Yes, there is a war and off course we have pandemics, and we have volatile markets, and we have scarce energy, and we battle the CO2 emission excesses, and a host of other challenges. Evolution shaped our brains to be acutely aware of any potential dangers—so our news media and politicians focus on the grim to capture your mindshare. This has a profound impact on our mindset: it literally shuts off our ability to take in good news.
So, what’s the solution to this challenge?
We must develop an Abundance Mindset—it means shifting your mindset from cynicism to hope, from pessimism to optimism. Making this mindset shift is especially important for entrepreneurs, who need to see opportunities where others see problems. Matt Ridley is an award-winning author, of The Rational Optimist. As Ridley puts it: “It’s incredible, this moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.” There seems to be a combination of cognitive biases and evolutionary psychology as the core of the problem. Can it be that we have a cognitive bias “loss aversion”—a tendency for people to regret a loss more than a similar gain—as the bias with the most impact on abundance.
How often do we not see that Loss aversion is what keeps people stuck in ruts. It’s an unwillingness to change bad habits for fear that the change will leave them in a worse place than before. Instead of being fearful, rather check the facts. Most people consider flying in an aeroplane dangerous, facts tell us that this mode of transport is substantially safer than travelling by car.
HOW DATA DRIVES OPTIMISM
About 25 years ago, Ridley started noticing that the doom predicted by these experts was still nowhere in evidence. Acid rain was the first sign that the facts were not matching the fanfare. Once considered our planet’s most dire environmental threat, acid rain develops because burning fossil fuels releases sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, causing an acidic shift in the pH balance of precipitation—hence the name.
First noticed by English scientist Robert Angus Smith in 1852, acid rain took another century to blossom from scientific curiosity to presumed catastrophe. But by the late 1970s, the writing was on the wall. In 1982 Canada’s minister of the environment, John Roberts, summed up what many were thinking, telling Time magazine: “Acid rain is one of the most devastating forms of pollution imaginable, an insidious malaria of the biosphere.”
Observation of the facts let to the discovery that “It wasn’t just that the trees weren’t dying, it was that they never had been dying—not in any unusual numbers and not because of acid rain. Forests that were supposed to have vanished altogether were healthier than ever.”
In America, fearful handwringing produced everything from amendments to the Clean Air Act to the adoption of catalytic converters for automobiles. The results were a reduction in sulphur dioxide emission from 31 million tons in 1970 to just 1.8 million tons in 2021—a 94% reduction. Nitrogen oxide emissions declined from over 27 million tons to 7.6 million tons during the same period.
The absence of acid rain got Ridley curious. He began looking into other dark prophecies and found a similar pattern: “Predictions about population and famine were seriously wrong. Age-adjusted cancer rates, for example, are falling, not rising. Furthermore, I noticed that people who pointed these facts out were heavily criticized but not refuted.”
All of this led Ridley to another question: If the negative predictions weren’t coming true, what about the veracity of more common assumptions, such as the idea that the world is getting worse? The result of this inquiry became the backbone of his book The Rationale Optimist, which makes the case that optimism rather than pessimism is the sounder philosophical position for accessing our species’ chances at a brighter tomorrow.
Let us take a step back and be objective: We are living in the most exciting period of human history.
The incredible news today, as compared to even a few decades ago, is that exponential technologies are giving each of us unparalleled access to knowledge, experts, and global communications at little-to-no cost.
One the best ways to see this is to look at how the internet revolution has continued to rapidly spread across the planet. In 2010, we had just under 2 billion people connected to the internet. We’re now at 5 billion. By 2030, that number will rise to at least 7.5 billion—or 90% of the planet. Coupled with 100 billion sensors, the incredible advancement of AI, robots, and much more, we’re rapidly creating an intelligent brain for the entire planet. This intelligence layer enables us to solve global problems by mobilizing resources around the globe.
This is at the core of what it means to have an Abundance Mindset: the idea that next year will bring more opportunities than this year.
The job as an entrepreneur is to consistently turn scarcity into abundance.
The question is: What challenge are you going to solve? What will you create? We should strive to obtain mastery in four specific mindsets: an Abundance Mindset; an Exponential Mindset; a Longevity Mindset; and a Moonshot Mindset.
A Moonshot Mindset is going 10X bigger when everyone else is pursuing a 10% incremental change. Moon-shot are at the intersection of tremendous opportunities, breakthrough technology, and a radical solution. A Moonshot Mindset allows you to make a “dent in the Universe.” Elon Musk is an excellent example of this way of thinking.
“Let’s flip the paradigm and begin with the imagined future state and work backward to the present. This is how we get to moon-shot thinking.”
There are some powerful verbs that describes a specific action one can take:
Solve, Inspire, Transform, Impact, Create
The following is one example of what awaits us. In December 2022, scientists at California's National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced they achieved a net energy gain in a fusion reactor for the first time (resulting in a net energy gain of 1.5 megajoules). In this fusion reaction, two hydrogen nuclei are fused to form Helium. A small amount of mass is converted into enormous amounts of energy, according to Einstein's formula E = mc². Research on fusion has been pursued for decades.
To be comfortable in the world of the future we must create it. The Latin cogito, ergo sum, usually translated into English as "I think, therefore I am", by René Descartes's philosophy, he originally published it in 1637. If one is to think, one may as well think big.
My wish for our readers for 2023: Abundance to you.
Corrie Kruger is an Independent Analyst
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