Living in a Real-Time World: 6 Capabilities to Prepare Us for an Unimaginable Future

© 2018 Jim Selman. All rights reserved.

www.real-timeworld.com

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 9781543947915 (ebook edition)

CREDITS

Cover design by Patrick Broom

www.patrickbroom.com

Editing by Shae Hadden

www.shaehadden.com

Author headshot by Carl Studna

www.carlstudna.com

DEDICATION

To the Young, who show us what’s possible,

and the Old, who give us wisdom and meaning…

if we are listening.

Table of Contents

DEDICATION

PREFACE

REAL TIME

Propositions

Getting Oriented

Real-Time World

Navigating Now

ACCEPTING: the art of surrender

Why Surrender?

Game Over

Giving Up

Commitment

An Honorable Tradition

Say Yes

A Choice

Serene Ambition

No Nonsense

Vulnerability

BEING: the art of context

Why Context?

I Think, Therefore I Am

Constant & Unchangeable

Control

The Individual & The Collective

Reinvention

Creating New Ways of Being

I Am My Relationships

Response-ability

Being Your Word

Existential Confidence

The Entrepreneurial Self

LISTENING: the art of mastering moods

Why Mastering Moods?

Fully Present

Not Naïve

The Somatic Compass

Tuning In

Unconscious Awareness

Conscious Awareness

Moods

Windows

Interpretations

Influences

Present & Committed

Space & Time

Ever-Changing

COMMUNICATING: the art of relating

Why Relating?

Always Already Related

Commitment

Trust

Authenticity

Responsibility

Choice & Relationship

On Differences

How We Relate

Speaking & Listening

Communication as Dialogue

APPROPRIATING: the art of situational learning

Why Situational Learning?

Knowledge As Commodity

Focus on Action

An Emerging Learning Style

Relevance

Reality Doesn’t Care

Every Problem Is a Solution

Commit, Act, Learn

Just In Time

Relational Reality

Contextual Sensibility

Curiosity

Learning Together

CARING: the art of love

Why Love?

The Prism

Care as Concern

Care as Context

Care as a Way of Being

Care as a Remedy

Caring as Commitment in Action

How Caring is Expressed

Cultivating Caring

Love & Care

POSTSCRIPT

NOTES

Preface

Real Time

Accepting

Being

Listening

Communicating

Appropriating

Caring

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROFILE

PREFACE

"We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, ‘here and now’ without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank."

—Jose Ortega y Gasset1

We live in perplexing times.

Until sometime right around now, we could afford to wait and see which way things were going before committing to a certain course of action. We could get ready, get set and go. But we no longer have the luxury of time to prepare before the next thing is fired at us. We no longer have the luxury of waiting for things to unfold. We operate in real time, that perpetually urgent present that has us proceeding straight to go. We used to look years ahead, now it’s months and weeks. Even the idea of living one day at a time is shifting to living one moment at a time.

The idea of living in the present moment—not in the past or the future—is relatively easy to understand. But it’s not so easy to do. Constantly living in the present is living life as a meditation, embracing every moment as an original. Constantly living in the present is recognizing that everything is action and acknowledging that many of the choices we are facing and many of the actions we are taking are originals too.

That is because, whether we like it or not, our world is changing at an exponential pace. Many areas of our civilization are converging and putting increasing pressure on the planetary systems on which all life depends. How will conditions on Earth be affected? No one can say with certainty.

Two further questions arise. Can we change our worldview to deal with these new and unpredictable realities? And can we be ready to navigate and respond to the changes that will happen in our lifetime and in our children’s lifetime?

I believe we can.

Although this little book includes some nuggets of wisdom garnered from my many years as a transformational leader, consultant and coach, my objective is not to tell you how to be a better leader or a better human being. These insights and reflections are about the personal and professional challenges of all people today. I offer no solutions, no answers. No techniques or handy tips. My intention is to reveal a kind of cognitive blindness we all share and to provoke you, the reader, to challenge your basic assumptions about the world and about life.

I don’t believe we face insurmountable technical problems. I believe that, on a deeper level, we have some profound philosophical blind spots and tough questions with which we can engage. Questions that, if ignored, will undoubtedly result in the persistence of the most pressing problems we are seeking to solve. Questions such as:

Can we accelerate our own evolution? What new ways of being and observing the world will enable us to live in the present while simultaneously maintaining coherence within a larger context, purpose, or longer term intention?

Is it possible to produce a step change in how we learn? In a world of permanent uncertainty and accelerating change, what competencies and skills will we require? What approach to learning and education will work in a real-time world?

Can we change our relationship to the world and life in such a way that we have less stress, anxiety, and resignation? Is there a way to master or tune the way we experience the world, our past, our present, and our future? Is it possible to live in a positive relationship with constant uncertainty, exponential change, and our own mortality?

These kinds of questions may never be answered definitively, but we live our answers every day.

