Failure of Purpose
Here is an excerpt from a Joe Polish email –
“In the 1970s, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health built the perfect mouse habitat.
Unlimited food. Unlimited space. No predators. No scarcity of any kind.
And the colony completely fell apart.
The males stopped competing. The females stopped nurturing. Play disappeared. Society collapsed.
He called it Universe 25. And his warning was simple: abundance without challenge doesn’t produce flourishing.
It produces collapse.
Peter Diamandis has spent decades at the frontier of exponential technology. Steven Kotler is the world’s leading researcher on flow and peak performance. They sat down at a recent Genius Network meeting to talk about their new book, “We Are as Gods,” and what it actually means that we now have godlike capabilities.
And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, the question got uncomfortable.
If AI removes friction… robotics handles labor… and abundance is no longer a question of resources…
What happens to us?
Because the same thing that makes the future extraordinary is the same thing that could hollow it out.
Too much delivered. Not enough earned.
Peter says we’re already watching the first fork happen. Not between rich and poor. Between consumers and creators.”
When we can get almost anything with little effort, bad things will happen to us. I am a firm believer that the effort, challenge, “failures” and struggle are necessary for us to be mentally and physically healthy and strong long term.
What do you think?
I also am very indebted to Joe Polish! In my early years, He’s the one who helped me understand what business really is. I’m still holding onto boxes and boxes of cassette tapes of him and his interviews with smart people at the time. All the information never gets stale. Once you learn the principles of how to be a good human being and how to help others, the modality may change the process, the process may change, but the the goal should still be the same.
You can either be creating or consuming. I choose to be creating!
Thanks for the insights again, Larry
A problem I see is a growing blindspot of basic knowledge as we increasingly rely on layer upon layer of technology and for our lives. We know how to press buttons to get something done—but often have little understanding of what’s going on to make the buttons do their magic. This prevents curiosity about how how to improve systems, or how we can could connect tools to build new ones.
You could not have said it better.
I completely agree. This is why even in this age of technology I’m still trying to hire as many people as I can rather than replace them with tech. I’m not convinced that technology increases productivity where the rubber meets the road which is on the job site. I firmly believe that my Granddad’s crew from 40 years ago could easily outperform a modern crew of the same number of people. Back then people weren’t distracted with cell phones on the job, they had a much simpler life, they weren’t concerned with as many cares of the world, didn’t have as many bills, didn’t pay as much for their housing and knew that they had to work hard if they wanted to take a paycheck home to their family. Things sure have changed.
Yes sir!