Do Not Be Troubled but Strike: Interview with New York Times Bestselling Author David Christian
I recently went one on one with David Christian, Professor Emeritus at Macquarie University and author of the new book Future Stories. David is the New York Times bestselling author of Origin Story, and with the support of Bill Gates, he helped create a free online big history course for high school students called the “Big History Project”. David’s 2011 TED talk, “A History of the Universe in 18 minutes” has been viewed more than 12 million times.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
David: I am an academic, a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, and I lived in the Soviet Union for a year when in graduate school. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union seemed to those brought up in the West like the “dark side,” so teaching young Australian students about the people who lived “over there” seemed very important to me. It seemed as if we were talking about the rest of humanity. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, I continued wanting to help people understand the fate of humanity as a whole, and that took me into the new field of “Big History”. I began teaching about the history of humanity at global scales and over hundreds of thousands of years, and also about the history of planet earth, and even the history of the Universe as a whole. That was a lot of fun, and I think it helped give my students a new perspective on the world we live in and the larger “Origin Story” that human history is just one part of. In a world in which knowledge is carved up into distinct disciplines, carefully insulated from each other, that was a radical experiment. And it faced plenty of resistance, because doing big history meant crossing discipline boundaries by dabbling in cosmology, astronomy, geology, biology, palaeontology, ancient history and modern history, and a lot of other disciplines as well. It took us all out of our intellectual comfort zones. So the big question behind all this was: is it possible to see the whole of the past, as if from a mountaintop. And, after many years of teaching big history, I think the answer is: “Yes”. There is what I think of as a modern, science-based origin story, and it can be taught even in primary schools and can help give everyone a broader, more spacious understanding of the astonishingly dynamic global society we live in today.
Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?
David: My new book is on the rest of time, the parts that haven’t happened yet: the Future! I think of the book as a sort of “User’s Guide to the Future”. It begins by asking what we mean by “the future”. That quickly takes us into strange, spooky, but fascinating philosophical and scientific territory. So the first takeaway is that the very idea of the future is weird. But it is also immensely important. After all, we will live the rest of our lives in the future. The second takeaway is that, though we can never be certain about the future, there are some clues about the future, and some basic principles about how to prepare for it. And those basic principles are worth learning, though they can never offer guarantees about the future.
Adam: How can we best approach and understand the future?
David: Though we have no direct evidence about the future (NONE AT ALL!), there are some basic rules of thumb about how to prepare for the future. And all living organisms are designed to use those principles to maximize their chances of surviving the diverse futures hurtling towards them every second of their lives. First, modern science is probabilistic. That means that today we believe the future really is uncertain. Uncertainty is not just a result of ignorance. The universe of modern science has a bit of wriggle room, a bit of “loose play” as William James put it. That means that the future is NOT predetermined; we really do have choices to make and our choices will make a small difference to the future. We are, in some degree, responsible for the future. Second, though we have no direct evidence from the future, paradoxically, we have lots of clues from the past. (That’s why, in the Divine Comedy, Dante portrayed soothsayers being punished by having their heads twisted backwards to face the past.) So, by studying the past we can see some large trends and those trends, though they give no guarantees about the future, do give us some hints about the more likely futures. From those hints we construct “future stories” that give us tentative guidance as we face the future. But as we construct those stories, it is important to distinguish the most regular and reliable trends from those that are too unreliable to generate plausible future stories. Third, amongst specialists, there is a lot of expertise about the most important and persistent trends in economics, technology, meteorology, and many other fields. But NONE of the experts can be certain about their predictions. What they aim at is not guaranteed predictions, but rather predictions that are right more than 50% of the time. Fourth, some past trends allow us to think seriously but cautiously about the most likely trends over many decades, and that thinking is immensely important today, as it will guide the political and economic and moral decisions that will shape the future fate of humanity and planet earth, of our grand-children and great-grandchildren.
Adam: Why do you believe studying history is so important for leaders?
David: If it is true that the only evidence we have about the future lies in the past, then clearly it is vital for everyone, but particularly for leaders, to study the past. But they must do so in the right spirit. The past does not offer simple answers to our questions about the future. The key is to identify those realms of the past in which changes are most regular and reliable, and most likely to persist some way into the future. I can be pretty confident that the sun will rise tomorrow (based on past experience) but I can never really make confident predictions about what people will do. That is why economic and political forecasting is so fraught.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
David: What I have just said suggests that great leaders must have two key qualities. First, they must understand the nature and limitations of forecasts and predictions and they must do so well enough to steer us, most of the time, in promising directions. To give an example, study of climate change suggests that our forecasts about the consequences of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are now very reliable because they are based on very powerful trends in the past, so leaders who can help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions are probably pointing us in the right direction. But the second vital quality of good leaders is the ability to inspire: the ability to make people excited about the direction in which they are pointing, and enthusiastic about the challenges they face. That was what leaders like Winston Churchill or Nelson Mandela were so good at. Mandela not only pointed to the dangers of a future civil war in South Africa, but managed to make the complex challenge of reconciliation seem inspiring and profoundly important.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
David: One way would be by studying more carefully the complex, probabilistic principles behind good forecasting. Oddly, we do not teach how to construct good “future stories” in most schools and Universities. Perhaps we ought to teach those fundamental principles much more widely instead of just “winging” it as most people do today. The best leaders will be those with the most realistic ideas about likely futures as well as the rhetorical skills needed to steer us all towards better futures.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civil leaders?
David: I’m not an entrepreneur or an executive, but here are the ones I would pick from my work on future thinking. 1) Study past trends carefully, particularly those that are most regular and give us the strongest clues about likely futures. 2) Be clear about the futures that you like the most, your future “Utopias”. 3) Take decisions that are realistic because they are based on the most likely trends in the past, but also hopeful because they point in the direction of your Utopias.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
David: In the great Hindu tale, the Bhagavad Gita or Song of God, Prince Arjuna, who is about to enter the battle of life, is extremely anxious about the future, and asks his charioteer, the god, Krishna for advice. Krishna reminds him that you can never avoid action. The future will be what it will be. The challenge is to prepare for the future as best as we can, then act with serenity. “Do not be troubled but strike!”
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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