Month: June 2020

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A world event and perseverance may just be the start of a new journey of innovation

The current COVID-19 pandemic is presenting business leaders with some very difficult decisions.

COVID 19 is not alone on the list of world event’s and its easy to forget the legacies of the past that have shaped our world. World history is filled with disasters, and most of them come with extremely high death tolls.

This list looks at the top 12 disasters:
1. Shaanxi Earthquake 1556
2. Tangshan Earthquake 1976
3. Antioch Earthquake 526AD
4. Haiyuan Earthquake 1920
5. Aleppo Earthquake 1138
6. Hongdong Earthquake 1303
7. Hiroshima Nuclear Detonation 1945
8. Nagasaki Nuclear Detonation 1945
9. Spanish Flu 1918
10. Asian Flu 1957
11. Sept. 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks
12. SARS 2003

The Worst Disasters on Earth have been truly devastating, and they go to show that no matter how impressively we build our structures, Nature wins out in the end.

Every disaster has things to teach us.

Looking back at a decade in which superstorms, wildfires, disease outbreaks, and monster earthquakes have taken unimaginable tolls all over the planet, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the scope of the problem.

But learning the lessons of every disaster, every time, is important. Every time, the world can respond more effectively – drawing from past experiences and avoiding past mistakes. As extreme weather worsens, people’s understanding of a disaster’s scope and effect can evolve as well.

Isaac Newton was in his early 20s when the Great Plague of London hit. He wasn’t a “Sir” yet, didn’t have that big formal wig. He was just another college student at Trinity College, Cambridge.

It would be another 200 years before scientists discovered the bacteria that causes plague, but even without knowing exactly why, folks back then still practiced some of the same things we do to avoid illness.

In 1665, there was a version of “social distancing” – Cambridge sent students home to continue their studies. For Newton, that meant Woolsthorpe Manor, the family estate about 60 miles northwest of Cambridge.

Without his professors to guide him, Newton apparently thrived. The year-plus he spent away was later referred to as his annus mirabilis, the “year of wonders.”

In London, a quarter of the population would die of the plague from 1665 to 1666. It was one of the last major outbreaks in the 400 years that the Black Death ravaged Europe.

Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667, theories in hand. Within six months, he was made a fellow; two years later, a professor.

Resilience is the process of being able to adapt well and bounce back quickly in times of stress. This stress may manifest as family or relationship problems, serious health problems, problems in the workplace or even financial problems to name a few.

Developing resilience can help you cope adaptively and bounce back after changes, challenges, setbacks, disappointments, and failures.

To be resilient means to bounce back from a challenging experience.

Research has shown that resiliency is pretty common. People tend to demonstrate resilience more often than you think. One example of resilience is the response of many Americans after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and individuals’ efforts to rebuild their lives.

Persistence is the quality of continuing steadily despite problems or difficulties. It is one of the qualities of high achievers. The longer you stay committed to a task or goal, the more likely something good will happen for you. And believe me- the Universe will test your commitment to your goal. You develop yourself and learn new lessons, you face challenges and obstacles, but the payoff comes when you refuse to give up.

Have you heard that anything worth having is worth working for? It’s true. Some of my most difficult situations preceded tremendous breakthroughs. There are tons of examples of underdogs or heroes of ours who persisted, stayed on course, and met or even exceeded their goals.

Let’s look at some examples.

• NASA experienced 20 failures in its 28 attempts to send rockets to space.
• Tim Ferriss sent his breakthrough New York Times bestselling book 4 Hour Workweek to 25 publishers before one finally accepted it.
• Henry Ford’s early businesses failed and left him broke 5 times before he founded Ford Motor Company.
• Walt Disney went bankrupt after failing at several businesses. He was even fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination and good ideas.
• Albert Einstein was thought to be mentally handicapped before changing the face of modern physics and winning the Nobel Prize.
• It took Thomas Edison 1,000 attempts before inventing the light bulb. His teachers also told him growing up that he was too stupid to learn anything.
• Lucille Ball was regarded as a failed actress before she won 4 Emmys and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors.
• Dr. Seuss’s first book was rejected by 27 publishers before it was accepted.
• American author Jack London received 600 rejections before his first story was accepted.
• Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, though today, his works are priceless.
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team for not being good enough.
• J. K Rowling was nearly penniless, severely depressed, divorced, and a single mom, who went to school while writing Harry Potter. Rowling went from needing government assistance to being one of the richest women in the world in a 5-year span through her hard work and perseverance.

