Four Reasons to Stop Worrying About the Future

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In Bob Miglani's latest book, he discusses the idea of embracing chaos and accepting it as an inevitable fact of life.

Here are four truths to help you deal with anxiety and uncertainty of a chaotic and unknowable future:
 
1. You can’t predict the future.  
The main tenet of a lot of our life stress and frustration is this nagging and seemingly scary feeling deep inside that you just don’t know what’s going to happen next.  From your career to your relationship to the way your kids will turn out to how things will play out in your business—it is getting harder to figure things out accurately. And it bugs us and eats us up slowly from the inside causing this vicious spiral of worrying and anxiety. Accept it that you are powerless to predict the future, because you’re likely going to be wrong…and guess what?  You’ll worry even more!

So what can I do?  So stop trying to predict the future and instead try to make changes today and now. That's something you have some control over, and it's probably the best way to hedge the bets in your favor when it comes to future success.


2. Even if you could predict the future, you can’t control it.  
Luck, randomness and chance contribute so much to the unpredictable nature of life that it is just unrealistic to think you can control things even if you have a good idea of what may happen. I have a hard enough time controlling my kids, so it would be foolish to think I can control my career or anything else. Break the root of worry by realizing that you cannot control or dictate things to just be.  It’s just not possible to have total control of your life when you are so intertwined with so much of the world (i.e. butterfly effect). 

So what can I do? Deal with the uncertainty of an unknown future by focusing your energy the only the things you can control:  Your thoughts and actions. You can control your mind, so task it to deal with those things that are within your control now and leave the worrying for another time.


3. You’re afraid that you're missing the best time of your life, not realizing that the best time is now.  
There is so much you miss in life when your head is in the clouds worrying about an uncertain future.  ”My kids grew up in a blink of an eye”, is what so many people say these days. The fact is that we spend a lot of time worrying about a future that we have no control over, and wasting the present which we do have control over. Imagine, you’re here on this rock for a short time and you’re missing the best part because you’re caught up with trying to figure out the future.
 
So what can I do? Be in the present moment. Being in the here and now is the only truth, so now is the best time of your life, so act like it. When you recognize this fact, you’ll be more productive in your career and your relationships. 


4. Sometimes the worst is not as bad as you think.
We often blow things out of proportion and exaggerate the bad that only our own mind thinks is going to happen (without any real evidence). What initially starts off as the "worst case scenario" starts more and more to sound like a realistic outcome. I realized that when I looked back at the chaos of life that I’ve gone through, it wasn’t all that bad.  Sometimes, you don’t even remember it.

So what can I do? Realize that a worst case scenario is as unlikely to happen as the ideal scenario because both are exaggerations of potential outcomes. We often doubt that best case scenarios will happen but take worst case scenarios as inevitable -- why? Both are equally likely and so equally unlikely. What actually happens is usually something in the middle -- and way more manageable than you anticipated it would be.

Four Myths About Reimagining Your Life

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Most of us want to believe that we can reimagine our life's second chapter and purpose, but allow negative and inaccurate thinking to stop us from doing just that. Here is author Richard Leider's list of four common myths that stop us from seeking out our next purpose:

Myth #1: To now have a new possibility means I must do something completely original. Can you really recall anything that is totally new? Almost every idea or creation is an extension or synthesis of previous efforts. New breakthroughs are built on existing fundamental truths. Like runners in a relay race, we simply do our part to carry the baton another leg of the race.

Myth #2: Only a few gifted or skilled people are able to discover new paths and possibilities in their lives. This is the most commonly rationalized of all myths. History, however, is filled with great contributions made by ordinary people who had virtually no experience or expertise in the areas where they thrived in their lives' second chapter. In fact, being a "seasoned novice" gives us permission and courage to step into things with fresh passion and purpose.

Myth #3: What I want to do next will come as inspiration or revelation. Until that time comes, I will wait. Inspiration comes to those who seek it. We don't find beautiful shells unless we're on the beach. If we believe in the the "miracle moment" theory, we rarely will find it. If we wait for "a sign," we end up being waiters for the rest of our lives.

Myth #4: It's too late; I'm too old. This something you do when you're younger.
Realizing new possibilities is a cradle-to-grave quest. Situations and people change every day and continue to change throughout our life. As long as there is change, there are new opportunities. Keep in mind that you now also have two things you had less of before: time and experience. Use them.

The Three Biggest Myths About How to Eradicate Poverty

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In their new book, Paul Polak and Mal Warwick discuss how business and entrepreneurship is the key to fighting poverty and creating lasting economic change and progress globally.

