The high cost of ego, experience and a closed mind in the new age of reasoning
We are seeing personal experience and ego taking up lesser space in this new age of reasoning. In this new age, one can be awakened with sobering realisations to find certain tenets of cherished principles, beliefs, rules and laws of work and business to be obsolete.
Experience steadies the ship but it isn’t enough to keep it from sinking. And ego is the best friend of a closed mind, both of whom takes pride in perishing together rather than being challenged.
Too much of what’s happening today are things that seems unthinkable 10, 15 years ago. Professional gamers making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Accounting firms hiring software engineers to train them to become auditors. The rise of social media becoming mainstream. 5 to 10 years from now, things will be unrecognisable from today.
Think about this. Take a pot, and you throw in the following ingredients and start to mix them up. What do you get after a while?
Google search is getting more intelligent by the day.
Apple is making media work easier in each release. Now kids are making movies.
MIT and Harvard comes together and just offered their courses online for free.
Quantum computing. Google’s Hartmut Neven reported, “we achieved a 100-million-fold speed-up.”
Broadband is getting faster year by year, offering a super highway for change agents to impact lifestyles and economies.
We are exposed and impacted by cross-border innovations and commerce. It’s a hyper-connected globalised world we’re living in now remember?
Deepmind, an Artificial Intelligence company acquired by Google is now able to have it’s AI beat a human at the game of Go.
The above are a small list of things that are happening today and it’s far from being exhaustive. As we approach the “exponential growth” stage in evolution of the information age, the consequences brought about by this increasing rate of change simply becomes mind boggling.
To great extends, such changes have the potential of putting many fundamental areas of life as we know it, out of order. For example, students can become irrelevant the moment they graduate from Universities.
Such a rate of change is forcing establishments to rethink education, jobs and what’s the new definition of relevance.
In this new age of reasoning, we can’t afford to let our experience, personal ego, dogma and tenets of past beliefs cloud our reasoning. The cost is too high. As the saying goes, time and tide waits for no man. In this case, there’s no place for mercy too. Things simply change. It’s a matter of whether we keep up or we don’t.
Constantly keeping our thinking afresh through well-researched reasoning is no longer a differentiator - it’s now a basic necessity.