I’m finally writing a book about us. 

A tech community who believes that developing our inner landscape is the key to the future.

The mission

I believe our mission is to bring wellness, wellbeing, and transformation to anyone, anywhere through the power of exponential tech.

Thriving in the next decade requires humanity to reach for our highest potential.  

Now more than ever, human transformation is the key to building the future of work and life, resilience, and innovating beyond our collective challenges.

The book

This book has been a very long time coming.

I wasn’t ready…until now. 

I changed and grew a lot during the pandemic.

Like many of you, I had some of my worst moments, and yet some of my best.

But, I can say the personal pressure from the last two years — plus the world shifting into acceptance of tech for mental, emotional, and social health — made me ready.

The process

My editor asked what books have impacted me and so I thought to share them with you as well. 

I divide these books into two categories – what we are building, and who we are being.  

I’ve listed 5 of my top 20.  

— What we are building —

Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari

The world that Yuval Harrai warns against is in some part already here – we are more focused on longevity, happiness and augmentation than we are on finding calories and war next door.  

The pandemic reintroduced “plague” into our concerns yet still cancer, chronic illness, and mental health are greater issues than TB, polio and black death.

The central plot question remains, how do we avoid designing our own destruction?

How do we survive attention economy algorithms? 

Harari’s own answer to the question was essentially, “Know thyself”

I see Harrai’s work as a brilliant exploration of where we are and a strong warning of where things can go.

But it still leaves the practical question of – what do we do?

 If we don’t do anything, then every negative thing you can imagine will come to pass. 

His work is an encouragement to build things that help us to know ourselves. 

We are builders.

 We are creators. 

Let’s do that.

The Singularity Trilogy by Peter Diamandis and Steve Kotler

• Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
• Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
• The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

I attended Singularity University when I first returned from China and it expanded and shaped my mindset. 

These books exposed the very real progression of exponential tech.

They launched with the radical idea that abundance is at hand.

The authors examined the intersection of tech and outer human needs—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, freedom — and documented the forces conspiring to solve our biggest challenges. 

Later books explored the compounding of exponential technologies and how that reinvents —transportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food, and finance.

We, as a community, have an equally radical idea. 

Exponential Tech can help us become more human and more able to create abundance.

We build at the intersection of tech and inner human needs.

Calm, peace, joy, empathy, compassion, belonging, self-actualization, self-transcendence and more.  

We think about how conscious leadership, mindset, and our internal landscape can be ignited through technology to help us become the people who can solve our problems.  

We ask, “How can we combine consciousness with technology to become better builders, deployers and users of tech as we build tech that deepens?”

Rethinking Humanity: Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, the Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom

Rethink is an extraordinary analysis that takes exponential compounding farther. 

With the added point that civilizations fall when they have bursts of technological innovation without corresponding shifts in organizing principles.

Also known as values, norms, beliefs, and myths.

We have certainly had a surge of innovation.

Avoiding a fall requires a mindset shift as dramatic as our technology shifts.  

This work further underscores the need to leverage technology to make that mindset shift scalable, urgently, to avoid a Fall.

— Who we are being —

I believe that we build what we are as such every conference and program we do at TT includes leadership, ethics and a focus on personal development.  

These are two stunning books to support your journey.

15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, Kaley Warner Klemp

The 15 Commitments is an extraordinary framework for becoming deeply, spectacularly human.

For founders, I believe that learning and applying the 15 Commitments will increase your ability to create teams and organizations that can succeed.

Deep Human Connection: Why We Need It More Than Anything Else, by Stephen Cope

Cope is a brilliant storyteller who lays out the rationale for connection, the barriers to connection, and 5 helpful categories of connection:

Containment, twinship, adversity, mirroring, and conscious partnership.

His book The Great Work of Your Life affected me profoundly, and I have read it at least 3 times.

Here are other links that have strongly impacted my journey, and will be a source of inspiration for you:

• Mobius – Liberatory Technology (n): Technology that enables all people and communities to embody and obtain freedom, thriving, and greater access to our aliveness.
• Center for Human Tech 
• Brain Mind 
• The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
• Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business  by John E. Mackey, Raj Sisodia, Bill George 
• Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business by John E. Mackey, Steve McIntosh, Carter Phipps
• Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna
• Deep Human: Practical Superskills for a Future of Success by Crystal Lim-Lange, Gregor Lim-Lange
• The Deeply Human Workplace: Tap into What People Need, Build Commitment on Your Teams, and Create a Workplace that Employees Love by Sal Silvester
• Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov, Mig Greengard 
• AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan
• How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth by Michio Kaku (shelved 52 times as futurism)
• The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling by Stephen Cope

 

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