HOW TO LIVE FUTURE READY

Your mindstate is the perspective you have in any given moment that encompasses your current thoughts, feelings, and focus and determines how you experience the present. It perceptually and cognitively influences the choices you make about how you act or react. In the same way your pupils get bigger or smaller to adapt to the amount of light around you, your mindstate fluctuates based on the content and context of the moment.

When your head is in the right place, you can be ready for whatever happens next. This is the future-ready mindstate. Tuned up in the key dimensions of the future-ready mindstate—radical optimism, unreserved openness, compulsive curiosity, perpetual experimentation, and expansive empathy—you put yourself right where you want to be, poised and eager to take on anything that comes your way. Together, the dimensions of the future-ready mindstate form a way of looking at the world that reveals the opportunity all around you and influences the choices you make that comprise the future you create for yourself.

Compulsive curiosity turns you into a native in the land of the unknown. It gets you caught up in mystery and wonder exploring roads you’ve never taken. Each discovery makes you bolder and more inquisitive and creates pathways to opportunity that didn’t exist before.

“In order to have the new experiences I knew would take me toward the life I wanted to live, I had to let go of stuff that I was holding too tightly. To be curious is to take leaps and plunges that can be a shock to the system, but that also reveal all the opportunities and possibilities that shape a path of purpose.” –Newton Cheng

Sometimes getting to the best answer requires you to be curious enough to ask a rogue question. First look at the problem you’re trying to solve. Say you’re getting anxious because sales of your top product have been flat for months. You’ve been pestering your team with the question “How can we increase sales?” They keep answering with the usual responses—marketing, advertising, consumer research, etc.

The discussion that follows the upside-down question will be lively and illuminating. It will point to issues you hadn’t considered and ultimately to the answers you’re looking for along with some others you weren’t looking for at all.

Make a square frame with your fingers.

Look through this frame panning to the left then to the right.

Look above you. Now look down. Zoom in and out.

Do you see something different(ly)?