Are You Ready For The Future?

“I look to the future because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.” (George Burns, 1983)

While it is important to predict the future, it may be a tough call.

The landscape will be shaped by imponderables such as new discoveries, black swans, and technological disruptions.

How the future unfolds will depend on choices of different individuals and groups. They are operating in an increasingly interconnected and at the same time multipolar world.

The future is going to be characterized by a faster rate of change. It has been described as being volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA).

It can make or break you, and also make the most out of your life or a mess out of it.

That’s why notwithstanding the challenges in predicting the future, you need to be prepared for all plausible scenarios.

The questions that begs to be answered are:

Are you ready for it?

Have you future-proof yourself for success?

Do you have the attitude, knowledge, skills, and behavior to make the most of the increasing levels of unpredictability and change?

To respond to the above questions, you have to obviously believe that you have the capacity and capability to make a difference to how to you live and thrive in the future.

You also need to believe that you do not have to be a passive consumer of the future, you can be an active contributor to its development.

Your future does not have to be an unchangeable reality. It can be a  controllable possibility.

You need to have the faith to imagine and articulate future scenarios and the courage to fight for your desired future.

Besides being sensitive and responsive to the changing environment, you need to ensure that you have what it takes to exploit even the worst possibilities.

You need to develop the capacity, ability and adaptability to survive and succeed in it.

To be future-ready, you must have a passion for learning and the ability to learn how to learn.

You must know how to harness information, think critically, and be able to constantly improve yourself so as to achieve better results.

It is sad that many people after completing their formal education
have not read a single academic journal, or attend another educational course

In a fast-changing world, they are moving towards irrelevance and obsolescence.

To shape your future, you need to not only be a recipient and distributor of third-party knowledge.

Through effective and ongoing learning, you can also research, generate, and implement new and better knowledge to make necessary changes to your environment.

In addition, you need to develop a range of meta-skills.

These are skills that are robust and durable and they can help you develop other skills to approach and capitalise on the future.

They include critical thinking skills, leadership skills, emotional and cultural intelligence skills, and self-directed learning skills.

As info-communication technology is one of the most powerful influencers of the future, you need to know to harness it for your ongoing improvement and results.

Instead of focusing on the mastery of technology for its own sake, you need to learn how to update yourself on the latest changes.

You need to learn how to acquire, deploy, and manage technology to help you achieve your desired dream and goals.

It is likely that there will be potentially more natural crisis and other kinds of turbulence ahead of us. You need to cultivate problem-solving skills to deal with them.

You need to know how to handle failures and build up your resilience so that you will be able to exploit the silver lining in every dark cloud.

In an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, you must know how to connect and communicate with the others in the global community.

You must know how to work with people that subscribe to different creed and custom and are from a different culture, community, and country.

You must have the cultural intelligence and competence to collaborate with them.

You must have the skills to work with them to co-create solutions for current as well as future challenges.

I hope these few points will trigger you to devote more thoughts about your future. With the help of our Creator, you will rise up to shape your destiny.

The future is up for grabs.

Are you ready for it?

Go4It!

Visit my Inspiration blog at http://liewinspiration.wordpress.com/

For my opinions on social affairs, please visit my Transformation blog at http://hsrpatrickliew.wordpress.com/

Please read my reflections and continue to teach me.

Life is FUNtastic!