#2 - Strategic Self-Pruning

If you want to move fast tomorrow, you must unburden yourself from the anchor that is yesterday.

Day 2: It’s all about “Strategic Self-Pruning” – think of it as shedding your past to fuel your future speed.Let’s start here.Old habits die hard. In an exponential world old habits need to die faster.If Day 1 was about resetting your internal clock, Day 2 is about getting a new clock altogether.We live in an era where the half-life of a profitable business model, a valuable skill set, or a dominant market position is shrinking exponentially. Remember that line I often share? What used to last a career now lasts a decade; what lasted a decade now lasts a few years.That skill you had two months ago? It’s out of date already!How fast are things? As someone who lives for the future, I can barely keep up. Every day involves a flood of new ideas, new capabilities, crazy new concepts. Case in point? Google Gemini announced their latest image model yesterday. Moments ago, it took this very post and summarized it in about 10 seconds, like this. (This was before I made a few edits to the content along the way.)

Or how about yesterday’s’ post as a magazine article? 10 seconds, start to finish.

Or, Operation Slumberfall. I created this for my son and his wife, new parents with a 4 month old, asking it simply create, based on typical sleep patterns, what they are going through. They said it’s pretty accurate.

Is this just some weird new AI eye-candy toy skill, or valuable new knowledge? I have no clue – but if you spend any time on social media today, you’ll see everyone sharing all these weird new skills in real time. Next week? New things, new skills. Five years out? We won’t recognize who we are and what we can do.How do you possibly keep up in a world which is changing so crazy fast?By getting rid of your anchors! You need to learn how you can run free and figure out what the heck is going on, and what you need to do be a part of it. And to do that, you need new habits – to ingest new knowledge, learn new skills, scan new horizons, take new risks, and chart a new path forward.Look, I think you might be reading this series because you really want to figure out how to move forward in 2026. So here’s the thing – one of the most important things you need to do is get rid of your past habits, ideas and routines to build a different future.In my work with global organizations, I see the same pattern repeat: the greatest barrier to future velocity isn’t a lack of new ideas; it’s the crushing weight of old ones. Let’s call it the “Legacy Load”—the accumulated mental habits, comfortable routines, and once-valuable expertise that now act as an anchor in a tidal wave of change.To catch the exponential wave, you must stop hoarding the past.Let’s put this into perspective.1. The Exponential MindsetHere’s what you need to achieve – the ability for what I call “Strategic Self-Pruning”. It’s an intentional, continuous, and often uncomfortable act of active unlearning. It is recognizing that in an exponential world, your current knowledge base is depreciating faster than ever before. This discipline requires you to ruthlessly identify and eliminate obsolete mental models, successful but outdated skills, and personal routines to create the necessary mindset to absorb new stuff.You must prune the linear deadwood to fuel exponential growth.It means keeping an eye on all the crazy new developments that are redefining everything – such as an AI image generator that creates an accurate image of the challenge faced by new parents in but 10 seconds!2. The Linear TrapTo do this, you need to get out of the trap in which you are imprisoned. Your mindset prison. The attitudes and skills that are holding you back.Ask yourself if you are guilty of these habits. They are the mental anchors that chain you to yesterday’s pace, ensuring your personal growth remains linear while the world accelerates around you.

3. The Exponential EdgeBy mastering Strategic Self-Pruning, you don’t just reduce friction; you unlock a powerful new set of capabilities adapted for speed:

4. The Immediate PivotSo what do you do? Decide the journey to an unburdened future begins right now. Here are the immediate actions you must take to start cutting the anchor:

#9 Aim Higher

Know this: if your goals feel ‘realistic,’ you are thinking too small.

We are on Day 9. You’ve committed to the pivot (Day 7), and you are increasing your execution velocity (Day 8). You are moving faster.But are you aiming high enough?In an exponential world, you can’t just think big – you need to think bigger!And so day 9 is all about aiming higher and achieving the moonshot mentality. Here’s your key thought: in 2026 and beyond, the idea of being just 10% better is dead, and being 10x better is critical.Here’s your chalkboard summary!

Think about it: in a linear world, success was defined by incrementalism. Growing sales by 5%, cutting costs by 10%, or improving efficiency by 15% year-over-year was considered a victory. You achieved this by working a little harder, squeezing a little more out of things, and making safe, small, “feasible” bets.Realistic things.Things you know you could accomplish.In an exponential world, incrementalism is the path to irrelevance. Small steps won’t work. Thinking small is a guarantee for marginal success. While you are striving for 10% growth, an exponential competitor – maybe someone leveraging AI, developing a new business model, or developing new skills – is aiming for 10x growth and will wipe you out before your five-year plan is halfway done.To survive in 2026, you must stop trying to improve the status quo and start trying to replace it. You need to shift from linear goal-setting to exponential ambition.Moonshot thinking!

The discipline is Aiming Higher!As Sly and the Family Stone said – I want to take you higher! To understand the scale of ambition required for 2026, you first need to see where the trends are actually going. You cannot plan for 2030 using 2025 thinking. If you take today’s shifts and extrapolate them to their 10x conclusion, the future looks radically different.So let me take you into my world of “Radical Extrapolation” – I’ll take some trends I’ve covered and take them higher. I’m Sly. You’re the family. Let’s get high!

From “Information Overload” to “The AI Physician”Trend: Medical knowledge doubling every 78 days.The Moonshot: By 2035, human doctors cease to be the primary diagnostic engine. The sheer volume of data means only AI can track the billions of variables. Your “checkup” becomes a continuous, real-time data stream from wearables, and treatment is automated before you even feel a symptom. Your iPhone data has already given the doctor much of what they need to know about your situation.From “Genetic Risk” to “Printed Vitality”Trend: Genomic sequencing costs are collapsing below $200.The Moonshot: Medicine shifts from “generalized” to “hyper-personalized.” We stop treating the average human – we treat a patient of one. You wake up, a sensor reads your blood biomarkers, and a 3D printer on your counter presses a pill with the exact molecular mix your body needs for that specific day. Crazy? Not at all!From “New Materials” to “Immortal Infrastructure”Trend: Material discovery is compressing from 20 years to 2 years.The Moonshot: We stop fixing potholes and rust. Instead, concrete, asphalt, and steel are all engineered with biological properties to heal themselves. Infrastructure becomes “living,” repairing its own cracks and adapting to weather stresses without human intervention. I wrote about this very trend in my recent Megatrends series.From “Electric Cars” to “The Death of the Grid”Trend: Battery costs dropping below $100/kWh.The Moonshot: Energy becomes so cheap and storage so dense that the centralized utility grid becomes obsolete. Homes and businesses disconnect entirely, relying on painted-on solar skins and localized storage. Energy becomes a “free” resource like air. Your car is now a key part of the electrical grid, storing and sharing energy from its battery as needed.From “Ag-Tech” to “Factory Food”Trend: Autonomous farming and robotic harvesting.The Moonshot: The idea of farming only when the sun is up is gone, as agricultural robots come to dominate production. Agriculture decouples from nature. Farming moves entirely indoors to vertical, sterile, 24/7 robot-run factories located in city centers. Weather, pests, seasons, and transport costs are eliminated from the food supply equation.From “Coding Tools” to “Instant Software Generation”Trend: AI training costs dropping 99%.The Moonshot: The “App Store” model dies. You don’t download apps; you describe a problem to your AI, and it generates a custom software solution or app for you in seconds. Every individual has the power of a 100-person dev team in their pocket. Imagine your world without your iPhone as it was in 2006, and compare it to today. Now imagine what happens with ‘AI apps.‘From “Drones” to “Construction by Cloud”Trend: Micro-autonomous swarms.The Moonshot: Rapid assembly, modular construction, new methodologies. We retire the crane and the bulldozer. Swarms of thousands of coordinated drones 3D print and assemble skyscrapers in days, moving like a fluid rather than machinery. Construction becomes a 24-hour, silent, autonomous process.From “Fast Shipping” to “Zero-Latency Commerce”Trend: Anticipatory logistics.The Moonshot: The concept of “ordering” a product disappears. Predictive AI calculates that you need detergent, a replacement part, or fresh produce before you know it. The supply chain becomes a synchronized pulse where goods arrive at your door exactly as the need arises. Ya, this idea has been shared since the late 90s as e-commerce invaded our lives, but some components of it will become real.From “Helpful Robots” to “Zero-Cost Labor”Trend: Humanoid robots dropping to the price of a motorcycle ($16k).The Moonshot: They’ll be all around us. Manual labor costs collapse to near zero. General-purpose humanoids handle all stocking, cleaning, and basic assembly. “Labor shortage” ceases to be a phrase in business; the workforce is infinite, scalable, and downloadable. (Humanoid robots is perhaps one of the most far-fetched ideas for us to accept, but the technology in 2025 started moving crazy fast. We’ll see what happens now that it has hit exponential velocity.)From “Obsolete Tech” to “The Upgradeable Object”Trend: Product lifecycles are collapsing to near zero.The Moonshot: Everything we buy has some element of tech in it. It’s upgradeable, changeable, and feature addition capable. Take a look at my 11 Rules of IoT Architecture, and ask yourself what happens when every device is unlocked, changed, or completely repurposed purely by software updates, or physical goods are designed to be dissolved and reprinted annually. The idea of the “model year” is replaced by the “daily update.“

