Total Rethink

21Future Generations

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

—John F. Kennedy

“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”

—Malcolm X

The widening of the gap between the two and a half billion haves and the five billion have-nots is very likely to speed up when the next generation reaches maturity, because the young people among the two and a half billion have grown up in a vastly different world to any generation before them. Their brains are wired differently. They are programmed to fit in to the world that is emerging from the technological advances of the last 20 years; they are fearless in the way they are pushing it forward. There has never been a generation like this before.

Those among them who are going to succeed will be able to think more clearly, more deeply, and faster than any generation in history, and they are ready and able to do that. They are going to be rethinking every model that the previous generations have ever taken for granted. Anyone who is not prepared for that is risking being trampled into extinction.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out the interesting fact that 14 of the 75 richest people in history are Americans who were born between 1832 and 1841. His conclusion is that in the 1860s and 1870s the American economy went through “perhaps the greatest transformation in its history.” The railroads were being built ...