How to re-invent yourself in times of constant change
OK, so its day three of the second Trump administration and the world hasn’t come to an end yet, but there’s still time. Admittedly things have already gotten a bit weird, with Al Capone named as Chief Gangster and Daffy Duck as Secretary of Defense, and there’s Mr. Magoo the Muskox to keep a sharp eye on things, but since Putin secretly helped Donald to win his first election at least World War Three hasn’t erupted yet. However, there is still time.
If the world seems to be going backward, and everything feels very weird, that’s because it is. Think of it as Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. What is up is actually down, black is white and right is wrong, and lying is the same as telling the truth. What part of that don’t you understand? You need to get with it or you are going to get left behind.
I confess I am a step ahead of you because I have been through all this weirdness before. Long ago and far away, which means a decade ago, I wrote a book called Forever Young; How to Re-invent Yourself in Times of Constant Change. Ostensibly it was a biography of a very weird guy named Frank Ogden, who billed himself as Dr. Tomorrow, a “futurist,” and certainly one of a kind.
I wrote weekly cover stories for a Vancouver magazine at that time. I met with Frank three times a week for about three hours at a time for a year, which added up to too much to learn all at one time. I learned more than I bargained for and I am still processing much of the information. Let’s start at the beginning, when I walked through the front door of his “floating cyberden,” as he described his houseboat moored at Coal Harbour Marina in Vancouver. A sign hung on the wall right next to the front door where you couldn’t miss it. “It’s not the strongest nor the most intelligent of the species that survives. It’s the ones most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin.
That was Frank’s own personal mantra. Everything he talked about (with speeches at $10,000 per hour, Frank was the highest paid speaker in the history of the National Speaker’s Bureau) referred to constant change. “You’ve got to learn to live with uncertainty and be comfortable with it. Those who succeed in the future will be those who learn to walk on quicksand and dance with electrons.”
The subtitle of the book (Re-inventing yourself in a time of constant change) is a reflection of Frank’s own bizarre life, which included about two dozen different careers until the age of 80 when he re-invented himself as a futurist. The Amazing Ogden was a pilot, salesman, LSD therapist, art college instructor, submarine owner, voodoo researcher, rock radio station manager, telepathy explorer and cyber-guru who changed careers constantly like a magician changes hats. For Ogden, life was not a journey but an adventure.
When computers became commonplace starting in the mid-1990s, nearing age 80 Frank was already computer literate. People paid big money and lined up to listen to his speeches, which evolved many topics, but it all came back down to adaptation. “The only constant in life is change. Learn to love it. The next big step is into chaos. As the rate of change accelerates, the result will appear chaotic to the uninitiated. But there is elegant order in chaos. Few so far have learned to recognize it and profit from it. This is where the future lies.”
The future is now upon us. We live in the Age of Trump, where little makes any sense and predictions become impossible. “In times of chaos, panic or rapid change, the bizarre rapidly becomes acceptable,” said Frank. If Donald J. Trump becoming President of the USA, after his first term proved that he is totally nuts, is not bizarre then I don’t know what bizarre is. Forever Young offers readers a “how to” guidebook for adaptation to constant change and personal success in a world where nothing stays the same for long. The ancient question of “survival of the fittest” becomes more a question of adaptation and ingenuity to unpredictable circumstance.
Ogden passed away before Trump emerged from the rabbit hole where the Mad Hatter led everyone on a merry chase to nowhere, but he accurately predicted that such a bizarre thing could easily happen and probably would. It makes me nervous that Donnie Boy figured out long ago that being bizarre was the road to success, which may mean he adapted to change before the rest of us knew what the hell was going on. Truth be told, I still don’t know what’s going on. I think I may need to go read my own book again just to make sense of it all.
https://www.amazon.ca/FOREVER-YOUNG-Reinvent-Yourself-Constant-ebook/dp/B00C0J1WLU