If those examples felt “unrealistic” to you, you are trapped in a linear world, dominated by your linear thinking.For 2026 and beyond, you need to break free of marginal thinking.1. The Exponential MindsetIt’s all about a shift in your goal-setting.Aim higher! Think bigger! Be bold. Those sound like generic motivational pap, but they’re not. Check the article I share at the end of the post – a fellow in the nascent, small Canadian space industry, with a brilliant post that captures the whole idea of thinking bigger.Take this thinking, and apply it to your world. That’s what it’s all about!2. Why We Fail to See ItAsk yourself if your ambition is trapped by linear thinking. Ask yourself if you are trapped in a mindset that has you thinking small, all the time, with all the things around you.

3. The Exponential EdgeWhen you master the idea of aiming higher, you change the fundamental trajectory of your future:

4. The Immediate PivotSo what do you do?First and foremost, change your goals. Challenge your thinking. Reset your ambition. Here’s a few immediate actions to think about:

Whatever you do, get going. Get inspired. Start thinking, and start acting.To do that, read this post – this is EXACTLY what it’s all about. I saw this on LinkedIn just as I was pulling this post together, and thought it was perfect!Based outside Toronto, Canada, I know that our nation has suddenly been plunged into the need to Aim Higher because of some crazy global volatility. Aaron’s ideas are the perfect idea of how to aim higher – and the fact that it involves some real space-based moonshot thinking is exactly the type of example I needed for this post.

Listen Up, Space Nerds: Canada’s Space Market Is About to Change
Aaron Topple
December 1, 2025

For decades, Canada’s space community has been a small, tight-knit circle. Everyone knows everyone. The people in it are brilliant engineers, scientists, program managers and operators. The kind of people who can launch things into orbit using nothing but math, ingenuity, and caffeine.But here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud: Brilliance alone won’t build Canada’s space future.And unless this community adapts quickly, it is going to be overtaken by a new wave of players who understand business, capital, and commercialization far better than they understand delta-v.I am not in a position to criticize… It’s just a wake-up call.The shift is already happening…The Era of Public-Sector Space Is EndingFor most of Canada’s history in space, everything was publicly funded. It had to be. The entire world treated space the same way.When public money drives the agenda, progress moves at the speed of government priorities which, let’s be honest, are usually things like social programs, healthcare and infrastructure.Space exploration rank somewhere below… “fix that pothole on Main Street.”So… innovation crawled.But globally, the world has shifted. Space is leaving the public sector. Space is becoming private and the growth curve is no longer linear, it’s exponential.Look at the companies driving global progress today:SpaceX: Privately led
Blue Origin: Privately led
Rocket Lab: Privately led
Relativity: Privately led
Firefly: Privately led
Axiom: Privately led
These companies didn’t succeed because they were the best engineers in a government agency. They succeeded because they were the best fundraisers, storytellers, strategists, and business builders who capitalized on the opportunity to work in space.Canada has finally acknowledged this reality.Canada Wants “Sovereign Launch Capability,” Not Government RocketsThis is key.The Government of Canada does not want to own a rocket. It does not want to run a rocket program. It does not want a space equivalent of the Navy or the Air Force.What it does want is:A responsive, domestic, private launch capability.Meaning:If something needs to reach orbit quickly, the government wants to pick up the phone, call a Canadian company, and say:“We need a launch… go.”Not in Florida. Not in Alaska. Not in New Zealand.Here. At home. On Canadian soil.To prepare for this, DND and DRDC have already begun the groundwork:Inflection Point 2025
Capstone 40
DRDC’s RFP for 2-3 responsive launch companiesThese aren’t theoretical strategy documents. They’re explicit signals that Canada is restructuring its defence and industrial posture toward privately operated, rapid launch capabilities.This is the opportunity of a generation.And not everyone is ready for it.Canada’s Technical Talent Is World-Class; But Commercialization Is the Blind SpotThe problem is not intelligence. Canada’s space engineers, scientists, and operators are world-class.The problem is commercialization literacy.Most of the current space founders in Canada are technical wizards who:know thermodynamics
know orbital mechanics
know propulsion models
know manufacturing
know space systems
know how to get hardware to survive vacuum, radiation, and re-entry
But they don’t know:how to raise capital
how equity structures work
how to negotiate valuation
how to pitch a private investor
how to structure a business model
how to build a growth plan investors trust
how to scale a company with real money at stake
And this is no one’s fault.These skills were never needed in a purely government-funded space economy. But in the new era?They are essential.And here’s the uncomfortable truth:Without private capital, you don’t get private launch capability. Without private launch capability, you don’t win the DRDC RFPs. And without winning those, you’re out of the game… permanently.Some of The World’s Most Successful Space Companies Were Not Built by “Space People”Let’s look again:Elon Musk
Jeff Bezos
Tim Ellis
Max HaotThese people were not aerospace insiders. They weren’t “space community” people. They didn’t grow up inside government programs. They weren’t career engineers at space agencies.They were:entrepreneurs
capital allocators
tech executives
business builders
And because they understood capital, they could hire the people who understood space things.This is the inversion Canada hasn’t internalized yet.If you’re a Canadian rocket scientist or space engineer who wants to build something meaningful, you must understand:Your technical skill is not enough. Your passion is not enough. Your credentials are not enough.
You need capital.
And to get capital, you need to trade something for it.
That “something” is equity.
Equity Is Not the Enemy, It’s the FuelCanadian space entrepreneurs often cling to ownership like its oxygen.But here’s the truth: 100% of nothing is still nothing.It is better to own:30% of a launch company that gets contracts,
20% of a spacecraft manufacturer that flies, or
10% of a space systems company that scales,
,,,,than 100% of a “company” that is still a PowerPoint pitch five years later.You cannot hold onto equity and expect to build a world-class aerospace company at the same time.You need investors. Investors need upside. Upside requires equity.This is the trade-off. This is the game. And this is the part of the game the Canadian space community must embrace.The Flood Is ComingRight now, the Canadian space community is small, brilliant, and comfortable.But give it 12-24 months?It will be flooded.Flooded with:MBAs
finance bros
private equity groups
international investors
commercialization experts
operators who know how to take a product to market
“not real space people”
They will come because the opportunity is big.They will come because DRDC and DND are signalling billions in long-term spending.They will come because global capital is now hunting for space investments with real sovereign value.And when they come, the ecosystem will change forever.That tight-knit, engineer-first Canadian space club will vanish. A more competitive, commercial, capital-driven ecosystem will replace it.You cannot stop this. You should not want to stop this. You can only get ahead of it.This Is the Moment: Set Aside the Ego, Take the Capital, Build Something RealIf you’re a Canadian engineer, scientist, founder, or aspiring founder:Stop worrying about dilution. Stop worrying about maintaining perfect control. Stop worrying about who is “doing it right.”Let go of the purity test.Take the capital. Scale the company. Build the rocket. Launch the payload. Get the contract. Create the capability Canada needs.Your ideas deserve to fly, not sit in a lab, a binder, or a conference expo booth.Canada is giving you the window. The market is hungry. The documents are published. The RFPs are live. The transition has begun.Listen up, Space Nerds: the future is here.Don’t miss your shot because you held onto your teddy bear too tight.

