Milestone 53 - reflections on completing 66% of the journey
Thoughts and Frameworks as I turn 53
Standing at the threshold of my 53rd birthday, I reflect on the journey that has brought me here and the path ahead. This past year has been a period of learning and growth, marked by both timeless truths and rapidly changing realities. The past years were but steps on a compounding journey of life, which is about to ramp into the stratosphere. Like Bacteria Bob in the Exponential Growth Framework, who was pondering life on day 6 out of 10, I am also now at about 66% of the way to the average UK life expectancy. And like Bacteria Bob, I can't yet predict the exact nature of the compounding growth, but I know it is coming.
My most important learning this year is that there are eternal truths that serve as the bedrock of essential things in our lives. Instead of asking, "What's changing?" we should ask, "What's timeless and constant and doesn't change?" Once we identify what doesn't change, we can build a long-term plan in these areas and create a separate plan for those things that do change.
Essential Things That Always Stay the Same
Balance and Well-being
The Wisdom of Balance: A fulfilling life relies on harmony between professional achievements and personal well-being. Financial stability and career success matter, but not at the cost of friends, family, mental peace, and happiness. The Job Satisfaction Framework emphasizes the importance of balance. This framework helps people understand how to achieve satisfaction by balancing work and personal life.
Health: The Foundation of Well-being: Maintaining good health becomes increasingly important with age, and building proper habits remains challenging. Using the Set Point Framework for Habit Change helps improve health habits and create a lifestyle that supports long-term well-being.
Manage Priorities to Manage Time: It is critical to prioritize tasks with the most significant impact. The Time Mastery Framework emphasizes focusing on high-priority tasks to achieve meaningful progress and avoid getting overwhelmed by less critical activities.
Life Quality: Reflecting on the quality of life is essential for maintaining overall well-being. The Life Quality Framework encourages slowing down, smelling the coffee, being more mindful, and experiencing a richer life. I share this framework and a summary of the first six months of my year in the Daily Dose flipbook.
Relationships and Happiness
Relationships: The Pillars of Support: We have one life—one opportunity to be there for the people who matter most and extend a helping hand to those who can benefit from support. While professional success is essential, being present for loved ones is crucial.
Trust: A Mix of High Reliability and Credibility with Low Self-Interest: Trust builds through reliability, credibility, and low self-interest. After retiring from a competitive career, I see even more clearly the positive impact of minimizing self-interest in fostering trust in relationships and professional settings. The Trust Framework provides valuable insights into building and maintaining trust.
Expectations: The Path to Happiness: Expectations often cause stress and disappointment. Reducing the judgmental and expectant mind's tendency to judge and expect is a challenge. Realizing that we cannot control others, but we can control ourselves, is a key learning. By controlling ourselves, we can also control how we feel. We tend to externalize our locus of control, but bringing it back inside us and taking responsibility for our happiness is crucial. The Simple Framework for Happiness talks about how happiness has two drivers—achievement and expectation. We are too often focused on achievement, while we could have been happier if we also focused on managing our expectations.
Knowledge and Perspective
Building Specific Knowledge and Unique Value: This year, I visualized the concept of building specific knowledge as a Venn diagram. Though initially, many people appear to have similar experiences and competencies, drilling down into specific expertise and interests reveals uniqueness. By creating a Venn diagram of experience, interest, and expertise, I realize that only a few people are exactly alike. This realization allows for uniqueness while being authentic, reducing the stress of maintaining a facade and helping to maintain the same internal and external persona.
Stories over Statistics: This year, I rediscovered the power of storytelling. Compelling narratives often sway Markets and decisions more than raw data. Understanding the power of stories can better inform decision-making. It's not just about presenting numbers and data; it's about creating a narrative that resonates and drives action.
Things Get Better All the Time, But We Feel They Are Getting Worse: Despite huge global improvements in healthcare and poverty reduction, there is a natural virality to bad news. In a world of 8 billion people, if there is a 1 in a million chance of a bad thing happening, it will happen 8000 times in a day and 3 million times in a year. The odds that it will happen to us or someone we know are practically zero, but we will hear enough in the news for us to believe that it is very likely that that bad thing will happen to us. Good news often goes unnoticed, distorting our reality. This year, I learned to look for bias and to be conscious about de-biasing what I hear. I have set up a bot that de-biases things I read by finding the contra perspective and balancing the narrative with the facts to help me make an informed point of view. I consciously adopt a starting neutral position, listen to both sides of the argument, and make up my mind—to develop critical thinking to maintain a realistic and optimistic perspective.
Important Things That Are Changing Rapidly
While some aspects of life remain constant, others are in dramatic evolution. Seismic changes are changing the landscape, and they have the potential to change our lives and livelihoods at a bewildering pace. Embracing these changes and being an early adopter is crucial to building strategies to benefit from them rather than become victims.
Navigating Future Trends
In late 2022, I had published a set of trends:
Looking at the list two years on, it is still valid, though the ranking of some of them would change based on the present pace of development. Out of these trends, I will call out:
1. Climate Change: The Urgent Call to Action: Climate change presents the most pressing issue of our time. It poses an existential crisis that requires immediate and collective action. We need to move beyond blame and take responsibility for mitigating the impact of climate change. Whether as individuals, corporations, or nations, we must all contribute to the solution. This commitment to environmental sustainability is essential for the well-being of future generations. Humanity is a race of tool makers and problem solvers. We need to create the tools and advancements to solve this problem while focusing on implementing dramatic infrastructure changes. Climate investment will be the most enormous investment in the next decade—and the faster we find out how we can be part of this transformation, the better for us and the planet.
