4 Taking Risks and Building Resilience on the Path to Innovation
4 Taking Risks and Building Resilience on the Path to Innovation
Dana Coester
Finding Joy in Taking Risks
“We don’t know what will happen, but let’s try this!”
Resiliency—the ability to weather change and bounce back from failure—is an essential mindset for entrepreneurs. In innumerable blog posts and articles, industry leaders describe resilience as a cornerstone to innovation, frequently citing Thomas Edison’s famous quote: “I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”
Resilience is more than a buzzword; it’s a survival skill. And it’s a skill that you will need to develop to become successful at navigating today’s dynamic business environment. With predictions suggesting that today’s worker may hold more than twelve jobs in their lifetime, you will need to build your capacity for resilience for the future. Sometimes you are forced to be resilient when dealing with an uncertain or difficult situation, such as losing your job or having to relocate. But while life experiences lay the groundwork, here are a few additional perspectives you can explore to build on your core of resiliency.
“The future is on top of us.”
One of the first steps in building resiliency is to fully appreciate the magnitude and pace of change that technology drives across almost all fields. This insight will even give you an edge over entrenched leaders, who continue to underestimate the pace of change[1] in their industries. Read carefully and internalize this bold statement about exponential change from Ray Kurzweil’s now cult-classic 2001 essay, Law of Accelerating Returns:[2]
“Human culture will change in the next 100 years as much as it has changed in the past 25,000 years.”
According to Kurzweil, the default setting within organizations for anticipating change is based on an intuitive linear view of progress—the idea that change happens at a steady and predictable pace with just a few dramatic turns. This false perception results in consistently underestimating change, which can happen at a far more accelerated rate. In fact, Kurzweil described the far-reaching implications of what the “acceleration of acceleration” would mean for industries grappling with technology-driven change, anticipating the profound disruption to come in the years since 2001.
The gist is that all exponential change is flat for a very long period of time—but exponential change always reaches a point where the graph becomes vertical.
We are at the point where the curve goes vertical.
You may ask, why does 100 years from now matter if you’re just looking to start your own business a few years from now? If you were on this curve back in 1980, and you were making plans for your future, you can see that the location of the future was exactly where you’d expect it—far off on a gentle and still relatively flat slope.
But if you’re at the point where the graph becomes vertical, you need to ask yourself, “Where does the future lie now?”
A young media college student in an ent