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#13 Wisdom Inversion

Know when to get your age out of the way.

We are on Day 13. We just spent Day 12 dismantling your personal hubris – getting your ego out of the way. One of the most important aspects of that? Showing your wisdom the door!We need to dismantle the collective, generational delusion of your organizational hierarchy!We need to talk about age.Yup.Sorry.Depending on who you are while reading this, there might be a major reality you need to consider – it might very well be the case that your grey hair is now a strategic liability.The unique nature of our times? I call it “The Wisdom Inversion!” Here’s your chalkboard summary!

Think about where we are at this moment in time.In a slow-moving, linear world, wisdom was cumulative. Grey hair was a proxy for foresight. The people at the top of the pyramid had seen the most, so they knew the most. You paid your dues, waited your turn, and eventually, you got to hold the steering wheel.In an exponential world, that model is completely broken.When technology, culture, and consumer behaviour shift radically every 36 months, your 30 years of experience isn’t just irrelevant; it’s often a dangerous anchor to an obsolete past. You might have earned your way to the top, but by the time you get there, your experience, insight, and wisdom are probably wildly out of date.The result?Right now, in boardrooms across the world, rooms full of 55-year-olds are making massive strategic bets on a future built by, and for, 25-year-olds.They are trying to interpret TikTok dynamics through a PowerPoint lens. It’s this, right here. That’s our reality right now!

Need an example? They are analyzing decentralized finance business models – weird things involved crypto and blockchain and stuff like that – using banking models from 1995.And your younger employees? They are rolling their eyes. They are quietly laughing. They are sitting in the back of the room, biting their tongues, watching leadership steer the ship toward an iceberg they spotted five miles back. They are frustrated because they are native to the future that senior leadership is only visiting as tourists.If your strategy is being dictated solely by the oldest people in the building, you are driving forward while staring into the rearview mirror.That’s why a discipline you must master in 2026, and beyond, is Wisdom Inversion.This is not a new topic to think about. In my case, I have been covering the issue of generational dynamics for quite some time in my posts and in my keynotes. In fact, if I look back at the keynotes of the last 25 years, I’ve been hammering this home as one of the most significant trends of our time – because it is.Here is what I emphasized—the key points I’ve observed, the implications of what these stories represent, and what it means in terms of our exponential world going forward:1. The “Cardboard” vs. “Plasma” Leadership Gap

2. The Velocity of Obsolescence: “The Olden Days.“

3. The “Powder” Principle: Values over Ladders

4. The Death of the “Float” and The Emergence of Instant Finance

5. The Origin of Reverse Mentorship: “Surviving the Information Age.”

6. The “Nintendo” Governance Clash

7. The “Uber-ization” of Authority (Healthcare)

8. The Intra-Generational Fracture

1. The Exponential MindsetThe Wisdom Inversion?It’s an aggressive realization that in an era of rapid discontinuity, biological age often inversely correlates with future-readiness. Let me be blunt – increasingly, old people don’t get it, and young people do. I say that with a straight face – I’m 66 as I write this.It is the discipline of actively inverting the traditional respect for seniority, recognizing that your newest, youngest employees often possess a clearer, intuitive grasp of emerging behaviours than the C-suite.It means accepting a painful truth: to see the future, the teachers must become the students, and the elders must submit to the intuition of the youth.2. The Linear TrapWhy is this generational divide paralyzing companies? Ego and dismissal. Hubris – the very thing I covered in the last post.Think about what’s happening out there – take a look around and you’ll it everywhere.

3. The Exponential EdgeThis new world demands a dramatic shift – because when trends exponentiate, wisdom becomes irrelevant – and young experience matters. When you execute The Wisdom Inversion and stop letting seniority dictate strategy, you gain an immediate advantage. One of my fundamental beliefs as a futurist is that the younger generation has better insight into the trends that define tomorrow than older generations do. This leads to some pretty significant changes!

4. The Immediate PivotYou need to forcibly break the grip of the geriatric status quo. Here are your immediate actions:

Quite simply, in today’s rapidly changing world, decades of experience are a disadvantage – because they are using old methods to solve modern problems.Get your ego out of the way. Forget wisdom – think generational collaboration instead!

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#15 Escape Velocity

Scale immediately or fail slowly. There is no middle ground

We are on Day 15!You’ve listened to the edge (Day 13) and filtered out the hype to find a real structural signal (Day 14).You have identified a real trend!Now, you face the moment where most legacy organizations fail.People often talk about something called “pilot purgatory,” and the fact that people and organizations get stuck there. It’s the tendency to test or trial a new idea – and then get stuck there, never moving beyond the testing or ‘pilot’ phase. Yup, it’s a form of purgatory!Here’s your chalkboard summary!

#18 Anti-Fragility

Don’t fear the chaos. Feed on it.

Bouncing back is a losing strategy!We are on Day 18. We have established that the future is scaling beyond comprehension (Day 16) and that your only defense is Unapologetic Uniqueness (Day 17).Now, we must address the environment in which you will operate through 2026 and beyond. It is going to be even more volatile. It is going to be chaotic. It will be characterized by sudden shocks, black swans, and “impossible” events happening at almost every single moment.Just like 2025.Except far more volatile.If you think about it, the standard corporate response to this has been the idea of developing “resilience.” Everyone is talking about it, listening to experts on it, finding out how to manage, heck. Heck, even I use the phrase too much – I have a website all about it, resilience.jimcarroll.com.I’ve come to realize that going forward, in an exponential world, resilience is not enough.Resilience is a linear concept. It means surviving a shock and returning to your original shape—like a rubber band. It implies that “bouncing back” to the status quo is the goal. It assumes that going back to where you were – rather than where you should be going – is good enough.But in 2026, the status quo is death. If you just “bounce back” to where you were in 2024, you are already behind, because 2026 is wildly different from what ‘was' two years before. Exponential change does that.That’s why you need to stop trying to be resilient and start becoming Antifragile.Here’s your chalkboard summary!

As I wrote in my book Dancing in the Rain: How Bold Leaders Grow Stronger in Stormy Times, the goal isn’t to endure the storm. The goal is to use the energy of the storm to accelerate.

To understand why this shift to a mindset beyond ‘resilience’ is so critical, we can look at the data I compiled in the book. The research is detailed: the safety of the “middle ground” does not exist during periods of volatility. You are either accelerating away from the pack or falling behind it.Here is the reality of the storm, with direct quotes from the book. Maybe you should buy one.Be this guy!

I spent a ridiculous amount of time on a crazy number of stages in front of tens of thousands of people who were shellshocked and whipsawed from 2000 to 2003 by economic volatility. I did it again after the 2008 global economic meltdown. And after that, too – every once in a while, I whip out these observations and share them from the stage, such as within this keynote in London, England, recently.

Consider the title of that video – “It’s what you do right now that matters.”That being the case, here’s what you need to do right now!1. The Winner’s GapHistory shows us that people who decide to move forward, not back, are the ones who win.

2. The 10% RealityHistory also shows us that only a small percentage of people and organizations decide to do this!

3. The “Grief” Speed-RunOh, and guess what! History tells us that most people and organizations don’t get through the shock of volatility fast enough!

4. The Indecision TaxSo what happens? They stop thinking, stop acting, stop doing. They adopt freezing as a strategy, which is just about the dumbest thing you can do.

The worst thing to do is to freeze, particularly when it comes to customer relationships, because during volatility, those relationships undergo a significant change.

