Daily Inspiration: Decisive Leadership – “Have you ever noticed that those decisions you didn’t make yesterday are coming back to haunt you today?”

“Have you ever noticed that those decisions you didn’t make yesterday are coming back to haunt you today?” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Life shouldn’t be a series of missed opportunities but a history of achieved possibilities.

The essence of disruptive thinking is developing the ability to decide the presence of imperfect information.

One of the lines I will often use on stage involves the ability to move into markets that do not yet exist with products or services not yet conceived. Steve Jobs didn’t launch the iPod or iPhone with perfect information as to what a future market might look like – he just knew the timing was right. Reed Hastings didn’t bring Netflix to the world with detailed information on the future of streaming services – in fact, he first had the company go into the physical DVD space. Jeff Bezos didn’t launch Amazon with full details as to what the future of the ‘everything online’ store might look like – he just had a gut feeling that online commerce would be a thing.

So what are you waiting for? Perfect information? Absolute certainty? Minimal risk? A guarantee of success?

That’s not how you do things.

You jump in, move forward, get involved, try things out – and make decisions.

Here’s what we know about trends and tomorrow. AI is going to change entire industries, much of which is as of yet unknown. Regenerative medicine will allow us to grow human body parts, forever changing the world of healthcare. The future of energy is all about the marriage of batteries and technology. Cars are going to be predominantly electric with a massive supporting infrastructure. We’ll be farming 24 hours a day through a lot of virtualized farm technology. We’ll be building things in new and different ways with a lot of new intelligent technologies. We will have shifted the world of insurance to one of real-time risk underwriting, based on a lot of device and human connectivity.

In all of these situations, millions of new jobs are being created, companies are being born, and service industries are being built around them. Ten or twenty years from now, we’ll all look back and go ‘Whoah.’

And there will be many people who will be in a state of regret because they didn’t take the opportunity when they should have.

They will be surrounded by those who made a decision, dipped their toes into future waters, and started to move forward, not back.

What’s your plan?