Geniuses at creating solutions.

Through my work as a coach, I know hundreds of men and women who have an uncanny ability to see life through other people’s eyes, to walk through life in other people’s shoes. This makes them extraordinarily clear and focused in creating and implementing unique solutions. This innate talent continues to improve as each of these individuals establishes and cultivates new client relationships.

This talent, I believe, represents the single most important skill any entrepreneur can have in the 21st century.

Too complex to comprehend.

Over the past 30 years, microchip-based tools and systems have been applied to countless situations in all sectors of the global economy. And not only the economy — microtechnology, as we grow to understand its virtually unlimited applications, is now seen as a crucial factor for progress in all areas of scientific, political, cultural, and social development. Simultaneously, all these diverse applications worldwide have been integrated into vast and myriad communication networks too complex to comprehend, culminating in what has now become the Internet, with its billions of daily uses and users.

We now live in a world where, every day, new opportunities for cooperation and competition emerge that were unimaginable 50 years ago.

But this also means that we live in a world where large numbers of people are faced with three serious dangers:

• Confusion. The experience of endless change driven by technology confuses people in many different ways. They lose their sense of where the center of things is, and they aren’t clear on where to focus their thinking and actions. Because of this confusion about the present, they don’t know how to invest their time, energies, and resources to produce a better future. For many, it’s more difficult to have a sense of personal meaning that keeps getting stronger; it’s harder to have a sense of purpose that stays on track.
• Isolation. Traditional forms of community based on mutually supportive relationships — extended families, small towns, neighborhoods, church membership, political parties, fraternal organizations, labor organizations, sports clubs — have weakened or disappeared from the lives of many people who live and work in modern settings. Even the most successful individuals often have few people they can confide in. There has been an increase in the number of temporary, transactional relationships in both personal and business spheres. People feel less commitment to long-term relationships, and they sense the same in others.
• Powerlessness. Conventional education is increasingly unable to prepare people confidently and competently for an unpredictable future. Knowledge and skills that were relevant five years ago can be worthless today. People who were successful in one setting find that changing circumstances are rendering them less useful and valuable. Specialists with 30 years of successful experience find that they have become redundant. Many people find that they are falling farther behind in terms of the constantly changing knowledge and methods that are crucial for success.

This is the bad news about the 21st century. The destructive side of change is never a pleasant experience. There’s certainly a lot of destruction already, with much more to come, making life scary, miserable, dangerous, and even deadly for millions of individuals. This will be true for the entire century.

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