Persistence as with resilience, determination and purpose is the quality of continuing steadily despite problems or difficulties. It is one of the qualities of high achievers. The longer you stay committed to a task or goal, the more likely something good will happen for you. Some of my most difficult situations preceded tremendous breakthroughs.

Persistence is one of several vital characteristics of successful leaders. Driven by an indomitable spirit, successful leaders never give up on their dreams of building a viable business. There is no impediment too great. This unflagging attribute is a key characteristic of triumphant business builders.

Purposeful Driven Leaders tackle bewildering and potentially catastrophic situations. They possess courage, hope and a deeply held belief that they can survive the moment and continue to prosper.

Personal strength, greatness, self-confidence, maturity and wisdom are by-products gained through unfathomable adversity. It has been said that men become great mariners when sailing on troubled waters, not calm seas. The same axiom applies in the business world.

Serious hardships may be financial in nature. They might also be employee-, client-, vendor-or investor-based. They may arise through human error or market conditions. I can see, in my mind’s eye, the depressed face of a purposeful leader who can’t make payroll or has just lost a substantial client. I can sense an owner’s profound frustration upon learning a product has failed and there is a lawsuit to manage.

We can empathize with a founder’s pain when there has been a fire, theft or betrayal. Consider the emotions felt with the death of a spouse or key employee. These occurrences are severe, somewhat common, and require a powerful and thoughtful response.

We need to have more gratitude for the amazing opportunities that are born from disasters and world events.

On a final note, the first step in becoming innovative is accepting that the world around us needs to change, sometimes because of unexpected and unprecedented events, and believing that we as individuals must take initiative to make that change happen.

It requires ongoing learning and an open mind with a willingness to see the world in new ways. Upon such realization, one must develop an unshakeable mental toughness for the long haul.

Changing the way we live or do business requires imagination and creativity. And that requires staying curious about the world. The less we’re wrapped up in our current situation or thinking, the more we notice about the world.

Even Einstein famously declared that he had “no special talent beyond being passionately curious,” which means there is no better avenue to cultivate creative work aside from impassioned curiosity.

Taking unconventional paths requires taking risks for a greater reward (financial or otherwise). It takes courage to act differently than others might. Innovative people tend not to dwell on things, but are decisive – the unknown does not paralyze them. They invest in their own capabilities and plough forward to create access where there is none. This brings us back to the need for mental toughness, because many times those risks don’t pay off right away.

Connecting the dots between the access one already has and the access one needs, coupled with the traits described above, allows us to survive and thrive.

As Walt Disney once said:

“All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.”

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Can we all be Super Human?

Recently, I watched a highly recommended film called ‘Limitless’, a 2011 American science fiction thriller film directed by Neil Burger and written by Leslie Dixon. Based on the 2001 novel ‘The Dark Fields’ by Alan Glynn, the film stars Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Robert De Niro, Andrew Howard, and Anna Friel.

Limitless Trailer

Eddie Morra is a struggling author in New York City. His girlfriend Lindy, frustrated with his lack of progress, breaks up with him. Eddie encounters Vernon, the brother of his ex-wife Melissa, who gives Eddie a sample of a new nootropic called NZT-48.

On the drug, Eddie discovers he has acquired perfect recollection of everything he has ever read and refined interpersonal skills. As he swallows a pill, he is being yelled at by his landlord’s wife.

With his new power he calms her down, helps her with her homework and sleeps with her. His new power enables him to make significant progress on his book.