There are still unfortunately many myths about poverty and how to eradicate it. Here are the three biggest ones:

Myth #1: You can donate money to help people out of poverty

Why it's not true: Giving people money or free stuff is harmful. If it’s just a one-time thing with no guarantee of renewal, it simply reinforces the attitudes of inadequacy that hobble so many poor people. And if the giveaway is actually sustained over time, it creates dependency. Both effects are extremely undesirable. In any case, there’s just not enough money in all the foundations in the world to give away enough to the 2.7 billion people in the world who live on $2 a day or less. Poor people have to make an investment of their own time and money to move out of poverty. Only then will they have a chance to improve their lives and those of their families.


Myth #2: National economic growth can end poverty

Why it's not true: Most economists view an increase in a country’s per capita GDP as the leading indicator of poverty reduction, but this entirely misses the point. Growth in GDP inevitably boosts the income of those at the top of the economic heap, and to a limited extent those in the middle class, but it rarely trickles down to the poor at the bottom of the pyramid. Even if government resources are invested in programs to subsidize the poor, a large proportion of the money is routinely siphoned off through corruption. In the developing countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, the effect of increasing a country’s economic output is typically to widen the gap between rich and poor, not to narrow it.

Myth #3: The UN, the World Bank, and nonprofit organizations are taking care of the problem.

Why it's not true: The advocates of foreign aid and philanthropy typically insist that they are making great headway in reducing poverty in the world. However, the 2.7 billion people today who live on $2 a day or less is greater than the entire population of the planet in 1950, around the time when the global fight against poverty began. In fact, the traditional approaches to eradicating poverty have failed—because they plan from the top down, they ignore poor people’s own views of what they need, they are prey for corrupt officials, and they direct nearly all their efforts at more prosperous people in towns and cities and not among the desperately poor people who predominate in the countryside.

Five Surprising Answers to Five Common Questions About American Indians

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With the release of The Seven Paths, we celebrate the wisdom and teachings of several American Indian nations. American Indian culture has been appropriated by a number of individuals and groups who have lent their own interpretations to it. In some cases, those interpretations are incorrect, even if well-meaning. In other cases, they lead to complete misinformation.

Based on reports from the American Indian Movement, Assembly of First Nations, and the American Indian Library Association, the following five questions are those that are most often asked of their membership:

1. What percentage of American Indian lineage do I need to prove to call myself a Native American?

There exists no universally accepted rule for establishing a person's identity as an Indian. The criteria for tribal membership differs from one tribe to the next. To determine a particular tribe's criteria, one must contact that tribe directly. For its own purposes, the Bureau of the Census counts anyone an Indian who declares to be such. By recent counts, there are over 2.4 million Native Americans.


2. Isn't it offensive or not politically correct to call Native Americans as Indians?

The term "Native Americans" came into usage in the 60s -- mostly by outsiders who wanted to convey respect to the indigenous peoples. That said, the term "American Indian" is not offensive to most self-identified American Indians for two reasons:

+ The languages of the treaties and of government organizations as well as tribal rights and support groups all use the word "Indian." It is a legitimate term.

+ The term "Native American" also refers to Hawaiians and Samoans, so it is often inaccurate in terms of who is specifically being identified.


3. What criteria does the government use to "federally recognize" a tribe? What stops any native group from demanding tribal status?

A group has to contain people bound together by blood ties who are socially, politically, and religiously organized, who lived together in a defined territory, and who speak a common language or dialect. Given how challenging it can be to prove such things, the process of gaining recognition is lengthy and tedious. There are currently more than 550 recognized tribes in the United States.


4. What exactly does having "Tribal Sovereignty" mean? Are you truly a different nation?

Tribal sovereignty describes the right of federally recognized tribes to govern themselves and the existence of a government-to-government relationship with the United States. Thus a tribe is not a ward of the government, but an independent nation with the right to form its own government, adjudicate legal cases within its borders, levy taxes within its borders, establish its membership, and decide its own future fate. The federal government has a trust responsibility to protect tribal lands, assets, resources and treaty rights.


5.  How is it that American Indians can claim to be independent entities living on sovereign land but still receive payments from the federal government?

This is one of the most popular myths but it remains (unfortunately for Indians) quite untrue. Indians do not receive payments from the federal government simply because they have Indian blood. Funds distributed to a person of Indian descent may represent mineral lease income on property that is held in trust by the United States or compensation for lands taken in connection with governmental projects. Some Indian tribes receive benefits from the federal government in fulfillment of treaty obligations or for the extraction of tribal natural resources - a percentage of which may be distributed as per capita among the tribes membership.

Changing the World in Five Movements

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Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaeufer, their latest book, Leading from the Emerging Future. These movements develop the capacity for “presencing,” which is experiencing the future as if it were “wanting to be born,” explain  how we can move towards a better global future by discarding the self-centered ego-system and transforming to a whole-focused eco-system using the five movements inherent to Theory U.

