there's a question that's been on my mind even burning a hole in my heart for a while do you feel like too much is changing too fast and it's harder and harder to keep up maybe it's the news or never feeling like you have enough time to read and know all that you ought to after all 90% of all the data in the world was created in the last 2 years maybe it's what to study or what your kids should study given that a college degree no longer guarantees a good job 35% of all the
skills deemed important today will have changed in five years and automation poor tends to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs within our lifetimes maybe it's what growing old will look like or maybe it's simply new apps for your phone that completely change how you used to do things I see and feel this in my own life every day is a deluge of new information no two days are the same I find myself living the cliche that change is my only constant I see this with my friends who wonder whether their children protesting is the new
normal or when the next climate calamity will hit where they live there's no way to really know today what tomorrow holds I reckon many of you feel this too so many things are changing so fast and our utter inability to predict or control them for the past few years I've been diving deep into this sense of not knowing and continuous change I call it flux today I'd like to offer you what I've learned but first how did we get here how did this world of flux come about my view is it for the last few
centuries we've lived in a fixed world by fixed I mean permanent predictable controllable or at least for those with a shred of power the belief we could control things and change them with our own sheer will so politically we created borders to separate people and cultures in business we built bigger-than-life factories with a vision they'd last forever we structured most corporations as top-down hierarchies with fixed chains of command and walled gardens of control at home we relied on a tight-knit nuclear family and sacred bonds of kinship these bonds often extended to work as well if
you came from a family of cobblers you are a cobbler if you came from a family of bankers you were a banker if you had the privilege of studying for a different profession regardless you could aspire to and often rely on lifetime employment and when change did happen it took longer to take root keeping up with slower the effects of the first Industrial Revolution took more than 100 years to be fully felt that's five generations in this era in nearly every sense we developed a fixed mindset a state of mind that assumes that we and
the world don't change and yet today's world is constant flux things are changing far more quickly than they used to no wonder it feels hard to keep up there's a big disconnect nation-states are in flux of the ten largest populations in the world today only two or nation-states eight our digital platforms borders are in flux true we have more physical border barriers than ever from seven at the end of World War two to 77 today yet technology is searing through borders that historically policies work visas and lack of connectivity kept us apart climate is in
flux as temperatures rise and glaciers melt we have a sense that environmental crisis is approaching but we don't know exactly when the tipping point will hit business is in flux the average lifetime of a corporation has plummeted from more than 60 years in the 1950s to less than 20 years today CEO tenure has plunged as well with leaders forced out by impatient shareholders after a year or two expectations are in flux they're rising and diminishing simultaneously on the one hand were capable achieving more than ever with unprecedented tools and technologies at our fingertips on the
other hand in some fundamental ways were less equipped than ever to survive think about it the smartphone is only 12 years old it has revolutionized almost every aspect of life and made us far more dependent perhaps most of all the future is in flux a predictable life cycle no longer holds we're even starting to edit species and it's not just change itself it's the pace of change any one of these shifts would be hard enough to grasp much less keep up with but all of them at once and accelerating velocity like holy-moly know right and
yet this is it this is who and where we are today and so our minds fall into anxiety we worry about today and fear the future the more change and uncertainty we experience the more we grasp for what's no longer there 25 years ago this summer I was finishing my junior year at university I was studying in the UK preparing to travel around Europe with big plans to do my PhD the phone rang in my flat this was still the era of landlines and I picked it up to hear my sisters voice on the other
end why would she be calling me I thought she's several years older than me we weren't particularly close at the time April are you sitting down she asked I need you to sit down i sat down on the reading chair next to the phone and waited for what she had to say April something horrible has happened mom and dad were killed in a car accident you need to come home I stumbled faltered didn't know what to say I tried to scream but nothing came out then I tried again and it shook the house in that
instant whatever I thought my future was going to be vanished my entire world became flux twenty-five years later we're all living in a state of permanent impermanence maybe it's your job your kids your bank account or the news some aspect of reality as you've known it isn't holding together when my parents died I never would have imagined that I'd be up here talking about that day nor did I have any idea of what it meant to let go not of the past but of the future I had to do it I had to let go
of the future I had in mind and the future my parents wanted for me little did I know that in the process I was planting the seeds of a superpower back then an ability to control and predict was seen as the Holy Grail being comfortable with uncertainty was a weakness embracing impermanence was a deficit so my parents premature deaths were the epitome of what we feared now I don't mean to underestimate the difficulties of that loss yes it was hard and yes I missed them but if I continued to believe that I could control my
