Welcome to the future

Transcript

# Meaningful Work Remarkable Life – Season 6: Welcome to the Future

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia.

In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.

Hello and welcome to season six. I don’t know exactly how long the break was between seasons. Hopefully not too extended. I do have a tendency to have a break and then forget, forget to pick up the tools once again.

So we’re kicking off with this episode, which is entitled Welcome to the Future.

In 1999, I was in a field in the Northern Rivers region in Australia. If you’re not from Australia, Northern Rivers in New South Wales is synonymous with hippies and people living a conscious lifestyle. That always makes me think of somebody lying prone and dead on the floor. Living conscious lifestyles.

So I was amongst it. We were a bunch of hippies. I think I would have been about 20—19. I can’t remember. I remember my friends squatting and mixing some huge pot of something we were going to be eating. I remember swimming naked in a creek. We had this huge field that was kind of boundaried on one side by a creek.

I remember my friend, Craig Ross, who is now an associate principal trumpet in the Opera Australia Orchestra. He was hilarious that night. New Year’s Eve, 1999. Walking from group of people to group of people with his trumpet over one shoulder. He had a cigarette in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other.

Very intense conversations ensued. I remember one of my friends saying to him, you’re killing my buzz, dude. Everyone was smoking because it was the nineties. Everybody smoked in the nineties.

And I felt in love with my life, with my friends. I felt loved, but I also felt insecure and self-conscious. It’s a bit of a haze that sits over my entire twenties, which is hilarious really, because if I reflect upon it. There are lots of brave things I did in my twenties, including traveling alone and working overseas.

But there was a feeling in 1999 that the future was here and a feeling of hope.

And so this is something that I hope will be a theme throughout this season, because there are so many things that we can focus on that are negative. And I did have a little bout of existential dreads recently.

I had two days working with an energy company. I have a VIP strategy session, which is basically two days of intense work. So I did one of these with this same company in March, and then I came back in June and interviewing a whole bunch of different engineers, talking about energy, talking about, you know, the future, sustainability, AI.

Renewables, nuclear power, coal power, all this stuff. And then a few more conversations with different intelligent people about AI and climate change. And I did have a feeling of existential dread that kind of hung around for a few days.

Now, if you’re feeling existential dread right now, hopefully this season will help to lift some of it because we have to find hope in the future, right? Hope is a brave, bold thing. And it’s also a productive emotion.

Whereas dread, dread nails us to the spot. It nails us to the ground and it doesn’t change anything. Kind of a little bit like worry. Yeah. Worry does not, sometimes worry might convince us, oh, well, if I worry about this thing, then I’ll cause it to stop happening. I’ll somehow inoculate it from happening, inoculate myself. It doesn’t work like that.

So AI and climate change are going to be two dependent addicts going hammer and tong. And they are going to be creating a hell of a lot more complexity and a hell of a lot more volatility. Not just in climate change and weather events.

But in energy, in the amount of energy that we need, that we continue to need, the increasing demands that we have for energy and that AI is ushering in as well. And all these extreme weather events are going to lead to ripple effects on the financial industry, starting with the insurance industry.

Of course, we’ve got what’s happening right now in the US as like some kind of nightmarish backdrop to it all. I promise this episode is going to get more cheerful in a moment.

But you know, many of Trump’s policies, the mass deportations, the wholesale sacking of public servants by Elon Musk and his Department of Government efficiency. The decisions to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. These have been challenged in the court. The Trump administration is embroiled in multiple legal challenges. And it’s clear that he has a lot of disdain for the legal system and, and presumably a lot of his supporters do as well.

So there’s definitely a rise of fascism just to make things even more spicy, to go along with. Extreme weather events, climate change, increasing demands on energy, increasing volatility, potentially mass job losses. I think that’s, you know, maybe potentially I need to delete that word. Mass job losses.

And as a smart friend who you’ll be hearing from very shortly in this season of the podcast, put it, we are in the line, the last dying embers of rotten capitalism. We’ve been talking about this for some years now, or at least I have with my left-wing buddies on the internet.

So this is, you know, kind of what was predicted, but I want to remind you, dear listener, that you are not rotten capitalism. You are not rotten capitalism, nor are you capitalism. This is giving yourself far too much responsibility.

We, you and I, still need to earn money despite all of this, despite all of this, we need to still somehow make ourselves a thriving income from our own sweat and smarts and do so whilst holding onto some semblance of our sanity and our humanity.