The five movements are:

1. Co-initiating: Build Common Intent by stopping and listening to others and to what life calls you to do. Key stakeholders gather together with the intention of making a difference in a situation that really matters to them and to their communities. As they coalesce into a core group, they maintain a common intention around their purpose, the people they want to involve, and the process they want to use. The context that allows such a core group to form is a process of deep listening—listening to what life calls you and others to do.

2. Co-sensing: Observe, Observe, Observe and go to the places of most potential and listen with your mind and heart wide open. The limiting factor of transformational change is not a lack of vision or ideas, but an inability to sense—that is, to see deeply, sharply, and collectively. When the members of a group see together with depth and clarity, they become aware of their own collective potential—almost as if a new, collective organ of sight was opening up. Goethe put it eloquently: “Every object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception within us.”

3. Presencing: Connect to The Source of Inspiration, and Will, and go to the place of silence and allow the inner knowing to emerge. This entails crossing  a threshold that requires a “letting go” of everything that is not essential. At the same time that we drop the non-essential aspects of the self, we also open ourselves to new aspects of our highest possible future self. The essence of presencing is the experience of the coming in of the new and the transformation of the old. Once a group crosses this threshold, nothing remains the same. Individual members and the group as a whole begin to operate with a heightened level of energy and sense of future possibility.

4. Co-creating: Prototype the New in living examples to explore the future by doing.  The prototype is part of the sensing and discovery process in which we explore the future by doing rather than by thinking and reflecting. The co-creation movement of the U journey results in a set of small living examples that explore the future by doing. It also results in a vibrant and rapidly widening network of change-makers who leverage their learning across prototypes and who help each other deal with whatever innovation challenges they face.

5. Co-evolving: Embody the New in Ecosystems that facilitate seeing and acting from the whole. Review what has been learned from the prototypes and then decide which prototypes might have the highest impact on the system or situation at hand. Coming up with a sound assessment at this stage often requires the involvement of stakeholders from other institutions and sectors. Very often, what you think you will create at the beginning of the U process is quite different from what eventually emerges. The co-evolving movement results in an innovation ecosystem that connects high -- leverage prototype initiatives with the institutions and players that can help take it to the next level of piloting and scaling, and eventually, global.

Five Famous Women Who Suffered from "Impostor" Moments

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In her new book, author and highly successful businesswoman Joyce Roche addresses how many successful leaders -- especially women -- suffer from the Impostor Syndrome where they feel undeserving of their accolades and achievements and actually question their competence.

This has been a factor for all great leaders throughout history. Here is a list of just five world-famous women leaders who each dealt with their own version of the syndrome and questioned their competence despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary:

1. Mother Teresa (1910 --1997): An icon of God's work on Earth, Nobel Prize winner, and global symbol of compassion, she was also, as was recognized after her death, unsteady in her faith. In letters she wrote to friends and others, Mother Teresa questioned her ability to perform or minister to the needy because she had no faith and confessed to feeling "Repulsed, empty, no love, no zeal." She felt she was a hypocrite and possibly an atheist who was doing the work of a God who did not exist.

Despite her reservations, she never stopped working and caring for the poor and diseased until the end. Her work is even more inspiring and heroic given how she questioned herself so sharply but remained committed to her work.


2. Golda Meir (1898 -- 1978): She was the fourth Prime Minister of Israel and remains a legend to her people as well as admirers globally for her leadership of a troubled nation. She enjoyed an illustrious political career in service as Israel's Labor Minister and Foreign Minister prior to taking on the role of Prime Minister in 1969. Israel won its six-day war against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and grew  prosperous under her government, but the Yom Kippur War just a few years later impacted Meir greatly. Though Israel went on to win the war, with the U.S.'s assistance, the government was severely criticized for its alleged unpreparedness. Much of the blame was directed towards Meir.

Insiders reported that Meir questioned her capability to govern following the end of the Yom Kippur War despite her previous successes. Seeing the people's sudden turn as a reflection of poor leadership, she resigned from government. Many scholars have argued that Meir's decision to resign was too radical and self-critical given the sum of her achievements prior to the war. She remains to this day the original "Iron Lady" of world politics (well before Margaret Thatcher earned the moniker).


3. Madeleine Albright (1937 -- ) Though she was the first ever female Secretary of State and had numerous achievements to her credit, she was dismissed as politically correct window dressing for the Clinton administration upon appointment. Albright's battle with naysayers in government took its toll on her marriage as she felt unworthy of also being a wife and mother. At one particularly low point (as she relates in her memoir, Madame Secretary), she tolerated a husband who had openly taken up with a younger woman but called every day to complain how he could not choose between her and his new lover. So low was her image of self that she even conceded to her husband's plan as to how he would choose between the two: "If he got the Pulitzer, he would stay with me. If not, he would leave and we would get a divorce."

