From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I firmly advocate the idea of reinventing oneself every 5 years.
That is my courage – I see things thanks to young people around me, and go forward fast, implementing before others do.
Small companies will get an idea and try to scale up. Big companies have to decide when to extend, when to extend and scale, and when to do something new. They need to build capabilities in terms of insight and execution to do the new thing.
People find that you don't have to go around managing the maintenance of a building with a tool belt anymore, you can go around with an iPad. You've still got to operate buildings, but our buildings have to be technically oriented as we're challenging them to be greener. So, how do you go from a tool belt to an iPad?
Dyslexics, like me, often possess above-average intelligence, but we grapple with sequential thinking. Instead of thinking linearly from A to B to C to D, we jump from A to B to Z. Over time, I've learned to turn a perceived 'weakness' into a strength.
My entry into this space came in 2019 when I read a paper by Demis Hassabis of DeepMind advocating for machine learning and AI researchers to go back to their roots in neuroscience. I took that literally — I went back to the neuroscience department at my alma mater, the University of Melbourne, and asked what was exciting them.
Machines are pushing people to new frontiers, and teach us that complacency and the status-quo are not working.
We must not only use the emotional part of exploration, but also the state of mind of exploration which encourages us to get out of our bad habits, beliefs, everything we know, our comfort zone, and even our way of thinking. The mindset of exploration encourages us to find new solutions.
For many years, motorsport resembled a pyramid—a well-established, widely recognized structure with Formula 1 at its pinnacle. When Formula E emerged, it occupied a completely different position. It remains somewhat set apart, and only in recent years has it begun to be recognized as established motorsport by the broader community.
It's the convergence of technologies at any given time that allow individuals to achieve the things which simply were not possible before. Your smartphone can be used to diagnose diseases for example – every disease has a pattern.
If one aspires to make a positive impact on the world, shouldn't we strive for innovative solutions, perhaps even for a disease as formidable as cancer?
Today, we have the tools to enable institutions to operate simultaneously at micro and macro scales. We have the tools today to allow us to get smarter faster. But we do have to learn how to do it.