MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (81 page)

SECTION 7

JUST DO IT, ENJOY IT, AND SHARE IT!

CHAPTER 7.1

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHTER THAN YOU THINK

The point of living is to believe the best is yet to come.

—PETER USTINOV

Why do most people pursue wealth? It’s because they’re after a greater quality of life. And one thing I know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that anybody can deal with a tough today if he or she feels certain that tomorrow has greater promise.

We all need a compelling future.

So if you’re wondering why we would take time to talk about the future and technological breakthroughs in a financial book, it’s
because technology is a
hidden asset
that every day is compounding its capacity to enrich your life.

There are breakthroughs occurring today and in the months and short years to come that will revolutionize the quality of your life and the lives of everyone else on earth. This tide of technology will offer the opportunity for all boats to rise.

And in financial terms, you know what’s really great? The cost of technology is decreasing while its capacity is geometrically expanding! What does that mean for you? It means that even if you start building wealth late in life, you will likely still have a great quality of life in the future, for even less money than you might think.

Also,
learning about these trends in technologies can awaken you to some of the greatest investment opportunities of your lifetime. These technologies are growing exponentially. The time to pay attention to them is right now.

My hope is that this chapter will also inspire you to take greater care of
yourself and your family, not only financially but also perhaps physically as well. Without physical health, there is no wealth. Being around long enough to take advantage of some of these huge advances in technology should be a priority—especially after you hear about some of the changes that are unfolding as we speak.

So let’s take a brief journey together and explore the cutting edge of our technological future. I’ll say in advance: this chapter takes an unabashedly positive view. But it’s not just based on my enthusiasm—but rather reflects the work of some of the greatest scientists on the face of the earth. Not those who just predict, but those who deliver what they predict. Individuals who have done everything from decode the human genome, to design the first digital voice recognition system, to develop commercial space shuttles that fly people back and forth to the International Space Station.

Now, I acknowledge that many people have a different, more skeptical view of technology. And perhaps they’ll be right. Some look into the future and see a
Terminator
-style dystopia of killer robots and genetically altered Frankenfoods. Others look forward to a world of flying cars, like they had in
The Jetsons
; or android helpers, like
Star Wars
’s C-3PO; or meat and vegetables that can be grown from single cells to feed the world’s hungry. None of these extreme scenarios has come to pass yet. I choose to look at how technology will be used to make a massive difference in the quality of our lives. I also understand that people often fear new technologies and worry that we’re going too fast.

After all, there has always been a “dark side” to these advances—often because these technologies initially put people out of jobs until they adapt to new forms of employment. As Steven Rattner, the influential financier and columnist, pointed out in the
New York Times,
even Queen Elizabeth I of England refused to patent a 16th-century knitting machine because it would put her “poor subjects” out of work. But according to Rattner, “The trick is not to protect old jobs . . . but to create new ones. And since the invention of the wheel, that’s what has occurred.”

Most of the time, these new tools have been used to enhance human life. And today some of the biggest challenges in the world, from too much carbon dioxide in the air, to a lack of fresh water, to a scarcity of farmland, are being solved by new technologies. And all this seems to be happening
overnight. But throughout history, there has also been a minority who will take any tool or technology and use it as a weapon. Electricity can light up a city or kill someone. But there are millions more streetlights than electric chairs. A Boeing jetliner can carry us across oceans or be used as a bomb to murder thousands—but there are millions more flights than hijackings.

It’s natural for human beings to fear the new and unknown, and to focus on worst-case scenarios. Our brains are wired for survival, and that’s how we’ve made it as a species. But our imaginations can also hold us back. Science fiction has made many fear futuristic technologies, like artificial intelligence. But actual scientists and futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, and Juan Enriquez see advanced technologies as an opportunity for humanity to evolve and transform into something better.

So if you’re irritated by an optimistic future, you should move on to the next chapter! But if you’re a person who is truly interested in knowing how technology is shaping our lives, I think this will help you understand what’s available and what’s coming. The way I look at it, you can choose to be fearful about the future, or you can embrace it. But nothing is going to change  it.

Why?
Because the future is already here.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

—ALAN KAY

Every ten minutes in America someone is horribly burned. They’re rushed to the hospital in searing pain—one of the most intense pains a human body can suffer. The nurses scrub away the blistered and charred flesh and cover the wound with cadaver skin to keep the person from dying of infection. Can you imagine the skin off a dead body put on top of your own?! If the patient survives, the scarring can be brutal. I’m sure you’ve seen faces, arms, and legs scarred beyond recognition. Sometimes there are multiple surgeries, and healing can take years.

So imagine how one night Matt Uram, a 40-year-old state trooper, finds himself about to become another one of those grim statistics. His life altered forever.

How? He’s next to a bonfire when someone throws a cup of gasoline on the flames, and the burns cover his right arm and the right side of his head and face. The doctors and nurses move fast, cleaning off the blistered skin, disinfecting Matt’s wounds, applying salves. Normally he would be in the burn unit for weeks or months, going through the same agonizing process twice a day. Instead, a team of specialists goes to work with a new technique. They harvest a layer of healthy cells from unburned patches of his own skin. No cadaver skin for Matt! These cells are cultured, and before long, a spray gun is gently painting the wounds with a solution of Matt’s own stem cells.