Albright recognized later (after they divorced) just how much she lacked confidence in herself as a spouse to even have allowed such a scenario. She uses this story often to illustrate how ascending to power can often cause women to question their competence and ability in other arenas as well. 

 
4. Corazon Aquino (1933--2009): Became the first female President of the Phillipines when she defeated Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. She made incredible strides to rebuild the nation after the corruption and mismanagement of the Marcos administration had almost doomed the nation. There were numerous coup attempts and corruption charges but she weathered them all and remained a favorite of the people. She was, however, unable to bring about a lot of the social reform she had hoped for and her dissatisfaction with her own efforts is well documented. She finally stepped down in 1992.

Aquino was the people's choice even at the time she stepped down, and remains a national figure of reverence. Many argue that Aquino saw her inability to bring about reform in the face of such opposition from the established powers as a personal failing but failed to recognize all that she had achieved for the people despite the limitations placed upon her.


5. Indira Gandhi (1917--1984): When she was elected Prime Minister of India in 1966, a TIME magazine cover line read "Troubled India in a Woman's Hands." Brought up under the close watch of her father Jawaharlal Nehru and just decades after British rule ended, Gandhi was able to battle through recession, famine, scandals, a civil war in Pakistan, and the controversial creation of the new nation of Bangladesh. Being the leader of a nation steeped in patriarchal culture and values (even her own father and his fellow patriots who rallied against the British were known for not including women in their groups) always proved to be a challenge and she voiced her insecurities and fears about being "a woman in my father's job" to her advisors quite often.

At the time of her assassination in 1984, Gandhi was the world's longest-serving Prime Minister -- a distinction she holds to this day having served four terms in office. Three million people -- including the heads of state of the most powerful nations in the world from all continents -- attended her funeral.

Five Huge Software Blunders

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In his latest book, Mike Song teaches you how to use software and technology in the most effective ways possible to minimize your labor and time while maximizing quality and results. All of his tips and instructions have been tested multiple times to make sure they work.

Of course, not everyone has been that lucky with software and tech, and here are just five of the biggest software blunders in recent history:

1. The Most Expensive Hyphen In Software History
One of the earliest software fails occurred in 1962 with NASA’s Mariner 1 spacecraft on route to Venus. Before it even left the Earth’s atmosphere, ground control, while trying to correct a steering problem, activated the self-destruct button. Rumour has it that there was an errant hyphen in the software program that caused the problem. Whatever caused it, Mariner 1 self-destructed and ended up throwing $134 million in today’s money into the fire (literally).

2. The Monumental Windows 98 Fail
This goes down as probably one of the most embarrassing on record because Microsoft founder Bill Gates was the person being shown the demonstration (along with hundreds of others in the audience) at Comdex '98, a national computer conference. As Microsoft marketing guru Chris Capossela was showing to the audience how to connect drivers for a scanner utilising Windows 98, the dreaded  Blue Screen Of Death appeared. (The Blue Screen of Death is non-recoverable and thus the system crashed.) To his credit, Gates rolled along with it all and even cracked a joke.

3. The Y2K Bug that Wasn't
This will go down as the biggest software malfunction that never was because it was fueled entirely by human hysteria. A perceived inability by computers to recognize the year 2000 as a new century had people worrying how payrolls wouldn’t be met, files would get lost in the ether of date confusion and planes falling out of the sky as the clock struck midnight on January 31, 1999. Millions were spent trying to fix the problem, and eventually it was solved. The fix that cost so many millions? Expanding two digit years to four digit years in programs, files and databases. Five minutes, in most cases, to update.

4. Windows...Again.
Introduced in 2006, Windows Genuine Advantage was never a popular initiative with Microsoft's customers. All it did was help Microsoft root out software piracy. In that task, it was as vigilant as, well, an overenthusiastic vigilante. In  late-August 2007, it found piracy everywhere it looked -- even among thousands of legitimate Windows customers. But it got worse: on Friday, Aug. 24, someone on the WGA team accidentally installed bug-filled update on the main servers. So for 19 hours, the server flagged thousands of WGA clients across the globe as illegal, told tens of thousands of Windows XP customers  they were running pirated software and remotely turned off features on tens of thousands more Windows Vista users.

5. Black Monday: Software Blamed for Human Error
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Black Monday (1987), Wall Street's greatest ever loss in a single day, was all the fault of bugs in the computer models.

Except that it wasn't.

Program trading was relatively new and harder to understand back then, and people with diminished pension funds were anxious to find a scapegoat they could really lay the blame on. It was easier to point to a faulty program than to understand overvaluation, lack of liquidity, international disputes about exchange rates, and the market's notoriously bipolar psychology. Of course, program trading did contribute to the precipitous fall of American markets, but the trading programs just did as they were instructed. The fact that they sold as the financial markets collapsed around them wasn't a bug, it was a feature -- just not a well-thought-out one.