So 2023, a couple of years ago, I really felt like AI and I haven’t fact checked this. I just kind of pulled it from my own memory, which is sometimes dubious. There was a lot more talk of AI all of a sudden. Everybody was talking about generative AI.

And at the time I didn’t actually comment and I kind of felt a little bad about that. I remember thinking, come on, Brooke, what have you got to say? There must be something you can add to this conversation. There must be some intelligence spin that you can put on things.

But you know, I just, I knew it wasn’t a storm in a teacup and believe me over 17 years of self-employment, there has been many storms and many teacups. I knew that this was something real and something, you know, influential and something that wasn’t going to just go away.

But I also didn’t really feel qualified to comment yet. And of course there were a lot of people springing up at the time that were declaring themselves AI specialists and AI experts, which is hilarious and always fun to watch.

And there were lots of business owners as well that were quick to take advantage of it, of which, you know, hats off to these people. Well done. You know, people that saw opportunities, for example, and I purchased a couple of things from, from these business owners to show people how to give better prompts. There are still people of course, that are, that are selling these things, how to give AI better prompts to get better answers.

But it’s really important when we are leaders and if we’re a business owner, whether or not we’re a micro enterprise of one, you know, is really neither here nor there, you are in a position of leadership. You absolutely are in a position of leadership.

And if you are promoting yourself on the internet, if you are building your professional reputation, then that is part and parcel of your leadership, right? Because nobody’s going to pay attention. Let alone trust you and believe that you are credible and go ahead and purchase from you if they don’t believe that you are some kind of a leader in your particular domain of authority.

So leadership requires people to not run away when things get tough. Apologies for bringing up COVID yet again, but a lot of leaders went silent. There was a lot of mute people in March, 2020. And I don’t care if they were soloists or they were CEOs of massive, you know, businesses. There were plenty of CEOs who were being paid many hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions in annual salary who did a dismal job of leadership during that period.

Because leaders are here for the hard times. They’re not just, you know, here for the party. They’re not here when everything’s going swimmingly. You’ve got to show up when things are tough. That’s what makes a leader.

A leader has a willingness to go into the muck and to help make sense of it with you. With their audience, with their people.

So this is something that I am committed to now. I felt like I was, you know, swimming in that, those waters where you don’t really know what’s coming up next and you’re not really sure what the appropriate response should be.

And really, isn’t that true of all times? Like we, none of us really know what’s coming up next. None of us have some special portal. Some special insight into the future. None of us have those advantages over other people to know what’s coming.

But we are still willing to show up despite the uncertainty, despite the complexity, despite the volatility, despite the despair, despite a feeling of perhaps existential dread that sits on your shoulders from time to time and hangs around. Despite all of this, we are willing to show up and we’re willing to show up not just for other people, but we’re willing to show up for ourselves.

So recently I caught myself and isn’t this true of habit? You kind of catch yourself. You you realize just a second, this seems to be an established thing. This seems to be a recurring thing that I do. I found myself consuming too much on the internet.

And of course, you know, I’ve been working on the internet. I was many years teaching social media marketing. I was a social media marketing trainer. So I used to say to my partner, no, no, Pete, this is actually me working right now. It looks like I’m just looking at funny videos, but I’m actually researching. But I was, I was kidding myself, right? I was.

Specifically looking at a lot of Instagram reels, a lot of threads, threads for the threads algorithm was giving me all the good stuff. I’m not consuming bad internet. Like don’t get me wrong. I’m not always deep into philosophy or politics, but I have curated my feed or the feed has curated itself due to my behavior. You know, to give me some really interesting, insightful, personable, engaging. Entertaining, smart people.

I don’t hate follow. I don’t watch car crashes of other people’s lives. That’s not what I do. But it was clear and obvious that I had fallen into a bit of a habit of way too much consumption and not enough creation.

And so I’ve committed to getting back into creating. And you might be listening to this thinking for God’s sake, Brooke, how much more creating can you do? But you know, I do enjoy it.

And this is my next point is that the most talented and resilient of people that are in the public eye are people that are creatively prolific and they creatively prolific not because of any other reason that it feeds them.

So this is what I want to talk about because this is a generative thing to do. Now, of course I can’t make assumptions for all people. I can’t talk about all content creators or all influencers or all people in the public eye. But my opinion is that if this is going to be long-term and generative so that you feel good and you love it and you do it because it’s a joy and a privilege and a pleasure, then it’s got to feed you, right?