The next day, the effects having worn off, he brings his pages to his publisher, who praises them. Eddie seeks out Vernon for more NZT-48, but while Eddie leaves to run some errands for Vernon, Vernon is murdered by someone searching for the drug.
Eddie locates Vernon’s supply and begins ingesting pills daily. With its effects, Eddie improves his entire lifestyle, appearance, sex appeal, and social circle, and finishes his book.

While enjoying his new life, Eddie has an epiphany; in order to achieve the plan he derives from his epiphany, he decides to focus his talent on investing in order to raise capital.

Eddie quickly begins making large returns on the stock market and borrows $100,000 from a Russian loan shark, Gennady.

He is hired at a brokerage firm and resumes his relationship with Lindy. Eddie experiences what he refers to as a “time skip”, a momentary lapse in memory.
Eddie’s success leads to a meeting with finance tycoon Carl Van Loon, who tests him by seeking advice on a merger with Hank Atwood’s company. After the meeting, Eddie experiences an 18-hour party-hopping time skip. The next day in a meeting with Van Loon, Eddie sees a news telecast that a woman has been murdered in her hotel room. Eddie recognizes her as the woman he slept with during his time skip and abruptly leaves the meeting.

Eddie experiments with NZT-48 and learns to control his dosage, sleep schedule, and food intake to prevent side effects. He hires a laboratory in an attempt to reverse-engineer the drug, an attorney to keep the police from investigating the death of Vernon or the woman, and two bodyguards to protect him from Gennady, who is threatening him to obtain more NZT-48.

On the day of the merger, Atwood falls into a coma. Eddie recognizes Atwood’s driver as the man in the trench coat and realizes Atwood is on NZT-48.
While Eddie participates in a police lineup, his attorney steals Eddie’s whole supply of pills from his jacket pocket. Eddie enters into withdrawal, and while Van Loon questions him about Atwood’s coma, Eddie receives a parcel which is found to contain the severed hands of his bodyguards.

He hurries home and locks himself in, before Gennady breaks into Eddie’s apartment, demanding more NZT-48. Gennady flaunts his abilities while injecting himself with NZT-48. As Gennady threatens to eviscerate him, Eddie grabs his own knife and kills Gennady. Eddie then consumes Gennady’s blood in order to ingest the NZT-48 in the blood. This gives Eddie the mental abilities of the drug once again, and Eddie is able to kill the remaining henchmen. He then meets with the man in the trench coat, surmising Atwood employed the man to locate more NZT-48. Once Atwood dies, the two recover Eddie’s stash from his attorney’s apartment.

A year later, Eddie has retained his wealth, published a book, and is running for the United States Senate. Van Loon visits him and reveals he has absorbed the company that produced NZT-48 and shut down Eddie’s laboratory and both acknowledge that Eddie will likely become President of the United States one day so Van Loon offers Eddie a continued supply of the drug in exchange for Eddie assisting his ambitions.

Eddie tells Van Loon he has already perfected the drug and weaned himself off of it, retaining his abilities without side effects.

This all made me think beyond current limits and borders, and question will AI rise up and take over, what if humans become superhumans without AI?

Does anyone recall the Trachtenberg speed system of basic mathematics?

The Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics is a system of mental mathematics which in part did not require the use of multiplication tables to be able to multiply. The method was created over seventy years ago.

The main idea behind the Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics is that there must be an easier way to do multiplication, division, squaring numbers and finding square roots, especially if you want to do it mentally.

Jakow Trachtenberg spent years in a Nazi concentration camp and to escape the horrors he found refuge in his mind developing these methods. Some of the methods are not new and have been used for thousands of years.

Multiplication is done without multiplication tables “Can you multiply 5132437201 times 4522736502785 in seventy seconds? One young boy (grammar school-no calculator) did successfully by using the Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics.

So, with human intelligence, why do we need AI, deep learning or machine learning?

It is a fact that humans have gradually discovered many additional recurring shapes and patterns in nature, involving not only motion and gravity but also electricity, magnetism, light, heat, chemistry, radioactivity and subatomic particles.
These patterns are summarized by what we call our laws of physics. Just like the shape of an ellipse, all these laws can be described using mathematical equations.

