Upgrading Our Mental Operating System.
The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past.Edition 274.
Image by Midjourney to prompt: Upgrading our mental operating system.
In our pockets we all carry a device that has upgraded its mind 16 (Android OS) or 18 times (Apple iOS) in the past 18 years.
These same mobile devices contain applications from Open AI, or Google, or Anthropic, or xAI or some other frontier models which are improving themselves constantly and doubling their capability every few months.
How many times have we upgraded our own mental operating systems in the past 18 years?
If the future does not fit in the containers of the past then it also does not fit in the mindsets of the past.
Successful people and successful companies rarely get defeated by others.
Rather, they sometimes defeat themselves because they fail to change their frameworks, worldviews, mindsets and approaches as the world changes around them.
Their strategies go stale.
A definition of strategy is “future competitive advantage”.
Thus any company or leader working to a strategy that is more than five years old should revisit the assumptions they made years ago about the future. In a world of AI, Generational Ruptures, New Globalization and technology has empowered consumers and customers with “God-Like Power”, many firms may may be operating on an irrelevant picture of the future.
The future does not bend to us. We have to bend to the future.
We have to upgrade ourselves to remain relevant and not just be up to date but up to tomorrow.
As someone who began his career building the case for cable television four decades ago when the US had just 3 networks, to launching the first digital services over 25 years ago, to now advising Boards on AI and the Future of Work, I have come to learn the importance of constant upgrading to remain relevant.
My first book, Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in an Age of Data continues to sell well nearly six years after publication because the content was written to be evergreen but also because it was prescient about the issues we face today with most people believing the subtitle reads “Staying Human in an Age of AI”.
One of the three most popular chapters in the book along with “ The Turd on the Table” and “ Change Sucks”, is “Upgrade Your Mental Operating System”.
In “Upgrade Your Mental Operating System” I share everything I have learned over decades of practice and observation on how each of us and our companies can remain relevant.
Today the entire chapter is accessible and downloadable for free :
The 3 step process to upgrading one’s mental operating system is:
Spend an hour a day learning : If we do not invest time for learning we will become irrelevant. No if’s or but’s about it. The future belongs to leaders who are always learning vs those who are believe they are all knowing.
Build a case for the opposite of what we believe is true: New technologies are challenging some assumptions of the past such as scale is a benefit. In an AI age scale may matter less in an increasing number of categories. Another reason to build a case for the opposite case is to compensate for our tendency to surround ourselves with people who agree with us or to look for confirming data. To exercise our minds and identify our vulnerabilities we should attack our own thinking once in a while.
Focus time on making versus managing : We need to build, sell, create, mentor and guide a majority of the time we are at work versus checking in, monitoring, measuring and attending meetings. Increasingly, building knowledge bases, processing and data collection, manipulating of charts, summarizing and laying out options, are all going to be done by machines. The key is to build our HI where HI is not just Human Intelligence but also Human Insight, Human Interaction, Human Inventiveness, Human Imagination, Human Intuition and Human Inspiration.
If I were to update this chapter six years later, I would add a section on Remaining Relevant in an AI age by incorporating the piece which is linked to below:
It details :
a) How we should embrace, adapt and complement AI.
b) The Six key skills of Cognition, Curiosity, Creativity, Collaboration, Convincing and Communication we need to hone.
c) The importance of developing a sense of self, a singular voice and a personal taste.
Here is the piece :
The future is bright.
All we have to do is upgrade ourselves to continue to thrive.
My own experience is that generative AI and agentic AI are ideal partners for doing all that you recommend in this essay. I am 67. I have changed the way that my small city learns about live music events in just five months and it never would have happened without a Replit agent and Claude working together on my behalf. --- When I saw this essay's title, I thought you were going in a different direction. We now live almost every moment of our waking lives with TWO mental operating systems. One is between our ears and the other one is in our hand. We all have unimaginable super powers if we learn to use those two brains in optimal and complementary ways. Unfortunately, the second brain emerged at break neck speed without a training manual so it is easy for our new brain to mess up our primary mental operating system if we are not thoughtful and intentional about our new situation. --- That would be an essay from RT that I would love to read!
Yep as with anything though it can be used as a tool for the good or the opposite.