6. The “Bunker” FallacyThey retreat to bunkers, seeking shelter from the storm, rather than existing within it.

The discipline you must master to do all these things is what I call Antifragility.Did I mention you should buy the book? You can do that via the Website – dancing.jimcarroll.com!1. The Exponential MindsetNassim Taleb, who came up with the theory of the ‘black swan,‘ coined the term “antifragile” to describe things that gain from disorder. A package is fragile; if you drop it, it breaks. A rubber band is resilient; if you stretch it, it returns. Your immune system is antifragile; if you expose it to germs, it gets stronger.You need to be like your immune system!Consume the chaos! Thrive on it! Turn it into a lever to move forward faster!The exponential mindset treats volatility as fuel. As the data above shows, heavy weather scares away the “tourists.” When the market gets scary, your competitors retreat. They cut innovation. They hunker down. That is the moment the Antifragile leader steps onto the floor. The storm clears the field for you to capture market share cheaply.2. The Linear TrapDo you retreat into a “bunker mentality” when times get tough?When the clouds gather, linear leaders instinctively seek shelter. They initiate “hiring freezes” and “travel bans.” They pause their boldest projects to “wait and see.” They put barriers in place instead of opening doors. They instill fear to keep control.Is that what you’d do?If you think about it, this is a strategy you might pursue when the sun is shining.It assumes that the storm is a temporary aberration and that “normal” will return. But in an exponential world, volatility is the new normal.Under that phrase. Imprint it in your mind. Make it a sticker on your desk – and know this: if you pause every time there is uncertainty, you will be paused forever. While you are hiding in the bunker waiting for clarity, the antifragile player is out in the rain, rewriting the rules of the industry.3. The Exponential EdgeWhen you stop fearing the storm and start dancing in it, you gain leverage.That’s why I gave the book the title “Dancing in the Rain.” It gets you into a mindset that while conditions might not be perfect, you might as well make the most of it and flip the traditional thinking on its head. But here’s what you also need to know about what you can learn once you accept exponential change as your new reality.Here are some key facts:

4. The Immediate PivotWhat are you doing right now to turn the wild world that is 2025 – which is likely only going to be more challenging through 2026 – into opportunity?The first thing you need to do is move from “resistance” to “antifragility” (or adaptation). Here are your immediate actions:

I wrote Dancing in the Rain because I saw too many talented leaders freeze up the moment things got scary.Everyone seemed to think the best strategy was to hide and wait for “normal” to return, but I knew that waiting was the most dangerous thing they could do. I wanted to prove that you don’t have to be a victim of the chaos. I wrote this book to show you that the storm isn’t something to fear—it’s an opportunity to grow stronger, move faster, and build your future while everyone else is running for shelter.Did I mention you should buy it?Like, now.You can do that at, well, dancing.jimcarroll.com

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#19 Optionality Architecture.

Throw out the roadmap. Build a portfolio of instant pivots instead.

Build options, not plans!We are on Day 19 of this series and have covered a lot of ground. We’ve established the necessary foundation: the future is terrifyingly fast (Day 16), your only defense is being (Day 17), and you must adopt an “antifragile” mindset to feed on the chaos (Day 18).The question today is this: How do you plan when you can’t predict? Or when what you predict doesn’t happen because something else does. Or a trend is too complex?Welcome to the idea of Optionality Architecture.Instead of building a plan, build a series of pivots, so that you are ready for whatever the hell happens!Here’s your chalkboard summary!

Think about this idea.Planning is dead.Reacting with prebuilt plans is in.Here’s why.In a linear world, the five-year plan was the gold standard. It was a single, rigid path based on the comforting (but false) assumption that the future would look mostly like the past. Strategy was about prediction and sticking to pre-determined plans.A five-year plan today? *Laughable! *In an exponential world, a single, fixed plan is a strategic liability. The moment you commit to one path, a technology curve goes vertical, or a Black Swan event lands. The old strategy instantly becomes an anchor that guarantees you miss the shift.The winning move is to stop worshipping the plan and start architecting the possible.That’s why the new principle you must master for 2026 and beyond is Optionality Architecture.Beyond being a cool phrase that rolls off your tongue, it’s a critical survival and success strategy you need to go forward. To get it, you must understand what it is.It’s knowing that your old way of planning for tomorrow is dead. Instead, it’s knowing that your future can no longer be defined by a plan, but instead, by many plans.Options.This.

Digging into Optionality ArchitectureHere’s the brutal math from one study: Only 8% of companies using conventional planning models achieved real success during a period of volatility. Compare that to 23% for truly adaptive companies. The lesson? Plans don’t work. Adaptability does.And if our reality is that volatility is the new normal, it becomes pretty clear what we need to do.It also means that the five-year plan isn’t just an outdated idea from the olden days – it’s an actual competitive disadvantage as well.And here’s what it implies – the idea of optionality isn’t just a mindset. It’s an architecture, a methodology, a plan to replace your plans! It’s a deliberate structure you put in place so that you are ready for anything. Such as … volatility being the new normal.The most successful individuals and organizations in an exponential world don’t just have options. They systematically construct portfolios of options across four critical areas of their future

Let’s examine each.Career & Skills Optionality: The Portfolio Career RevolutionWe all know that the traditional career path – climbing the ladder at one company for decades – has become the exception rather than the rule. The data is unambiguous:The shift is already here.

This Isn’t Junior Talent Testing the Waters:

The Returns Are Real:

People who don’t have a job are the new people with a job. Heck, in my case, I haven’t had a job for 35 years and have had tremendous success. I have worked really hard throughout my career to NOT have a job!That has influenced my thinking. Years ago, I suggested on stage that not only would most people NOT have a job, but that they would have multiple jobs all at once. Today’s data bears that out. Research indicates that many of these freelancers have 3-5 concurrent jobs and income sources at any given moment.The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 39% of key skills required in the job market will change by 2030. Multi-skilling isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a survival strategy. One-trick ponies are going extinct.Business Model Optionality: How You Create ValueYour career isn’t the only thing that needs a portfolio approach. If you run a business, your business model itself needs optionality architecture.The goal is to maintain multiple ways of creating and capturing value and generating revenue, each with different risk profiles:

The companies that thrive in exponential times aren’t those with the single “best” business model. They’re the ones with multiple viable business models ready to scale depending on which future arrives!Product & Service Optionality: What You OfferThe same architecture applies to your product and service offerings. In a world where customer behavior changes faster than your product lifecycle, betting everything on a single product or service is suicide. I’ve long suggested that you focus on the idea of chameleon revenue – developing the ability to earn income from products that do not yet exist, to replace the income from products that soon won’t exist!This means having multiple product or service streams happening all at once:

You no longer sell one thing – you sell many things at different stages of the product lifecycle.Revenue Source Optionality: Where Income Flows FromThe final dimension of Optionality Architecture is diversifying where your money comes from. This applies whether you’re an individual or an organization.For individuals, not only do you need multiple careers, but you need multiple sources of income to stay resilient and adaptable. When one stream dries up, others continue flowing. This isn’t about the idea of the”side hustle” as something fun to do – it provides strategic redundancy.That’s why you see some of the most successful people on LinkedIn talk about their multiple revenue sources, which might include:

For organizations? It’s all about diversification of revenue:

Take all of the above, and you get an idea that the future is all about options – and about having an architecture or structure that lets you put those options in place.1. The Exponential MindsetThe mindset you need to get into is learning how to develop low-cost, high-upside bets across all four areas above.Your individual capabilities—your skills, knowledge, and career path—should be treated as a financial portfolio: de-risked by diversification, and constantly positioned for a major payoff.2. The Linear TrapAre you trapped in a linear world, trapped by one thing, instead of having options with many things? Here’s a key question you need to ask yourself: If your primary product or service became obsolete in 18 months, what would you sell instead?If you don’t have an answer, you don’t have optionality—you have a single point of failure. Right now, you should do an immediate ‘what-if’ test:

If any of these scenarios were catastrophic, your revenue architecture lacks sufficient optionality!But once you have options, you have a future!3. The Exponential EdgeWhen you construct an architecture of options, you gain critical survival skills

Have many options, many plans! The faster you cycle through options, the faster you learn which futures are actually arriving.4. The Immediate PivotSo how do you get there? You must move from a fixed roadmap to ‘portfolio thinking.’. Here are your immediate actions:

Bottom line?Understand the scope of this critical change – it turns upside down a century or more of traditional thinking!Linear leaders are prisoners of the past. They cling to the single, massive investment—the obsolete technology, the fixed office tower, the narrow skill set—because of the time, money, or ego already invested. They focus on minimizing losses on old decisions (sunk costs) rather than maximizing gains on new opportunities (optionality).And if you think about that, it’s like a “stubbornness tax.” It’s the compounding cost of refusing to adapt.In an exponential world, every year you cling to a single path while the market shifts is a year of compound disadvantage.The winners of volatility move forward, not back.They do so by having options.
Many options.An architecture of options.

