How Successful Entrepreneurs Transform Complexity Into Opportunity
Dan Sullivan
Life radically changed in the early 1970s with the introduction of the microchip, followed by the personal computer, the internet, apps, and mobile communication.
These inventions have brought the economics, politics, and culture of the world down to the individual level. And individuals are asked more and more to use new technological capabilities to empower themselves to make sense of the world they’re living in.
People say, “Isn’t this great? We can do things faster, better, and cheaper.” But what actually happens is that people get exponentially confused due to a lack of direction.
Everybody’s reality, everywhere.
Everyone today lives in personal and public circumstances that are being disrupted in countless unpredictable ways that can make life complicated and confusing.
That was partially true 50 years ago, but it’s a general condition now.
The essential culprit is that the complexity we each have can multiply the complexity everyone else has because we each have the interconnecting technology to complicate and confuse other people’s lives.
So we’re all complicit in the endless growth of complexity.
It’s like we’re fish, and complexity is now the water we swim in, and people think they can continue swimming the way they used to even though there’s been a fundamental shift in our environment.
We haven’t been trained for this interconnectivity and for this level of interaction that’s required whether we like it or not.
So how does an individual not only survive, but thrive, in a new world without the protection of old structures?
You have to develop a whole new idea of what the individual has to focus on for themselves. That’s half the picture. Then, you have to figure out whom to collaborate with—because the future is collaborative. And there are two fundamental skills of collaborating: simplifying and multiplying.
Complexity’s a mindset.
While some people say that attention spans have gotten shorter, I think that attention spans have just become binary: you give 100 percent attention to things you’re interested in, and zero percent to things you’re not.
When you love doing something, that comes from the inside. And the complexity you experience isn’t because of what’s happening outside of you, but rather because of how you’re thinking about your relationship to the outside world.
You have no responsibility for what’s happening in the outside world, but you have 100 percent responsibility for how you respond to it.
You can’t play a 50/50 game, feeling like you have some control over what’s happening outside of you and not taking full ownership of your response to what’s happening.
It used to be that we had access to limited resources, but we’re now able to connect with any resource or capability we want, so we have to take responsibility for figuring out what resources and capabilities we should be looking for.
Someone else’s complexity is your opportunity to shine. Get your copy of Simplifier-Multiplier Collaboration now to learn Dan Sullivan’s breakthrough solution to an increasingly complicated world.
Mindsets that work for you.
If you took someone from 200 years ago and put them into the world 150 years ago, they’d be overwhelmed by the advances in technology that were present.
But the rate of change has accelerated in our time. And the question is, can you adjust your mindset to the current set of conditions?
The secret to life at all times is to develop mindsets that adjust to the circumstances you’re living in and give you access to the best possible resources and capabilities for your own personal growth.
That would be true anywhere, in any time period.
But there’s a dependency now on guidance from outside sources, and that isn’t working anymore. Traditional teachers, leaders, and guides don’t know any more than you do about what will be required of you years in the future.
Skills for best thinking.
So what we do is continually create, test, refine, and strengthen entire systems of useful mindsets that increasingly enable us to be successful in a world with other like-minded individuals. We look for resonance.
We continually organize, package, and share uniquely new and useful ways of thinking about the world that also enable other like-minded individuals to think and act in better ways.
So once you’ve proven it with yourself, you become valuable to others. We find guidance in our relationships with like-minded people.
Simplicity for everyone.
Things have gotten more complicated for everyone. Complexity is the water we’re swimming in, and to an extent, there’s no air to breathe outside of that water.
You don’t need to spend time explaining the problem because it’s the experience we’re all living in. And not everyone has learned how to swim in this ocean of complexity yet.
To know who you are in this world and to have great, mutually beneficial relationships with other people, you have to become increasingly skillful at transforming your own internal complexity into new ways of simplifying everyone else’s internal ability to transform their complexity. If you want simplicity, this is how to get it.