And this is how it feels to me when I’m creating. I feel like I’m in conversation with my audience and that audience is watching me in real time. Now, of course, I still do a lot away from, you know, from the internet. I still do beaver away in my creation cave. I’ve been doing a lot of beavering lately. I’ve got something new. I’ve got multiple new things. I’m just about to share. Not quite yet.

But this creative process, I have always found generative and I’ve always used it as a way to help me make sense of my thinking. Because the way my brain works is I really love connecting threads. I love to see patterns and to notice how seemingly disparate things are connected.

And sometimes my brain is messy. Oftentimes my brain is messy, especially when I haven’t been feeding it properly. I haven’t been nourishing it. And it can be a bit of a dog’s breakfast in there.

So when I’m creating, when I’m writing, when I’m producing, when I’m podcasting, when I’m creating a video, it helps me make sense of my thoughts. And I find it very, very satisfying.

And for the person watching, for the people that are watching, the audience, your audience, my audience, it feels like you’re part of this person’s process, you know, there’s a young woman, I guess she’s in her early twenties who I’ve just started following the algorithm served her stuff to me on Instagram and she’s hitchhiking.

She’s hitchhiking from China through Mongolia. She’s just arrived in Mongolia and apparently she’s going to make it to Cape town. I love this, this woman’s tenacity. Like Jesus, like it’s just, it’s so fascinating and I love the way that she frames the day and she frames the stories. And it feels like you’re part of the process.

Yes, we’ve always done armchair traveling, existential armchair traveling and same goes for food. Why do we buy cookbooks so that we can look at the pretty pictures and imagine how delicious they’re going to taste except it’s a hell of a lot of work to make the recipes.

But this feeling of being involved in that creative process. This is what AI doesn’t yet replicate.

So creating out loud is what the internet is built on. And for us to do this, for us to do this creating out loud, it does require certain things of us. It does require discipline. I hate using the D word because everybody hates the D word, including myself.

Discipline because I had to start, had to break that bad habit, right? I had to break the back of that bad habit. Go, no Brooke, you’re starting a sub stack channel. Have I mentioned that? No, it’ll go in the show notes. I have started a sub stack channel.

I am recommitting to a new season of the podcast. I am producing more work. I am creating out loud in conversation with my audience because it’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasure. It’s a privilege.

So technology changes our brains and how we are gonna deal with this is we’re gonna require increasing discernment. And this is a massive big topic. So let me just kind of turn left so that we can stay where we were headed.

For us to be creating, for me to be creating, I need to be resilient. I need to stay upbeat. I can’t have those beats, those fits of existential dread. I have to stay energetic and upbeat.

I have to be vigilant. I have to carve out space regularly for recording, for thinking, for marinating, for planning, for dreaming without a device, without the internet, without, maybe even without, you know, a notepad and pen just by myself and my thoughts, old school style.

So the focus that I’d love to, I want to kind of wrap this up and leave you with some actionable insights, actionable insights, starting with focus. The question I’d love you to ask of yourself is what can I do to feel upbeat, to feel productive, which is good for our mental health. Yeah. It’s actually terrible for our mental health. Sometimes.

To be meditating. Is a very, that was a big statement. Let me start again and try and create a little bit more nuance and hence a little bit more truth.

Sometimes sitting on our ass and resting and doing nothing can be the worst thing for our mental health. If you know what I’m talking about, you know what I’m talking about. Yeah. Think about the last time you were unemployed and how that felt.

So that feeling of being useful, being productive, being of use, creating stuff that is inherently human.

So what can I do to stay connected as well? Who can I connect with? What feeds me? What’s my responsibility? And what is not my responsibility? What is outside my domain?

Elizabeth Gilbert has some really smart things to say about this, about how women take on way too much responsibility for things outside of themselves and outside of their control. I see this all the time. I meet martyrs. I don’t have, you know, I have some sympathy, but I don’t have a lot of time for martyrs because they’re constantly outside of themselves. They’re constantly distracted by everybody else’s things and they’re jumping in to take responsibility where they don’t need to.

The skills, the skills that I want to ask of you now, what are we going to need in the future? Starting with, we’re going to need each other. We’re going to need friendships.

I heard Simon Sinek interviewed recently on the diary of a CEO, great episode if you’re interested, and he’s writing a book on friendships, which makes sense to me. This is a very timely topic. This is absolutely definitely in the public eye. Great topic. I’d love to write a book about friendships myself.