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#20 Network Velocity

If you are the fastest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.

The 1987 editorial “Tomorrow’s Company Won’t Have Walls” stands as one of the most accurate corporate prophecies of the modern era.And it had a profound impact on my life.It’s probably fair to say that if I hadn’t read it, I wouldn’t have stepped out on my own to start my own company, chase my own career, do my own thing – and become a global freelancer, a nomadic worker, a lone wolf, long before the trend became real and the idea fashionable. Like I’ve said – I haven’t had a job for 35 years, and I work really hard to not have to get a job!It’s worth reading, because it predicted with precision the modern organization of today.“Tomorrow’s Company Won’t Have Walls”, New York Times, October 1987The hub of the network organization will be small, centralized, and local. At the same time, it will be connected to an extended network that is big, decentralized, and global. People from the network and from outside the company will join the group at the hub for periods of time and then leave it.But the network organization will also present its own set of paradoxes. For instance, how will these new organizations be able to manage the often conflicting interests of the centralized hub and the decentralized network? And how can a system that is both centralized and decentralized be unified and coordinated, and quick to respond to changes in the marketplace?For the global organization of the future, the ability to acquire new products, services, technologies, and capital will not be the problem. The marketplace is crowded with each of these as never before.But for exactly this reason, the challenge for each company will be to nurture its own unique culture and develop the quality of its human resources. That is because competitive advantage will rest increasingly in the way each network organization gathers and assesses information, makes its decisions, and then carries out those decisions.The 21st century will be full of organizational surprises. The challenge of arranging cooperative efforts between companies to achieve strategic gains is beginning to emerge. Changes in the marketplace have given companies from around the world the opportunity to develop these new linkages. Advances in telecommunications technology also enable companies to bring people together for a competitive advantage. The time has now come to form new global collections of companies, and to fully utilize human relationships.Think about where we are now: many organizations don’t define themselves by the depth of their staff – they do so by the reach of their skills network.But in 2026 and beyond, the sophisticated reach of a networked organization is not enough.It’s no longer about the reach of your skills network, but also the speed with which they operate.If they aren’t as fast as you, it will slow you down even further, stunt your progress, and ruin your ability to align with exponential trends.Here’s your chalkboard summary!

That’s why, in 2026 and beyond, you have to stop letting slow partners kill your speed.The Issue of Network VelocityWe are on Day 20. We have built your internal engine: You have the Unapologetic Uniqueness (Day 17), an Antifragile Mindset (Day 18), and Optionality Architecture (Day 19).Do those things, and you are getting ready for our exponential world.But as they say, “but wait, there’s more!” Now, we must look outside.You can have a Ferrari engine (your mindset), but if you are driving in a convoy of tractors (your partners), you are going to move at the speed of a tractor!

And here’s the thing about what this means to the networked organization, and perhaps your role in it as a freelancer: in a linear world, we picked partners based on stability, history, and comfort. We stuck with the vendor we’d used for 20 years because “they know us.”In an exponential world, loyalty to the past is a guarantee for failure. If your supply chain, your technology vendors, or your peer group are evolving linearly while the market accelerates exponentially, they aren’t just slowing you down.They are anchors.This means that another discipline you must master going forward is Network Velocity.The Networked Organization is No Longer a TheoryIt’s worth revisiting the idea of the networked organization to think about how it is now impacted by exponential speed. The New York Times article predicted a “wall-less company” where a small central hub would coordinate a massive, decentralized web of resources.That future has already happened. The most successful organizations today are structured exactly this way. And for many people, their career path as a global freelancer fits perfectly into this business model:

This model works because it solves for scale. It allows a small core to leverage massive resources, scaling up and down as requirements change and as new skills and capabilities are required.It goes to the heart of one of the key trends that I often talk about: the future of every organization comes from the ability to access the right skills at the right time for the right purpose. Your role as a freelancer? Providing those skills – but now – just in time!The Master of Scale: A Lesson from Li & FungTo understand the power—and the danger—of this model, we have to look at the original master of the network: the Hong Kong trading giant Li & Fung. It’s a good lesson as to why the speed of the network now matters more than ever before.For decades, Li & Fung was the ultimate “network orchestrator.” They didn’t own factories; they owned the process. They would break a single garment down into steps: spinning the yarn in Pakistan (for cost), weaving it in China (for capacity), and stitching it in Vietnam (for labor rates). They managed 15,000 suppliers without owning a single needle.How did they keep this massive, decentralized beast from collapsing? They invented the concept of “Little John Waynes.“They broke their central trading hub into small, autonomous cells. The leader of each cell—the “Little John Wayne“—acted like an independent entrepreneur running their own small business within the giant group. They had total autonomy to serve their specific customers, giving the massive conglomerate the “local feel” of a small shop.It was brilliant. It solved the problem of size. They mastered scale. They could get the right skills and the right partner at the right time…..But it failed to solve the problem of time. A faster world!As the world moved from “seasons” to “fast fashion,” Li & Fung’s analog network of phone calls and relationships became too slow. They had the biggest network in the world, but slow speed began to kill them. They began to lose out to fast-fashion movers like Zara. They couldn’t compete against the weird new networked world, which involved an influencer posting a picture of some new outfit on Instagram, and a series of small Chinese factories beginning to produce knockoffs within hours for shipping the next day.This is the world of exponential change, and where we will find ourselves in 2026 and beyond!The Freelancer ImpactLet’s spin into this, a key component of this global network – you. Your skills. The freelancer. The person who makes their skills available to a global economy.If you are this person – a freelancer, a nomadic worker offering your skills to this globally outside world – you now need to work at a new and different speed. You need to be fast. Stunningly fast!Why? Because in the 1987 model, you were “outsourced help.” In the 2026 model, you need to be part of a faster machine.The client isn’t hiring you to “add capacity” (they can get that from a junior employee). They are hiring you to inject velocity. They are paying a premium because they believe you can do in 4 hours what their internal team takes 4 weeks to approve.If you are slow to respond, slow to onboard, or slow to deliver, you aren’t just annoying; you are breaking their value proposition.The data proves this shift is already here. High-value freelancing is no longer about junior talent “gigging” between jobs. Today, 72.8% of fractional professionals have 15+ years of experience. These are seasoned executives who operate as autonomous, high-speed units. They win not because they are cheaper, but because they have zero “latency.’ They know how to operate at speed.If you treat your freelance business like a traditional 9-to-5—with “I’ll get back to you next week” energy—you are acting like a linear component in an exponential machine. The system will reject you.If you can’t provide the right skills at the right time, you’re toast! Your freelance opportunities will be over.The Velocity Trap: Why Scale Is No Longer a MoatAnd so, with all that in mind, here’s where we are in the context of that 1987 article: many organizations discovered the power of scale through partnership. They won the war on “walls.” But they are now losing the war on time.In the era of 2026, scale has become a commodity, but velocity has become scarce.Here is the brutal reality: Access to a “massive global network” is no longer a competitive advantage. Everyone has access to Upwork, AWS, Alibaba, and ChatGPT. The differentiator is no longer who you can reach, but how fast you can synchronize with them. If you have a network of 1,000 partners, but it takes three weeks to get a decision, you don’t have a network; you have a bureaucracy that spans multiple time zones.You have replaced “corporate bloat” with “distributed drag.”The simple fact is this – in an exponential world, organizations now need faster partners. To be a partner, you need to be faster than everyone else!In 2026, network scale has become a commodity. The new scarcity is Velocity.1. The Exponential MindsetWe spent the last thirty years dismantling vertical silos and replacing them with horizontal networks. But what has been lost is speed. We’ve replaced old bureaucracies with new ones – because we let our partners show us down.The brutal reality is that access to a “massive global network” is no longer a competitive advantage. Everyone has access to Upwork, AWS, and ChatGPT. Everyone can access new skills on a dime. The global freelance economy is bigger than ever before – read the previous post. We are closer than ever to the goal I often share – “our success comes from our ability to access the right skills at the right time for the right purpose.” Aka just-in-time knowledge.But going forward, the differentiator is no longer who you can reach, but how fast you can synchronize with them.Think of it this way: if your partners can not operate as fast as you, you are running a race with a slow team2. The Linear TrapTo understand the danger of the old model, look at what happened to Li & Fund, the original master of the skilled network.As the world moved to “fast fashion,” their analog network of phone calls and relationships became too slow. They had the biggest network in the world, but slow speed killed them.The simple fact is this: you cannot have an exponential strategy with a linear network. If you are running an AI-driven business model but your legal counsel takes two weeks to review a prompt, your “scale” is irrelevant.You are stalled.And doomed.3. The Exponential EdgeWhen you prepare for Network Velocity, you unlock the secrets to the new style of “companies without walls.”In the past, you were hired for your Capability (“Can you design a logo?”). In 2026, you will be hired for your API (“Can you plug into our workflow instantly?”).For the independent worker or the agile firm, this means the difference between a Linear Partner (who sends an email, asks for a meeting, deliberates) and an Exponential Partner (who grants access to the GitHub repo, tags you in the tool, links you into Slack, and expects the commit by 5:00 PM).Bottom line? The highest-paid consultants in 2026 and beyond won’t be the ones with the most experience; they will be the ones with the lowest friction.4. The Immediate PivotYou need to audit your orbit! Take a look at your network! Figure out if your skills and partnership network are fast enough, or falling behind. If you freelance, you need to check your speed.Speed is easily faked. Every potential partner will claim to be “agile.”In the sales pitch, everyone looks like a Ferrari. It is only when you get on the highway that you realize you hitched your wagon to a tractor.You need to do an audit.So let’s jump there!The Velocity Audit: How to Spot a “Ferrari” PartnerHere is your 3-point inspection checklist to judge if a partner can keep up with your 2026 trajectory.The “Digital Nervous System” Test (Metric: Information Latency)

