Heh. After giving you this catchy, click-bait-ish promise in the title, I guess I’ll have to deliver, at least to some extent…
Since I became one of the major players in the world of the stock market investment by owning that one famous Amazon share, I seriously started thinking about ways to predict the future. You know, get even better at being an investor. What will our future look like, what are the new, emerging technologies that today either don’t yet exist or are still in their infancy?
Folks, before we move on – this blog post (like the majority of my other blog posts) is meant to be half serious and inspiring, half ironic and half amusing and somewhat fun to read. Oh, and BTW, this “what’s our future going to be like?” question comes from a guy who actually bought a pager in late 1998 or early 1999. Yep. Not a cell phone. No. Not an Iridium Satellite phone. No. A bloody pager. So, you know, just managing expectations… 😀 In case you don’t remember: over time, pager business was practically abandoned, as nearly everybody switched to cell phones. Oh well, let’s continue…
Back to our topic – “predicting the future”. In terms of investing even more money (I mean besides the aforementioned Amazon share) I had to first understand what awaits us in the near future. Flying cars? 3D printing in every household? 5G networks with IoT and self driving cars? So I did some research. And even more research. And I started interviewing people. Huh. I’m not done yet, but this is what I came up so far…
The newly appointed CEO in the company where I was last employed had invited all the employees for a town hall meeting. After a short introduction, instead of showing us all the usual slides with YOY performance figures and the usual fugazi, his first few slides were on the topic of company’s future (and) transformation. He went on saying how majority of the population tends to think about the future in linear terms while the development curve is actually exponential! Crazy discrepancy there. I really loved his presentation.
As an illustration (and probably he was trying to be funny as well), on the next slide he had Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft), laughing at the idea of Apple’s recently presented iPhone. Quickly he moved to the next slide, showing the same Steve Ballmer, this time making a thoroughly confused face, with a huge question mark above his head and “WTF?” written all over the slide. Yep. That’s what happens when you’re neglecting future trends… All of the sudden, you serve as a bad example, being inserted into some dude’s Power Point presentation, featuring your funniest face ever and “WTF?” written above your head.
I mean – don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind being in Steve Ballmer’s shoes at any moment in the recent past. At least not from the business/financial side. He’s obviously doing a great job (save for the haircut; D. Trump and Kim Jong seem to be doing a much better job in this department). It’s just that, I want to be able to predict the future the way Nikola Tesla, Steve Jobs (and his team), Isaac Asimov et al. did. But how? How did they do that? Lie in bed every evening and try to “visualise” the future? Like, right before or immediately after doing their Astral projections…?
If you have any idea on functioning ways of predicting the future, please contact me! (sharing this knowlege is gonna do really good for your karma, so don’t miss out. And I promise we’ll share the profits! Hey, c’mon! You also get to keep the babes! C’mon, man…)