Exponential Growth

Our human brains have a hard time understanding or accepting exponential trends. We prefer and interpret events and trends to be linear.

Like a nice Sunday drive that is steady in course, direction and speed, we think life events unfold this way.

However, the reality is that we have acceleration occurring at unprecedented speeds. Whether it’s world population, bandwidth or medicine. We are not linear. We are exponential.

This comes from the compounding effects of technology. When technology enters your marketplace, you are off the industrial progress of linear trending and onto exponential growth.

We used to watch blue collar factory work get replaced by robots and automation. Now, the same has happened for white collar office workers. Robots are faster, cheaper and don’t complain.

The network effect of using LinkedIn, Upwork or Twitter to find talent or get things done with a modular project team is within everyone’s grasp now. You just have to rally around your idea and lead. All the resources are a few clicks away to make your ideas happen now.

The network effect is accelerating and available to anyone that is connected. And everyone is connected now.

So, what happens to your position right now? The world is not standing still and the security you might feel could be a deception. You might feel like it’s a linear zone when you are merely in the first part of an exponential curve. It’s not inconceivable you will be replaced or your cost will dramatically reduce.

Once network effects and digitization occur, the commoditization process begins. Computing power, bandwidth and storage are near zero cost. And every day our hypercompetitive economy keeps changing the rules because someone is building on top of the collective knowledge that makes the next step of innovation easier.

The strategy for a world of exponential growth is not to go hope and find places where things are merely linear. That’s not going to happen. The trend across modern reality is efficiency and demonetization.

No, the fit strategy is to map yourself into an exponential mindset. You can participate, thrive and get rich by keeping pace with and trending with exponential growth. Make it a foregone conclusion that automation will replace your work today. But it doesn’t have to replace you.

Your opportunity lies with the ability to develop your personal leadership and use the existing and emerging technology of today to build something people will buy. Start with a few. Make it work. Then make it work at scale.

Have you accepted exponential growth?