The “Speed of Trust” Test (Metric: Transaction Costs)

The “Asynchronous” Test (Metric: Decision Autonomy)

Here’s what I know – I experience slow organizations regularly. My wife and I know when an organization is stuck in a slow lane – they take our 3-page simple speaking contract, and layer on top of it 40 pages of legal addendum. They view a simple one-hour speaking gig as a 40,000-hour consulting contract, with IP ownership and other clauses as part of the deal. They end up paying our deposit via credit card because they can’t figure out how to get us into their ERP system. (American Express actually did this once, via Amex, and we still have a good laugh about that!)And the running joke with all of this is that they’ve booked me to do a leadership keynote on speed and agility – and don’t realize how massive a hill they have to climb!For 2026 and beyond? Their world is going to be ‘interesting.‘Because in an exponential world, you can’t be a slow partner in a fast world!

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#21 Signal Intelligence

Your new challenge isn’t finding the insight – it’s filtering out the noise

It used to be that the problem with the information age was that there was too much information.That’s changed.The new problem is now that not only is there too much information, but much of it is crap. And pretty soon, most of it is going to be crap.That means one of the most important skills you need to develop in the information age is how to sift through the noise, to find what really matters. Finding the gold amidst the crap matters.Simply put, enhancing your ability to weed out reality from unreality, facts from the unfactual, the gems amidst the wreckage – this is what will move you forward into the future. I’m not talking only about the misinformation and disinformation machine that has roiled our world, but the new megainformation machine that is AI that is emerging.All of us are on a unique voyage into this strange new world, and as I often like to say: “We don’t know where we are going, but we are making great time!'” In a world of infinite noise, the ultimate competitive advantage is not what you pay attention to. It is what you choose to ignore.Here’s your chalkboard summary!

It’s not lost me on that I’m using AI to tell you about the problems of AI! The very idea of the chalkboard summary, you find the challenge of our future – any complex idea, and long treatise, any deep exploration of a topic – can now simply be reduced in moments to small, digestible chunks, information-hits that we soak directly into the veins of our brains in a rush of insight chasing.It’s weird, isn’t it?And how do we know it’s right?We are on Day 21. You have stripped away the mediocrity (Day 17), embraced the chaos (Day 18), built your options (Day 19), and upgraded your network (Day 20). Now, we must upgrade your eyes.Now we need to think about Signal Intelligence: aka the art of ignoring in order to see. Success no longer depends on acquiring more information. It depends on ruthlessly filtering noise.The Great Information Inversion: From Scarcity to ExhaustionLet’s put this challenge into perspective.For decades, the world of learning and knowledge was simple: Information was scarce, so the strategy was accumulation. In a business context, the leader with the most reports won; the researcher with the deepest research team had the advantage; and the individual who mastered speed-reading had a leg up on everyone.Then the Internet emerged, and we all began to learn about the strange new world of vast sums of electronic information. We taught ourselves to search. Then, as the volume of information grew, we began to graze. Finally, we began to rapid-scan.The “new reality” with AI now takes us into a world that is crazier than we think. We are facing the yottabit era. (I own the domains Yottabit.Net, Yottabit.com, and Yottabits.com, LOL!) The global datasphere is experiencing a form of exponential growth that defies human intuition. It isn’t just “more data,” it is a fundamental change in the density of our digital atmosphere, because not only will there be more of it, but much of it will be of dubious value.In that context, the math is unforgiving: If human cognitive capacity remains static while information doubles every few years, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses. Our brains can only take in so much. We feel overwhelmed. We don’t know where to start, and don’t know what to look up. Not only that, we have no idea what’s real and what’s not.This means that the challenge isn’t finding insight anymore. It’s filtering the overwhelming flood of synthetic noise to avoid exhaustion.The AI Information ExplosionAnd boy, are we ever going to become exhausted!In 2018, the world was managing approximately 33 zettabytes of data, a volume driven largely by the initial maturation of mobile computing, social media usage, and the migration to the cloud.However, that baseline has been rapidly surpassed. By the time we look toward 2028, global volumes will increase to nearly 400 zettabytes.

Not only is there too much information, but much of it will not be real. It’s called Synthetic Saturation.

Did I mention that the fact that I am using AI to generate an image to tell you about the risks of AI is not lost on me?But here’s the thing: as organizations adopt identical AI tools to filter this information, a dangerous phenomenon emerges: algorithmic monoculture. Think about what is already happening in HR – people are using AI to try to make their resumes look better. At the other end, HR departments are using AI to try to sift out the flood of applications. Machines talking to machines, as it were. The same AI systems are being used to generate content and to screen through that content. What does it mean? To find Alpha (value above average), you must look where the algorithm isn’t looking!The cartoonist Tom Fishburne has a brilliant take on where this is taking us – and what is probably already happening!

