One life, many lifetimes

It's been just over a year since I last posted on this blog! Has anything changed in my life in the last twelve months? Well, let's see ... new house, new job, new golf handicap, new club membership, new friends in new (to me) countries ... yes, things did change. The laptop from which I am writing this blog is new, my phone is new, and my ipad2 is being shipped now. If I think of books, clothes etc. almost half the stuff in my house is less than a year old!

At least from my "express train" window to the world, it appears as if the simultaneous occurrence of two seemingly opposing trends is creating a very different life experience for us than for any generation in the past.  On the one hand, the pace of change is accelerating, reducing the longevity of products, experiences and even relationships somehow. On the other hand, human beings are living longer than ever before and with better levels of fitness, if they are careful.

This means that it is now possible to experience more than one type of major life experience within one lifetime: it is possible to have more than one career, more than one marriage, set up more than one business, live in more than one country, indulge more than one significant hobby ... in short, it is possible to live more than one lifetime in one life!

Two recent reflections brought this home to me. A few months ago, I received a phone call on a Sunday afternoon in Singapore, requesting for my presence at a meeting in London. That is normal, except the meeting was on Monday morning. I booked my ticket from my iPhone, hopped on a plane and attended the meeting, preparing my presentation on the long flight in to London. On the long flight back home, I reflected on how amazing this was! One generation ago, it would have taken months to plan for such a meeting, send snail mail invites, booking flights or even ships. Now it takes a day, even a Sunday! With everyone working at this pace, decisions are made faster, products and services get designed and delivered faster, fail or succeed quicker and get replaced by their next avatar faster than ever. Information search takes seconds, as do communications and transactions. Looking into the future, we may not know what is going to happen, but we can know this: whatever it is, it will happen faster than we might think.

Then recently I had lunch with this distinguished young man of only 90 years of age. He lives in London but travels around the world, serving on many corporate boards and trusts. During his life so far, he has had a successful military career, a successful banking career and a successful consulting career. He has also served as a part time diplomat. And he is not done yet - he is in discussions to get involved in new roles! This made me wonder: what if I end up living much fitter for much longer than I think, as opposed to my current paradigm that evokes visions of me riding into the sunset in my 60's?

People in the future will have the opportunity to experience many different lifetimes in their one life. This has significant implications. There will be less fear of failure, since it will be possible to restart something new quite quickly. So people will experiment more, try out more things in their lives, even things that are very different from one another. This should lead to more innovation, but also potentially more chaos as conventional notions of life stages, career paths and development trajectories will be challenged. Educators will need to think differently about how to prepare young people for such a world, and employers will need to rethink how to manage them. Businesses will need to adapt to serve their protean customers. And all of this will happen sooner than we think.

Do you believe you have the option of experiencing more than one lifetime in this life? If so, what are you planning to do with this chance? I'd be interested in your thoughts.