future or death or goals and expectations set by society or the transformation of something beloved I wouldn't be here today and yet the more I see people everywhere grasping to a reality that no longer exists the more I realize that only by getting out of our own way letting go of those things that are no longer fixed and in so many ways never were can the future have the space and oxygen it needs to emerge and I have three simple suggestions for how to develop what I call a flux mindset the ability to thrive amidst
constant change my first suggestion is to look to other cultures other cultures can teach us a lot about impermanence change and flux growing up my father was my best friend and a geography teacher at our kitchen table I had a plastic placemat like many kids do to contain spills my place and I didn't have a cat or a ball on it though it had a map of the world every morning over breakfast my dad and I would play the capital game he'd name a country and over time I learned the Capitals names like Addis Ababa
ulaanbataar and Wagga dugu were magical to say and I dreamed of visiting these far-off lands one day my dad would often say the world is bigger than your own backyard go explore it you might even find that it has some of the answers to the questions you asked at home some years after my dad died I visited these places I still remember my first sunrise in Ethiopia because my dad was everywhere his spirit was in my pocket his voice was on my shoulder in Mongolia his advice really hit home Mongolia is a nomadic country most
of its population moves and rebuilds their homes known as Gare or yurts three times a year in harmony with the seasons they do this every year basically forever this is living impermanence on a nationwide scale does this make Mongolians anxious or fearful of course not it makes them strong and resilient and their culture endure now I'm not saying that nomadic life is easy or somehow the answer my point is simple this mindset is grooved to adapt to continuous change it has a more fluid nimble relationship with control and with nature in a world of flux
this will serve whoever has it extremely well and it's not just Mongolia lots of places in India the Andes the South Pacific and across Africa shed light on this don't wait learn from them my second suggestion is to expand your peripheral vision literally and figuratively peripheral vision is the ability to see objects in motion outside your direct line of vision I think of it as the awareness of everything you're not looking at did you know that when you're anxious your peripheral vision shrinks so expanding your peripheral vision can literally help reduce anxiety and what's more
we can train ourselves to expand our peripheral vision you want to try okay here's an easy way to start you're all looking at me right now without looking sideways what color is the person to your right wearing now you can look alright okay next ready follow me hold your hands out the front I like this now place your thumbs on your ears like this this is so fun for me to watch now move your hands to the side so that you can't see them anymore oh this is even more fun I've been doing them to
this moment of getting to see you all like this now begin to wiggle your fingers and move them in just so that you can see them at the edges just so you can see them okay now that's your peripheral vision now hold on a minute pay attention are you noticing things you couldn't see before even if only slightly do you notice your awareness awakening now when my parents died it was as though I lost my frontal vision in order to survive I had to expand my peripheral vision of life and today I have a far
larger family of choice than I would have had if my parents lived in losing my parents I gained a community but only because I focused on what and who was just beyond my range of vision don't think about it whether it's stretching into new relationships or imagining a more creative less traditional career how am I you expand your peripheral vision to see new horizons and to see differently my third suggestion is to learn to let go of the future you know when we talk about letting go we always talk about the past but no one
talks about the future now the lucky ones of us who are excited about the future we still know it's full of unknowns and nothing is guaranteed but many of us fear the future and in so doing we get stuck fixated paralyzed trapped in a situation we can't control the more we grasp to what's no longer working the more were fluxed now I know this notion of letting go of the future may sound paradoxical but I actually believe it is the essential difference between people who thrive and people who crumble in a world of constant flux
as Joseph Campbell says the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek parents come to me asking how to help their kids pursue a more meaningful less traditional path professionals ask me how to navigate a future of work that feels like a minefield of unknowns when these people ask they know nothing about my backstory now I encourage them to begin by cultivating a flux mindset this way of thinking and being that so comfortable was changed that you can't help but embrace it as the greatest magic and mystery of life true I learned how
to let go of the future through tragedy I was forced into a flux mindset you could say by circumstances beyond my control but that's not why I'm here today today my mission is to help people do this without tragedy because not only is it 100% possible and essential for human flourishing it's also a lot more fun now to be clear letting go does not mean giving up or somehow failing with all due respect to failure I am NOT talking about military surrender with a white flag instead I mean surrender in terms of the yoga principle
of a pari Gras which means non attachment and non grasping being comfortable with change and being able to let go these are actually our strongest human strengths their superpowers in today's world the pace of change has never been as fast as it is today and yet it will never again be this slow now I can imagine my dad is in this room right now with us and if I were back at the kitchen table with him and my three-year-old self or any child or adult today I would nurture this flux mindset I would encourage having
goals and celebrating their evolution I would expose her to as many cultures as I possibly could I would practice expanding our peripheral vision together and I would remind her that a flux mindset is her special superpower so to her to all of you to everyone watching don't wait to let go thank you [Applause] [Music]