2. Artificial Intelligence: The New Electricity: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will redefine our world. Just as electricity revolutionized every aspect of life, AI will become ubiquitous. Those who do not embrace AI will be left behind. The impact of AI will be far-reaching, affecting industries, economies, and societies in ways we can barely imagine. Large companies like Google, which dominate the top 20 company list, have an existential challenge to stay relevant by transforming themselves with AI. Many of these companies will fail and be replaced by more AI-first companies. Investing in the growth journey of these companies would be like investing in Apple in 2005, Tesla in 2015, Bitcoin in 2010, and Nvidia in 2022. The future belongs to those who can harness AI to drive innovation and productivity. This is true of individuals, companies, and countries.
Personally, I have integrated AI into most of my workflows. This allows me to focus on strategic decision-making rather than getting bogged down in administrative tasks. The AI Frameworks and the AI Jobs Framework are the starting points as I begin to share frameworks for leveraging AI for personal and professional growth.
3. The Rise of Virtual Worlds/Tokenization: The rise of AI will also lead to the redundancy of traditional jobs, emphasizing the need for creativity and connection. AI will gain agency in decision-making processes, and people will lose jobs. At the same time, virtual worlds will become a reality, offering new opportunities for exploration and engagement. Tokenization will make it possible to trace and manage assets in these virtual realms (more on this in future frameworks). With Asgard.world, I am working at the intersection point of AI, tokenization, and virtual worlds—it has been an incredible journey of learning and discovery for me, and I look forward to sharing more with the world as it goes into test launch in Q4 this year.
Reflections on the Way Forward
Building on both these eternal truths and changing realities, we chart a path forward that integrates the past's learnings with the future's innovations. You can use two actionable ideas to create value and wealth:
1. Building Specific Knowledge and Unique Value: Our most important resource is our minds and capabilities. Any investment we put into honing these is always our best investment. We can build specific knowledge in multiple areas we are interested in. Many retired leaders have extensive experience in large CPG companies; many people are learning about AI—building frameworks and testing tools; many people are building entrepreneurial ventures in AI, and many like to build frameworks. But there are very few who do all these things at the same time. As we build specific knowledge in multiple areas, we become more unique—while being ourselves and doing things we enjoy. You can define your own Venn diagram of specific knowledge and uniqueness, which is incredibly valuable and will help you chart your future success.
2. Building Bots: Building 'bots' that can self-replicate and grow wealth is also crucial. (More on this in an upcoming Framework). In the past, these 'bots' related to factors of production—if you had money in the bank, it created more money (interest); if you had a machine/people/land, it made money with which you could buy more machines/people/land. These 'bots' scaled slowly. Today, in addition to these, we have more types of bots—code bots and content bots—that can scale across an unlimited internet faster than we can imagine. Wealth creation is stringing various kinds of these bots in series and parallel and getting them to run autonomously, even while we sleep. How rich we/our companies/our countries are in the world of tomorrow will be defined not only by what job we have but how many bots are working tirelessly on our behalf, how efficient and effective they are, and how far they can scale. The AI Tools and Chatbots Framework offers specific strategies for developing simple bots that automate tasks and generate continuous value. Over the following months, I intend to share more frameworks around creating self-replicating bots that scale and create wealth.
Thoughts for the Year Ahead
As I start my 54th trip around the sun on spaceship Earth, I am committing to guarding my boundaries and ensuring that my enthusiasm for 'work' does not overshadow my hard-earned balance. Happiness and balance are paramount. I aim to deepen my understanding of AI and become a world-leading practitioner, using it to enhance my life, business, and productivity. AI is at the heart of Asgard.world, which will launch this year. However, this is just the beginning. I must allocate more time to AI and its implementation for my benefit and to create frameworks for others.
Concrete Goals for the Next 12 Months
Personal Goals
Continue to Prioritize Time for Family and Friends: I will ensure that personal relationships remain a top priority by consciously spending quality time with loved ones.
Continue to Slow Down and Smell the Coffee: I will consciously slow down, enjoy the present moment, and appreciate the simple pleasures in life. I will continue to find and post daily photos and quotes.
Focus on Health: I will build habits to exercise appropriately and practice mindful nutrition to maintain physical and mental well-being.
Share Frameworks Regularly: I will publish at least one framework per week, with some weeks featuring two, to build a comprehensive collection for a book by the end of 2025.
Mentor and Learn from Others: I will dedicate time to mentor individuals who reach out and learn from their experiences and perspectives.
Work Goals
Launch Asgard.world: I will test launch Asgard.world, go through the learning curve—ensure the business's survival and then begin the compounding growth journey.
Become an Expert on AI Implementation and Transformation with enough credibility to help navigate the shift to an AI-first world: I will build a reputation as a thought leader in AI by being a practitioner, doing personal research, evaluating and building tools, sharing insights, speaking at conferences, and publishing articles.
Create at Least Two Successful AI-driven Product Businesses: I will develop and launch two new AI-driven products that solve real-world problems and achieve market success.
Help at Least Two Companies with Their AI Transformation: I will support at least two organizations to help them leverage AI for business transformation.
Conclusion
The first 53 years brought with them a wealth of experiences and insights. A birthday is a time to reflect on the past, embrace the present, and look forward to the future with optimism.
I focus on the possibilities that lie ahead and the opportunity to make a meaningful impact. I feel grateful for the journey so far and anticipate the adventures yet to come. The road ahead may be uncertain, but the direction is clear.
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Check out some of my other Frameworks on the Fast Frameworks Substack:
The exponential growth framework
Fast Frameworks: A.I. Tools - Chatbots
Video: A.I. Frameworks by Aditya Sehgal
The job satisfaction framework
Fast Frameworks - A.I. Tools - Suno.AI
The Set Point Framework for Habit Change
The Plants Vs Buildings Framework
Spatial computing - a game changer with the Vision Pro
The 'magic' Framework for unfair advantage