Three days later, his arms and face are completely healed. (And this miracle has to be seen to be believed! Go to
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI
and see the difference.) There’s barely a scar visible on him. I know it sounds like a scene from a sci-fi film. But it’s a real story that took place in Pittsburgh just a few years ago.

While the technique that healed Matt Uram is still in clinical trials in the United States, a similar stem cell procedure has already been used on hundreds of burn victims in Europe and Australia. Amazing, isn’t it?! Now there’s even a “bio-pen” that allows surgeons to draw healthy cells on layers of bone and cartilage. The cells multiply and grow into nerves, muscle, and bones, healing the damaged section. The technology allows the surgeon to place cells wherever he or she wants them, in an instant. And this is just another one of the incredible new therapies coming online and becoming more affordable for everyone.

If you hadn’t already noticed:
the world we live in today is a place of everyday miracles, and change is happening so fast that sometimes we don’t even notice it.
Or maybe we just take it for granted.

But if you were to describe the world of 2015 to a person back in 1980, just 35 years ago, he would think what you’re doing is magic! Spraying on stem cells? Hell, it would be a miracle just to talk to someone on the phone while you were driving in your car, right?

We’re used to the idea that we can predict tomorrow by looking at what happened today or yesterday. But that can’t be done anymore. Until very “recently,” change was very rare, and so slow that it was measured in eras: the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and so on. Now change is exponential. That
means it’s speeding up, making huge leaps forward in shorter periods of time. It means we’re making tools that can transform the quality of our lives faster and better, and they’re available to just about everyone.

The average person today already has options the richest pharaoh in Egypt never dreamed of.
Imagine what he would have given to be able to fly in the sky in a chair or in a bed to another part of the world in a few hours, instead of months fighting the oceans? Now you can do that for $494 on Virgin Atlantic Airways.

Even a pharaoh couldn’t spend $200 million to make a movie to entertain himself for two hours. And yet every week, multiple new films are coming out that we can enjoy in the theater for $10 (or $9.99 per month on Netflix).

Let’s face it, we’re living in one of the most extraordinary times on earth. We’ve seen the lifespan of human beings in the last 100 years go from 31 years old to 67 years old—more than doubling. In the same time, the average per capita income (adjusted for inflation) of every person on this planet tripled. One hundred years ago, the majority of Americans used to spend 43% of each day working just to get food. Now, because of advances in agriculture and distribution, it’s 7%.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL!

The first time I met President Bill Clinton back in the early 1990s, I vividly remember sitting down with him and saying, “You know, Mr. President, maybe there’s a way we could communicate electronically.” He looked puzzled, so I said, “I’ve started using this new thing called email. I’ve got an account on AOL. Do you have one?” And the president said, “Oh, I’ve heard about that!” But there was no email account for the president of the United States back then. Now the phone that an Amazonian tribesman carries around the jungle has more instant computing power than Clinton had at his disposal as leader of the free world. He can go online to buy supplies for his cows or pay his child’s school fees. He can translate languages. If he wants, he can access free courses in economics from Yale and math from MIT. We’re living in a whole different universe now, and we’re just at the beginning of the beginning.

And things are getting better, faster, every day. “The future is going to be a whole lot better than you think,” says my dear friend Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation, aerospace engineer, medical doctor, entrepreneur, and all-around great human being. “Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation, in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet.”

What does this mean for you? It means that even if you screw up and don’t follow through on anything you’ve learned in these pages, in the future you’ll still be able to enjoy a better quality of life than you ever imagined, even if you don’t have a large income. And for those who do, the possibilities are limitless.

The key to abundance is meeting limited circumstances with unlimited thoughts.

—MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

Technology is going to change what we think of as scarcity. It’s the common denominator that makes us fearful. The idea that there won’t be enough of what we need and what we value: water, food, money, resources, time, space, joy, and love. Why do people want to be wealthy? They believe if they are, they’ll always have enough, that they’ll never have to go without. It’s a fear that’s hardwired into our brains.

But scarcity doesn’t have to be a permanent condition. Technology can change it.
Did you know that there was a time when the rarest, most precious metal on Earth was . . . aluminum? That’s right! Separating the element from clay used to be incredibly difficult and expensive. Aluminum was the ultimate status symbol in 19th-century France. At an imperial banquet, Napoléon III served the king of Siam with aluminum utensils instead of the usual gold. But by the end of the century, scientists figured out how to process aluminum on a mass scale, and the light, inexpensive metal suddenly flooded the market.

Peter Diamandis likes to use the story of aluminum to point out that scarcity is a function of our ability—or lack of ability—to access resources. He wrote an extraordinary book,
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think,
which covers in 300 or so pages the concepts that this chapter is trying to capture in just a few. Here’s a great metaphor from the book about how technology can overcome scarcity: “Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit,” Peter writes. “If I pluck all of the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit—oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, I’ve suddenly got new reach. Problem solved. Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism.”