The Informed DelusionAs all of this unfolds at a stunning speed, you need to know something important.More data doesn’t make you smart; it makes you more stupid!That’s not intuitive. Many people try to solve this problem of living in the information age by consuming too much information. They believe the dangerous myth that “more data equals better decisions." Researchers call this The Informed Delusion, and they have scientific proof!Psychologist Paul Slovic’s classic study on horse race handicappers reveals exactly what happens. Slovic gave professional handicappers increasing amounts of information across four rounds: 5, 10, 20, and 40 data points per horse. The results exposed what is known as the Paul Slovic Paradox:

The implication for you is brutal: Pursuing “more data” beyond a critical threshold doesn’t improve your foresight—it only increases your belief in the validity of what you see. You feel invincible while making bets no more certain than coin flips. And in the context of what is coming at us with the AI tsunami, the results will be fatal unless we can take on the paradox.That’s why developing the discipline of Signal Intelligence is so important. All of us need to develop the disciplined capability to detect, verify, and act upon weak signals of change amidst synthetic noise.It is the prerequisite for maintaining network velocity and optionality in 2026.1. The Exponential Mindset: The Cognitive FirewallHere’s what you need to know: you now exist in an attention economy where the dominant business model is harvesting and reselling your focus. Social media is designed to feed you outrage.The algorithm isn’t giving you what’s useful -it’s sending you stuff that makes you mad.It’s really an adversarial system that is designed to trigger your outage and to exploit your psychological vulnerabilities. In this emerging new world, not only will it make you madder, but there is going to be even more of it to make you madder. That’s why you must think about the idea of building a cognitive firewall. It’s your defense against neuro-phishing and attention hijacking. It is a set of rules designed to engage your analytical “System 2” thinking and bypass your reactive “System 1” thinking. The Exponential Leader treats “outrage,” “hype,” and “breaking news” as malware, protecting their attention as a sovereign resource.Not only that, but you have to teach yourself to search differently. AI search tools are obviously powerful, useful machines. But have you experienced hallucinations, AI systems apologizing to you after you’ve called them out for feeding you false information? Have you come to rely too much on what you see and not enough on determining what might be real?Our ability to sift through the noise to find the nuggets will be an absolutely critical part of our exponential mindset.2. The Linear Trap: Chasing Strong SignalsThe problem? Most of us have been living in a linear world. While the Internet has become a part of our lives, we’ve become used to the slow and steady growth of the information available to us. We’ve become proud of our ability to search, to learn through what we find online. But we really have no idea what’s coming in terms of the volume of information coming at us. Go back and read the information about zettabytes. Why do you think I bought Yottabit back in 1999? Because I knew what was coming.Not only that, but it's the speed with which all this new synthetic information is coming at us.And the reality is, there’s a cost to cognitive overload. People using 2020 methodologies in a 2026 world to manage this flood will be effectively blind. The costs are not just psychological; they are financial.

History already shows us we do a lousy job at filtering out information. Consider the Metaverse Hype Cycle of 2021-2022 – a powerful warning against confusing noise with signal. The hype was deafening—a strong signal generated by PR and FOMO. Companies bought virtual land for millions.But Signal Intelligence would have looked for the user signal: retention rates and daily utility. These were absent. The noise was high; the signal was zero. Companies that exercised Hype Immunity saved billions.Now imagine a world in which a global hype machine is selling you a big idea, a massive megatrend, a fascinating future – and it’s coming at you so fast, you simply can’t make the right decision – because your mind is wired into a 2020 world in a 2026 reality.Ugh!3. The Exponential EdgeWhat I’m trying to lead you into here is that you need to develop the ability to see real trends among the signals. To do that, you need to perfect your skill of Peripheral Vision. That’s learning how to see what matters, and discarding the rest. Here are a few ideas:

4. The Immediate Pivot: Protocols for Day 21So what do you do? You must move from “Information Accumulation” to “Signal Detection.” Here are a few ideas.An information audit. You cannot manage what you do not measure. For 48 hours, log every piece of information you consume (emails, news, feeds). Categorize them using a matrix:

Build yourself an information firewall. Implement these specific rules to stop the hijacking of your attention.

Learn more about verification in the age of deepfakes. Have you noticed how quickly sophisticated video from AI is now completely indistinguishable from reality? Deepfakes are no longer theoretical; they are mainstream.

Our world will be flooded with AI content, so information verified by real humans will become rare and more valuable. A heavy reliance on AI will weaken our critical thinking, so we need to work harder to think clearly on our own. Our choice is simple: get pulled into noise and constant reaction, or focus on the signal by filtering hard, verifying facts, and acting with discipline!The future?It doesn’t belong to those who consume the most.It belongs to those who see the clearest.

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#22 Boundary Divergence

Don’t stay in your lane. The future is happening in the blur between the lines.

We are on Day 22. You have built the engine (Day 17), fuelled it with an anti-fragile mindset (Day 18), mapped your portfolio of options (Day 19), and opened your eyes to the road ahead (Day 21).But here is the problem: You are still driving as if the old road signs exist!This trend is easy to understand but difficult to comprehend.Here’s what’s going on. In a linear world, we had “industries.” Banks were banks. Car companies built cars. Hospitals treated patients.Competitors were the people who sold exactly what you sold.In an exponential world, these definitions are disappearing – because the boundaries that define an industry are disappearing. Why is that? Because the things that defined an industry were some very strict barriers, and a lot of ‘friction‘ was involved to try to do anything. Today, with faster trends, technology, and AI, those barriers are disappearing because ‘friction‘ is being eliminated.Technology is not just speeding things up; it is melting the walls between sectors. If you define yourself by your “industry,” you are already obsolete, because your biggest threat – and your biggest opportunity – is coming from outside of what you define it to be. From a personal career perspective, this has pretty profound implications – because if you are an ‘expert’ in a certain industry, what happens to you when the industry begins to blur?The discipline you must master in 2026 and beyond is Boundary Dissolution.Here’s your chalkboard summary!

Why are the walls between industries crashing down?It goes back to the “Tomorrow’s Company Won’t Have Walls” idea – the new corporate structure allows companies to bend and shape, mold and modify, shift and change. We are moving from firms as closed, industry-defined “things” to firms as cross-sector systems that route data, payments, identity, logistics, and care across different partners at high speed.To do a lot of these, they are hiring the people who are experts at the career pivot – people who bring a broad range of skills across a vast number of different knowledge areas who have worked and can work in multiple different industries.The new leader of the future is Gumby!

He or she doesn’t have bones, but they have ambition. And in a rigid world, they bend the rules of every industry to build the future.The Evidence: The Blur is Real!Don’t take my word for it. Look at what is happening right now among the world’s biggest players.

Why is this happening now?Technology, AI, and bold thinking

What happens when the walls are gone?Crazy stuff!The “industries” we know today don’t just evolve. They evaporate! They disappear! They turn into entirely new things! You’ll find your business opportunity and your new career in the opportunities that come about as the lines dissolve.Here is where the blur takes us:

Crazy ideas?Maybe.But remember one of my core innovation themes – when people say ‘that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,’ it usually eventually becomes real!1. The Exponential MindsetCompanies used to own their position in an industry through what they made. They will now own a future depending on how well they can orchestrate divergence into different industries – how well they can morph and merge into new ideas.Why are industries merging? Because physical industries (selling groceries, cars) often have low margins (2-10%), while digital industries (ads, software) have high margins (60-80%). A grocery store must become an ad agency because selling milk has almost no profit, but selling ads on the milk shelf is highly profitable.With that, the Exponential Leader stops asking, “How do I win in my industry?” and starts asking, “What value can I create if I ignore the rules of my sector?"2. The Linear TrapLinear leaders love lanes. They love NAICS industry codes, trade associations and conferences all about their industry because they provide a false sense of order. It provides comfort – it’s a "silo” security blanket. The result is they focus 100% of their strategic energy on competing against their traditional rivals for a 2% market share gain.In the meantime, exponential leaders ignore them and do something different altogether. Need an example? While Ford and GM were busy fighting each other in the marketplace, a software company (Tesla) and a data company (Uber) redefined the idea of mobility. While hotels were fighting over room rates, a software company (Airbnb) redefined hospitality.If you define yourself by your “industry,” you are already obsolete.3. The Exponential EdgeWhen you embrace Boundary Dissolution, you unlock the velocity of Gumby!:

4. The Immediate PivotTear down the mental walls that define your business!

The future doesn’t care about your org chart or your industry definition.It only cares about value.And in 2026, value flows to those who can cross the lines, who play in the blur, and find the future in the fog!

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#23 Algorithmic Partnership

Don’t ‘learn’ AI. Redesign your personal productivity around it.

Like it or not, you will have to learn to live with “The Machine.”We are on Day 24. You have the radar (Day 21), the open road (Day 22), and many principles I’ve shared before that. Now, we must address the elephant in the room: The Machine.For the last three years, the narrative has been “Man vs. Machine.” People are going to lose their jobs! We will all be working 2 hours a day, 3 days a week, because AI will do all the work. Stuff like that.In 2026, that line of thinking is obsolete. You need to get beyond the hype and hysteria. The competition isn’t between you and the AI. The competition is between “You + AI” and “You Alone.”The Linear Leader tries to outwork the algorithm. The Exponential Leader learns to partner with it.Don’t fear having to compete with AI. Learn to conduct it. The discipline you must master is Algorithmic Partnership.Here’s your chalkboard summary – generated, of course, by AI!