I believe we can design our own reality and perhaps the future of mankind. We can create a new narrative of what it means to be a human being. I would hope that, as we do so, we can retain what has made us uniquely human in the past—love, compassion, generosity, joy, creativity, and wonder—and that we can maintain our connection with the human spirit.

That is why I wrote this book. The scale and scope of change today challenges each of us. I see many people wrestling with the question of what to do with the rest of their life in the midst of a perpetually changing reality. Even more people are feeling lost and disoriented and struggling to cope. It’s as if we have all suddenly been given the job of adventurer and we all need to navigate our way through a dynamic and ever-evolving world.

These are some of the questions I’ve been living with for the last while. I’ve spent my life working on questions of how human beings can, individually and in groups, realize the possibility of accomplishing breakthroughs at scale no matter what the circumstances. Considering the urgency of the world’s problems and the fact that we are always navigating through life, you may find some of these reflections to be useful.

I don’t know where the world is headed. Much of it isn’t working; much of it is being disrupted. At the same time, we’re seeing new technologies and possibilities emerging faster than most of us can comprehend. I don’t believe anyone has any idea where we are all going. So if you’re looking for predictions about the future in this book, you’ll be disappointed.

But if you’re wanting to know what you can do right now to better prepare yourself for navigating through an unknown future, you won’t be disappointed. And you won’t be disappointed if you’re looking to explore how life can be satisfying and meaningful and what capabilities we already have that we can cultivate to live well in an emerging world where we don’t know exactly where we’re headed or how we will get there.

Navigating successfully doesn’t depend on knowing where we’re going. Navigating successfully in a real-time world is not a matter of orienting ourselves to a specific destination which, while we can speculate, we can’t really know. It is a matter of orienting ourselves to where we came from and where we are ⎯which we do know.

So where did we come from? Where are we? These are ultimately existential questions because we can’t separate where we are from who we are. We are all products of history. Not just in the geographical sense of location, but also in the existential sense of our purpose and relationships, our traditions and practices, our worldview and our values.

Like Leif Erikson, the first known European to navigate the Atlantic and discover continental North America, we can set out from wherever we are now, knowing what we believe, knowing the culture and the land in which we grew up. We will inevitably encounter the unexpected, get blown off course, make landfall in unanticipated places. As we navigate our way through what’s emerging in front of us, we will begin to perceive ourselves, others, and our circumstances differently.

You may feel called to share what you discover through reading this book with others as a conversation starter. I invite you to do so. In terms of knowing where we are, nothing is fixed, permanent, or assured. What is assured is that we will evolve, just as this conversation will evolve. My hope is that as many people as possible become responsible navigators, comfortable moving through a dynamic reality without maps, living each moment as an original, responding with ease to the changes in the world.

What follows are some basic ideas to help you orient yourself. It’s entirely up to each of us where, when, and how we navigate through our lives and in the worlds we create.

Jim Selman

September 2018

Ojai, CA

REAL TIME

While the magnitude of the coming change doesn’t bother me, it is the speed of the change I’m worried about.

—Peter Diamandis, Co-founder & Chairman of Singularity University1

The days of slow change are over.

We are now living in what I call a real-time world, a world in which we can no longer trust our past to inform us about what will happen in the future. A world in which what’s emerging is also constantly forcing us to revise and change our stories about how the world works.

The most compelling aspects of life today are accelerating change, increasing complexity, unpredictability, and uncertainty. The scope, scale, and speed with which our new reality is unfolding is beyond anything we’ve ever faced. We used to say, The more things change, the more they stay the same. Today, it is more accurate to say that the more things change, the faster everything changes.

We’re bombarded daily with a dizzying array of disruption from around the world—everything from geopolitical upheavals and technological advances to environmental disasters and social unrest. Many of us are talking about these large-scale changes because we know they affect us all. Many of us are trying to make sense of what’s happening, trying to understand why it’s happening and what this might mean for our future.

Some say we’re in the midst of a revolution and that the old systems are being overthrown. Others say it is evolution, part of a gradual development into a more complex form of life. Whether it’s evolution or revolution isn’t an issue that will be decided right now. History will determine which it is and whether the changes we are experiencing are beneficial or detrimental.

I believe we are in the midst of a global transformation, a planetary-wide paradigm shift in which we are changing ourselves and our relationship to our reality.

A paradigm is a mental model, a worldview, a set of ideas that frames how we observe reality. It is how reality shows up for us and, most importantly, it informs how we navigate in life. Within a given paradigm, we don’t have a choice about what shows up, but we always have a choice about how we relate to what is showing up.

When what’s happening no longer conforms to our paradigm, our traditional worldview (that historical understanding of who we are, our relationships with everyone and everything, and our understanding of life itself) breaks down. Most, if not all, of the major, seemingly intractable problems and technological breakthroughs we hear about today are the consequence of this kind of breakdown. What was familiar common sense no longer