Equations aren’t the only hints of mathematics that are built into nature: there are also numbers. As opposed to human creations like the page numbers in this magazine, I’m now talking about numbers that are basic properties of our physical reality.

For example, how many pencils can you arrange so that they’re all perpendicular (at 90 degrees) to each other? The answer is 3, by placing them along the three edges emanating from a corner of your room.

Where did that number 3 come sailing in from? We call this number the dimensionality of our space, but why are there three dimensions rather than four or two or 42?

There’s something very mathematical about our universe, and the more carefully we look, the more math we seem to find. So, what do we make of all these hints of mathematics in our physical world?

One of the last subjects Stephen Hawking wrote was not as widely reported as perhaps it should have been.
The physicist, who had previously warned about the potential threat artificial intelligence posed, more recently suggested that humans faced an even greater and more immediate threat.

Sometime in the foreseeable future, he said, the human race could divide into two: those with an average intelligence level by today’s standards and those with super intelligence. The latter breed will have bodies improved by genetic engineering and brains improved by artificial intelligence (AI).
These “superhumans”, as they are called, will be relatively few in number, but will pose a serious threat to normal humans.

If “Super Humans” exist in future, the super-intelligent might be few in number because genetic engineering of humans’ brains and bodies will be very expensive, and only the very wealthy (or wealthiest) will be able to afford it.

The result will be the gradual consigning of most humans to the role of a subservient class, less healthy and less intelligent than the others. In a few generations, the superhumans’ progeny will begin to inherit the enhanced traits and, so, medical intervention to engineer those enhancements will become less necessary.

Some experts believe AI is a serious threat because machines will eventually become conscious, develop more sophisticated brains than humans, and decide humans are dispensable.
Yet despite such warnings about AI, nobody knows if machines will ever become conscious, indeed nobody really knows what consciousness is.

The idea of machines becoming smarter than humans and threatening the human race is pure speculation and most experts believe it’s unlikely to happen this century, if at all.

The creation of superhuman beings, however, is less speculative. Already, humans can be improved by genetic engineering and most experts accept that greatly improving the human brain’s cognitive abilities by both genetic engineering and electronic implantation will happen sooner than most people think.

Hawking suggests that anticipated advances in genetics will enable people to acquire improved memory and intelligence, as well as improved disease resistance and longer lifespans.

Talking about “Super Humans”, two solutions floating across the internet are:  To give every person the same chance to become superhuman.
The second is to ban the technology.

Neither of these solutions will work. The first one is simply not practical, not affordable and could be the biggest threat for the human race.
The later one will just stop human evolution. History is not reassuring on either count.

The common take-home message is that we often feel we have to strive for more in a commercial way, by buying things, getting a job that will pay us more money or moving to a bigger house in a better place. But if you look at people who are denied these things because they’re locked in, you realise that there are other, perhaps deeper ways to find happiness.

Thomas Jefferson declared that “the pursuit of happiness” was a universal right. But how can you define happiness? Is it material or spiritual—or genetic?

Final thoughts: Can we all be superhuman? Or are the rest of us condemned to remain mediocre?

Finally, we cannot all be superhuman, and I do not find that to be a depressing conclusion because I think we can learn from the things these people have accomplished and advance further forward and make ourselves happier in our lives and do a little better.

There are ways of managing without being superhuman, that will still improve your happiness and day-to-day existence. Even if we know we’re not going to be superhuman, we can all improve and benefit from purposeful knowledge.

In today’s scientific world we have evidence that proves the importance of attitude and specific proven actions we can take to manage our attitude. We all know that being happy today is a daily challenge.

Between our personal daily struggles, the challenges of those we are close to, and the hardships that are happening globally, it’s easy to fall to a place of sadness.
And yet we still yearn and often times work towards a feeling of true happiness, purpose, self-acceptance and inner peace, which is pure elation.

A great quote by Ellen Key – Swedish Writer:

‘Unless one believes in a superhuman reason which directs evolution, one is bound to believe in a reason inherent in humanity, a motive power transcending that of each separate people, just as the power of the organism transcends that of the organ. This reason increases in proportion as the unity of mankind becomes established.’