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Visualize the Future

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."

-Albert Einstein

Most of us, whether we are business people or political leaders, doctors or teachers, students or parents, live in the present and try to work toward the future one day at a time, taking tiny cautious steps, improving things incrementally. It's been a survival technique the human race has used throughout our evolution, but it may not be enough to save us from the dangers that lie ahead in the near future, and it may also mean that we, both as individuals and as a society, are going to miss the enormous opportunities that technological progress is making possible.

It is time for us to be bold, to be revolutionary, and to change the way we do things.

Other forces, some of them constructive, some of them destructive, are now moving too fast for us to keep up with if we continue with the old ways of thinking and acting. There needs to be not one revolution, but many, in both the ways that we think and the ways that we do things if we are going to be successful as individuals and if we are going to improve the lives of the majority of the people on this planet. Positive revolutions could also avert the potential conflicts which are brewing between those of us whose lives are getting better every day and those of us who are being left further and further behind by the increasing speed of progress.

It's easy to illustrate how this widening of the gap can come about. If you watch an elderly steam train making its way out of a station in India, you will see that it is heavily laden with people. They are clinging to the outsides and squatting on the roofs, as well as filling every carriage to capacity. It would seem obvious that there is a need for some improvement in the services being offered to the population. Now, India's prime minister has commissioned a Japanese company to build the country's first high-speed railway between Mumbai and Ahmedabad in the west. These trains will have top speeds of 200 miles an hour, far too fast for anyone to hope that they can travel by sitting on the roof, and are indicative of how fast India is developing.

It would obviously be a sign of progress to be able to eventually replace all that elderly rolling stock with such sleek high-speed trains. It would be far more comfortable and efficient for those who can afford to buy tickets and sit inside in air-conditioned comfort, but entirely unattainable to the crowds of poor who throng the stations in the hope of hitching a cheap or free ride. All they will be able to do is stand back and watch as the future shoots past them.

No one would deny that the creation of a high-speed train that travels at hundreds of miles an hour is a wonderful thing, but at the same time it will increase the gap between those who can afford to travel on it and those who can't, improving the lives of one and making far worse the lives of the other. In other words, this leap forward, which would be a great thing for the country's economy and productivity, would inevitably widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, so the model for traveling across India needs to be rethought and entirely revolutionized in a way that will improve the lives of all those thousands of people clinging to the outsides of the trains, to make their experience closer to that of the people who will be able to afford to buy tickets on the bullet train. I don't have a solution for that particular problem, but it provides a vivid visual metaphor for the fact that every action inevitably has consequences, so we need to be thoughtful with every step we take, conscious of the effects improvements have on those at the bottom as well as those at the top.

Like those Japanese trains, civilization has progressed too far and is traveling too fast to be able to slow down now. If you want to be successful in any field at all, you can't rely on doing a bit better each year. Companies that increase their revenue by a few percentage points, individuals who marginally increase their earnings, inventors who make superficial improvements to their products, will not be the winners of the future. Simply being ambitious for success will not be enough either. We will all have to exercise enormous creativity and imagination in order to see and understand what is happening around us and work out new solutions to the problems that now face us, recognizing both the opportunities and the dangers ahead.

We need to dream big, but we also need to dream smart if we don't want the billions of people left behind on the platforms to rise up and attack the things they know they can never have and the people they know will always prosper at their expense.

If you want to be a game-changer and really make a difference, then you have to visualize the future that you want to live in. You have to imagine yourself already being there and then look back so that you can picture the route by which you are going to get there.

We need to be bold and creative in everything we do. At a personal level, a cautious, conservative approach to risk and innovation may keep your career or business afloat for just long enough to support you and your family during your lifetime, but it will never change the world and it will never blast your personal achievements into any new stratospheres.

Before you can do that, however, you have to convince yourself that your dreams actually are attainable.

In 1985, while I was still in my twenties, I was invited to the White House for dinner with President Ronald Reagan, a former actor who had succeeded in confounding all expectations by becoming the most powerful man in the world. Towards the end of the meal I had to get up to answer a call of nature. There was a marine standing rigidly at attention outside the door.

"Sir," I said, "can you tell me where the men's room is?" "Down the hall," he barked, "take a left, on your right, Sir."

As I walked self-consciously away down the hall, the click of my heels echoing on the black and white marble, I heard the marine speak again, this time in a very different tone.

"Goose?"

Recognizing my nickname from high school I turned back.

"Hey Goose," he said, "It's Ned! Jimmy Rourke's brother." Jimmy Rourke had been one of my best friends at school, a great footballer who had gone on to play in the NFL for seven seasons, including the Super Bowl.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" we both said at once. "I joined the marines," he said.

"I got invited to dinner," I said.

"No one's going to believe this at home," he said.

As I stood in the men's room it occurred to me that he was right: no one was going to believe I was at a White House dinner at 26 years of age. So when I got back to the table, I slipped my neighbor's demitasse White House coffee cup, which was one of Lyndon Johnson's place settings (each president and first lady designs a new place setting for official dinners at the White House), into my pants and smuggled it out with me. When I proudly showed it to my father a few days later he was appalled that I would stoop to do such a thing.

"But Dad," I protested, "no one's going to believe that I was there."

For the same reason, I asked the president to sign my menu, which I'm guessing is not really what you are supposed to do at those sorts of events.

Things were very different on the night I was invited by Prime Minister John Major to 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's residence in London. This was many years later, when I was in my thirties and I was one of the sponsors of the Cambridge Film Festival. There was an odd selection of guests that night, including the tennis star John McEnroe and his wife of the time, film star Tatum O'Neal (the youngest person ever to win an Oscar for her role in Paper Moon) and the television presenter and businessman Sir David Frost, with a lady who seemed much too young to be his wife. On the way back from the men's room I passed any number of priceless, historical antiques, and there was not a marine in sight. I resisted the temptation to put anything down my pants; after all I was a respectable married businessman by then and my wife was with me.

We had just had our first baby and had left him back at the hotel with a babysitter in order to take advantage of this opportunity to have dinner with the prime minister. As charmed as I was to be a guest in Downing Street, it was clear to me that it was perhaps my wife that the prime minister found most enchanting that evening. I was fine with that, but eventually we made our escape, my wife shedding her shoes as soon as we emerged into Downing Street, and headed back to our waiting child, despite the PM increasingly insisting that we "really must" stay the night.

I recently ran into Sir John Major at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin and reminisced over a cup of tea. He was just as charming as I remembered, even though our paths had not crossed for a quarter of a century.

I appreciate that these are boastful little anecdotes and, as my father pointed out, do not reflect well on my abilities to act in an appropriately statesmanlike manner, but the point I am making is that it is perfectly reasonable for anyone to visualize themselves dining in the White House or dining at Number 10, building a multibillion dollar business empire, or winning an Emmy (for...