve written at Brain Technologies for thinking about and dealng with contemporary times, issues and challenges all revolve essentially around the same question: “If you specifically designed a new kind of mind to help you deal with a future going bust, what would that mind be like?”
Your author says it should be a mind passionate at pursuing the next right, smart, good thing when it needs to do something different. Do anything less and the chances markedly increase that you’ll find yourself dueling with the sharks and giving blood at the feeding frenzy with the rest of the bait fish. Do anything more and you risk tilting at windmills and wasting badly needed resources, time and energy.
To be good at repeatedly discovering what works best in a change-crazy world, you need to challenge millions of years of conditioning in your brain. And welcome a mostly new kind of thinking that in these works we call “the dolphin mind.” (And, more and more, leave behind the shark, carp and not-quite-flying fish (or pseudo-enlightened carp) minds that humans have been using since Day One).
Thinking like a dolphin requires
• being the most observant creature in “the pool.” And paying close attention to who’s thinking how—and thinking what.
• knowing how to find the “new simplicities” on the other side of complexity.
• being passionate about acting pragmatically (ideologies, conspiracy theories, pet spiritualities, utopias and rigid dogmas must be checked at the door.)
• realizing that life is mostly about “the game”—about how to win, how to lose, how to decide when it doesn’t matter.
• wanting the best times to be ahead, not behind. Wanting the benefits to go to everyone, not just a few. And wanting people everywhere to have a fair chance at being what they were meant to be.
I’ve sought in our dolphin-thinking books to weave a unifying vision of how the post-postmodern world works, and how you can become the solution when your part of that world ceases to work well or well enough. Drawing on decades of breakthrough insights from brain studies, systems theory, game theory, cosmology, psychology and other social sciences, as well as its own Twenty-First Century wisdom, all of our dolphin-thinking books aim at getting you ready for future super-tsunamis of uncertainty and the unknown, whether you need to search for a new job tomorrow or rescue your favorite part of the planet the day after.
This is because the burning question of the hour is this: “In today’s demanding times, do you plan to be part of the speedboat or part of the Titanic?” As lawyers sometimes say, our works want you ready to reply, “Asked and answered!”
