Latest / From Chad / Shifting #1185

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Shifting #1185 · From Chad

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  Making sand think there's a story behind that.
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  This is your daily message from Chad #1185 to upgrade your
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  mental game today by telling yourself a better story.
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  Because the most important story you hear is the story you tell
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  yourself. This message is dedicated to
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  Atlas and Conan Whitaker. Here's the upgrade.
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  You're scared. The advance of technology is
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  about to end your job, your economy, maybe your species.
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  But upgraded thinking remembers. We've stood on this beach
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  before. Here's the story.
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  Every computer chip in the world starts out as sand.
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  Quartz melted down at almost 3000°, purified, sliced into
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  wafers thinner than paper, etched with billions of tiny
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  switches. That's it.
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  That's the whole miracle underneath every headline about
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  the future sand arranged cleverly.
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  There's a lot of doom trolling about AI these days.
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  The term artificial intelligence should give you some relief.
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  It's artificial. We've let the power go to our
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  heads over the idea that we figure out how to make sand
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  think. But you'd be wise to not build
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  your hopes or your fears on sand.
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  It has a way of shifting under you.
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  We've done this before. In 1975, a major business
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  magazine ran a confident story called The Office of the Future.
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  Computers, it promised, would empty the file cabinets.
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  No more paper. Fewer workers needed to move it
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  around. Some people were thrilled.
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  Some people were terrified. Everybody agreed it was coming.
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  50 years later. Now we print more paper than we
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  ever did. The paperless office never
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  showed up. What showed up instead was
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  something nobody forecast. More e-mail, more meetings, more
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  decks, more noise. The technology was real.
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  It changed how we work. But the prophecy, the specific
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  one everyone was so sure of, wasn't real at all.
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  And that's the pattern. Every leap forward built on sand
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  arrives wrapped in a leap of certainty about what it will do
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  to us. The certainty is almost always
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  wrong in both directions. The utopia doesn't show up.
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  The apocalypse doesn't either. What shows up as something
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  stranger and more ordinary than anybody predicted.
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  And we adjust the way we always have.
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  So here's what I'd tell you today while the headlines shout
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  that the sand is waking up and coming for your future.
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  A prediction is not a foundation.
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  It shifts. It always has.
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  That's what sand does. The better story to tell
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  yourself is I don't build my life on a prediction, I build it
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  on the next right thing I do today.
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  Tell me a story of a prediction that never came true to from
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  chadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and tell
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  them whatever they're predicting, the next right thing
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  still beats it. You can get a free copy of my
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  book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to from
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  chad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message
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  and hundreds of others are always available at
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  www.fromchad.com.