There’s a fantastic book that I read not too long ago called How to Be a Bad Friend. I highly recommend it. Go and look it up. The author’s name was Catherine Sled, I believe. Might be a little bit tricky to find because it wasn’t a mainstream kind of release. Catherine Sled, I believe anyway, try and Google it and see if you could find it. Highly recommend it, how to be a bad friend.

So I was also listening to a story recently about a woman who was living without money. And one of the things that she talked about was social capital kept her alive. So she would do favors for people. She was not sitting on a bum. She was very busy and active and productive and she was making things and fixing things and growing things and being generally helpful and a cheerful citizen. And because of this, she was rich in social capital. She had a lot of people who were helping her out, who were helping keep her alive.

We are going to need more of this. When the zombie apocalypse comes, when the mass layoffs occur, when things get increasingly volatile and shaky, when the worst comes to fruition, we will need social capital, friendships, neighbors, family. This is really, really important. It’s important from a mental health perspective, but it’s important for other reasons as well.

And part and parcel of this is communication. One of the key skills of the future is communication. We talked a bit about friendships a moment ago, interactions with other people making meaning, making meaning.

If we are exquisitely awesome at communicating, if we are particularly skilled at it, we make meaning for ourselves. We make the world more palatable to ourselves.

Another book recommendation, if you haven’t read Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. What are you doing with your life? Go immediately and find yourself a copy. It’s a very slim read. So it won’t take you long to finish it.

But one of the things I really took away from that book was how important it is, the focus of our attention, where we focus our attention on, what we focus our attention on.

And this was something I was lucky enough to learn as a young teenager or older teenager. When I accidentally joined a cult and started meditating at age 17, 18, you know, one of the key things that we were taught was that the focus of your attention, whatever you are focusing your attention on is what you will become. You’re kind of melding your mind with that.

So in Victor Frankl’s book, even though he was surrounded by horrific circumstances that no person should ever have to endure. He kept this power of his focus on the right things, on the good things, which even in the worst conditions in Nazi concentration camps, he was able to find.

So I just want to make a little translation for business owners. If you’re scratching your head going, what the hell? Are these actionable insights, Brooke? Spell it out to me. I need it double underlined here. Let me do it for you.

Me personally, I’m investing in people. I know that AI is important. I have AI in my business. I use AI, I use automations, I use tech. I love tech. Most of the tech, some of the tech most of the time.

But I’m investing into people to support my clients directly, to compliment what I do and to support what I can’t, where I can’t be of assistance, where another person’s skills would be better suited.

I have an accountability coach who works directly with my clients. I have a marketing assistant who works directly with my clients. Marketing and systems tech people that work directly with my clients.

I’m investing in people to hold space for other people in coworking sessions to help with accountability, to help with that presence of here we are together. We’re gathering this unique combination of people at this particular point in time, even if it’s just an online coworking session, it’s never going to happen again. And so let’s make it special. Let’s actually mark the moment.

Another key thing that we want to focus on is that information is not the commodity in the age of information. People are not buying information. People are buying your particular way of doing things, the feelings they get from you, the values you stand for that reflect their own values, your personality, your style, your quirk.

We need more of this. We need to turn it up, turn up the volume. This is how we render our competitors irrelevant, not just in our marketing, but all throughout our business, through our business processes and operations, through our sales process, through how we deliver our services, how we deliver our value, the value of our work.

And finally, to translate this and really drive the point home, in marketing, what we’re seeking to do is build one to many parasocial relationships. In the same way that I have a relationship with Björk, which I’ve had for 30 odd years, even though Björk probably wouldn’t recognize me in the street, should she walk past me.

Anyway, this is what we’re doing when we post on the internet. This is what we’re doing when we go live on video, when we send a mass email, we’re building parasocial relationships.

And so how do we do that better? And how do we build better real relationships, real relationships, not like here I’m in service to you, I’m somehow less than you. Yeah. Or the other way around, I’m the coach dictator. Let me dictate and tell you exactly where you’re stuffing it up. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about some weird power dynamic.

I’m talking about a mutual admiration society. You and your clients, mutually consenting adults who respect each other, who respect each other greatly, admire each other. These real relationships with clients, with community, through email, through social media, through other social platforms, other online platforms, through in real life events.

This is our focus. These are the key priorities that I’m focusing on at least in this next iteration of business and in life.

Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favor and write me a short review?

Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps. Other values based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.