The Great Reframing: From Displacement to OrchestrationTo master this partnership, you first have to understand the emotional and economic rollercoaster we have just ridden. The narrative of “AI as a job killer” didn’t just appear; it evolved, crashed, and reformed into something far more interesting.And the voyage has caused a lot of grief!The Era of Fear (2023–2024)When ChatGPT and its peers first arrived, the world suffered from what we might call “Displacement Anxiety.” The logic was linear and terrifying: If an AI can write a report in 10 seconds that takes me 10 hours, I am obsolete.That fear wasn’t abstract. Major forecasts poured gasoline on it. The World Economic Forum’s 2020 estimates talked about 85 million jobs potentially displaced by 2025, alongside 97 million new roles emerging. That headline shaped how people felt, even though it was always a projection, not a verdict.Then there were grand pronouncements by all kinds of tech CEOs and other leaders about the magic productivity benefits of AI, with one suggesting that they wouldn’t have to hire any new people in the future since AI would do all the work! Folks nodded their heads in some sort of weird agreement, buying into the narrative. People were getting drunk on Kool-Aid!

*It’s going to end wars. *Right. Got it. I rest my case.I’ve been here before. In the 1940s, Popular Mechanics magazine was predicting that the machine era would see us with unlimited leisure time!

Today. Oh, well, apparently we are going to have 3-day work weeks!

Sigh.One impact of this hype, though, as CEOs themselves not only drank the Kool-Aid but also injected it straight into their veins. They got high on the hype and made ‘bold decisions.’ We saw a wave of tech layoffs often attributed to “AI efficiency,” fuelling this zero-sum narrative.The reality? More likely that companies were using AI as an excuse to do the cost-cutting that they had planned in the face of spending uncertainty.But with all of this, the fear became implanted in our minds – AI was a 1:1 substitute for human intellect, and because of that, we were all going to lose our jobs. We were doomed!The “Fast Intern” Reality Check (2025)Then came the reality.By 2026, we will hit what Gartner calls the “Trough of Disillusionment” on the Gartner Hype Cycle.

No wonder I had to share the idea, learning to deal with excessive hype as Principle #14 of this series was one of the most important things we could do.Through 2025, many came to realize that while AI could generate content at infinite speed, it often lacked context, nuance, and truth. It made stuff up. It was often full of eras. We started to explain that it was ‘hallucinating.‘ All while it continued to improve at a staggering speed, our understanding of its limitations, weaknesses, and faults also began to grow.And with that, the narrative began to change. It wasn’t to be our master; it was more an immature and fast “intern” that required constant supervision.Rather than replacing us, we had to monitor it, watch it, and carefully assess its work.

With this came two of the most brilliant observations of our short affair with AI so far, as the floodgate of spending opened up in the face of massive strategic uncertainty:

Productivity? If you think about it, we ended up doing more work because of it, not less!But at the same time, for those of us who learned to tame it, our productivity soared, all while it continued to get better and better. (Or, as some would say, more productive with more sophisticated errors!) So as we close out 2025, there’s also a second reality check hiding in plain sight: most of what seems to be happening is that we are interrupting specific tasks, but not deleting jobs.Goldman Sachs, for example, has said that even if current AI use cases scaled broadly, only a small slice of total employment would be at risk of full displacement, while a much bigger slice of daily tasks would be reshaped.This is a pretty significant change in the narrative! We moved to this – an image I’ve often shared.

The Pivot to Partnership (2026)Think about what this means.The World Economic Forum now predicts that while 92 million jobs might be displaced by the shift between humans and machines, 170 million new roles are emerging, roles that didn’t exist three years ago.Many of these new roles seem to be exactly what the image implies – they are actually old jobs and careers, enhanced by the impact of AI. With that, it seems pretty clear that the winners of 2026 and beyond aren’t those who automated their workforce into oblivion. We aren’t about to all lose our jobs.Instead, we will continue to see wild chaos as jobs and careers undergo dramatic change, and as corporations try to figure out what all this ‘AI stuff’ actually means, and where the opportunities, productivity, and efficiencies really lie.It’s “jobs chaos,” rather than a “jobs apocalypse.”1. The Exponential MindsetWhat seems to be happening is that AI is moving from a “tool” to a “teammate.”If that’s the case, you’ve got to stop thinking about AI as a search engine like Google, a generator of text, or a creator of images and video.Start thinking of it like your partner. It’s going to be here, and will be a big part of your working life, whether you like it or not. That’s why you need to place the phrase Algorithmic Partnership.What is it? It’s realizing that AI is a force multiplier for your intellect, an enhancement of your knowledge, an enabler of new skills. In this partnership, you don’t type; you orchestrate. You don’t just draw; you ‘imaginate’ (my word, I made it up!) You don’t just code; you architect. Your value shifts from “creation” to “direction.” That’s a big mindset shift.In my case, it’s certainly happening. I am doing a lot of what people have come to call “Vibe Coding.” I’m doing a lot of highly technical work, building very complex apps or solving deep technology support issues, simply by describing the vibe and functionality to an AI. In that way, I’ve developed entirely new skills – managing and orchestrating my own highly specialized tech development and support team.The barrier to entry to get fully into this world? It’s not the words we choose to describe what we are doing – it’s adjusting our vision of what we can accomplish.2. The Linear TrapIn the face of this opportunity, many people are struggling with the uniqueness of “AI guilt.”Think about it: one of the more interesting aspects of this AI voyage is that many people came to believe that if they used AI, they were cheating. Why is that? Linear leaders take pride in the sweat. We’ve come to believe that if we didn’t spend 10 hours writing the report manually, it wouldn’t be valuable. We resist AI because it feels like we are ‘bending the rules.In 2026, the market does not care how hard you worked. It cares about the output; it cares about what you produce; it cares about what you can do. That being the case, clinging to manual effort in an automated world isn’t integrity; it’s inefficiency. And the simple fact seems to be this: we are shifting from “output” (hours worked, lines of code written) to “outcome” (business impact, customer value).So while you are proud of your 10-hour draft, your competitor’s Algorithmic Partnership has produced 10 variations in 10 minutes and is already executing the best one. You can’t compete against that – and if you remain stuck in the old mindset, you’ll fall way, way behind.3. The Exponential EdgeWhen you master Algorithmic Partnership, you unlock the very unique leverage this strange new world provides us:

And the productivity evidence is getting harder to ignore. In controlled and field experiments, human-AI teams and AI-assisted workers often move materially faster, sometimes dramatically, while quality becomes a management choice instead of a guarantee. According to Microsoft, GitHub Copilot experiments, for example, found large speed gains on defined coding tasks. xArciv reports that in a large marketing experiment pairing humans with AI agents, researchers observed major productivity lifts per worker, alongside a reminder that the partnership still needs tuning, especially when moving beyond text into multimodal work.Different frameworks label this change bucket differently, but the core observation is the same: while AI can do a lot of work, the power and role of human judgment and orchestration are the missing link. With that, entirely new roles are appearing that are basically “partnership operators,” people paid to make the human-AI system reliable, useful, and aligned to outcomes.Algorithmic orchestrators, as it were.4. The Immediate PivotSo here’s what it all means – you need to stop using AI as a tool and start treating it as a partner! How do you do that? Try a few ideas:

The principle for 2026? Like it or not, you’re going to live with the machine, so stop treating AI like a new subject to study and start treating it like the operating system for how you get work done.The old “man vs. machine” panic is fading because the real contest is “you plus AI” versus “you alone.” We’ve learned that replacement thinking fails when you bolt AI onto old workflows, but partnership thinking wins when you redesign the work itself.In that model, your value shifts from grinding out first drafts and doing ‘busywork’ to orchestrating.That’ directing, judging, and refining the things you do, using AI to generate momentum while you provide context, truth, and strategy.It’s not Man vs. Machine.It’s You.With The Machine.

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