Dancing in the Rain: How Bold Leaders Grow Stronger in Stormy Times is THE book you need right now.
And starting right now, you can pre-order it, for a July delivery, at dancing.jimcarroll.com
Join me! Dance in the rain with me!
Decoding Tomorrow: Your Daily Future Inspiration – Innovating in Uncertainty: “Every good moment of uncertainty demands the certainty of action!”
“Every good moment of uncertainty demands the certainty of action!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
You can pre-order Dancing in the Rain effective today!
I’ve got a final, print-ready manuscript in my hands, which needs a final read-through before we commit to it. I’m waiting for my cover guy to finish off the cover. After that, a few more buttons to hit, and we are good to go. There are a few logistical hurdles to get through, in that the team that works with me (aka family) has a few other commitments (aka day jobs) that take precedence. It will at least be by July – I am hoping for sooner.
What a wild voyage – I filmed a little clip about it here:
The actual date that I started the blog series was April 7, so it will turn out to be just a little more than 2 months from the time I conceived of the idea of the book to its release.
Think about where we were just two months ago. The insanity of the reality of a global trade war was setting in; markets were uncertain; and clarity was lacking. And if it isn’t evident to you yet, all the signs are there that we are already in the midst of what will be a rather prolonged and significant economic retraction.
That’s why I decided that what I needed to do was begin to summarize everything I had learned, observed, and researched about how companies and executives responded to previous periods of economic decline. In the previous decades, I had developed a LOT of insight into the criticality of innovation through a recession; of staying relentlessly focused on growth; and on finding opportunity while everyone else was retrenching. I had a significant amount of material on the strategies, mindsets, actions, and undertakings of those who were bold enough to not just focus on the challenges of today, but to double down on the opportunities of tomorrow.
So I began writing my blog series, starting with this post: “The long arc of the future always rewards the patient”
My opening comments?
It is what it is. We are where we are. This moment in 2025 feels like a bad dream to many, and the assault on the global economy was a tipping point for many worldwide. With that in mind, I’m devoting the next few weeks of my Daily Inspiration to addressing a key question: How do we lead through uncertainty. How do we lead ourselves – what’s our mindset? How do we lead others – how can we help? How do we lead our organizations – how do we keep moving forward? I spent a lot of time on this theme during and after the downturns of 2001, 2008 and again during 2020. There is a lot to revisit, and a lot to think about. The theme is ‘resilience,’ and we can all learn more about.
And so I began writing. And writing. And writing.
Somewhere along the way, I realized I had a book in there. I remember the night I was out for an after-dinner walk with my wife, and I carefully broached the fact that I was ‘doing another one.’ Keep in mind that she – as my business partner and editor – was still immersed in the process of getting my book Escaping Mediocrity out the door. This came after a fast project to get the other book, Embracing Mediocrity in print. All during this time, she was taking on the role of Treasurer and going back on the Board of a charity for special needs young adults that we are heavily involved with. She was none too thrilled but knows me all too well.
And so here we are. I practice what I preach. The core message of the book is that every crisis demands that we don’t freeze but act. That we don’t suddenly go into a state of indecision, but move forward decisively. While everyone else is focused on the current moment, we need to prepare for the next one.
That while others are doing what they can to avoid the storm, we need to go out into it with full determination, and dance.
I hope you will do a pre-order. We’ve worked tremendously hard to get to this point, and I am eager to get what I think is one of my best books (this one being #43 I think) into your hands!
Dance!
In the rain!
Order it now at dancing.jimcarroll.com.
Decoding Tomorrow: Your Daily Future Inspiration – Accelerating Creativity: “Your future is a canvas of endless opportunity!”
“Your future is a canvas of endless opportunity!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
I’m learning to make little cartoons. Pity my family!
Anyway, with that in mind, I’m thrilled to announce that we got an ISBN for Dancing in the Rain yesterday, so we are pretty close to being in print! I celebrated by putting together a little cartoon that showed my patience through the process.
I’ve also been tracking the weather for this weekend for a wedding shower for some good family friends. It’s been looking like rain, but the forecast suddenly started to look better. I created a little cartoon to share this good news with my close friends.
All of this has come about as I continue to relentlessly explore the creative opportunities that are AI. (I haven’t even touched on the massive explosion of creative innovation occurring with AI video. Suffice it to say, that the Bible, Titanic, and Star Wars will never be the same. If you are on social media, you will know.)
Anyway, my little cartoon endeavor began with this character, who I have named Little Guy.
He was generated by an AI for item #113 in my Embracing Mediocrity book. I kind of took a liking to him. A simple drawing that just seems to somehow show a range of emotions. The caption that went with him? “STAY AVERAGE. Stay where you are. Treat being ordinary as an accomplishment in itself.” And then, I liked him so much that he appears again in item #96 of Escaping Mediocrity, “WELCOME HARDSHIP. Difficulty builds character. Easy paths create weak people unprepared for life.”
My new cartoon skill (LOL!)? I first began going down this path when, several weeks ago, we seemed to be in an endless cycle of rain. I made myself remember why a gloomy season of rain leads to the growth that marks spring.
Of course, this led to a little comic that reminded me that the rainy pattern would eventually end…
That led to another one that is a bit self-explanatory – how we react to bad golf shots, but how it is our mindset that matters.
Anyways, what is the point of all this? I continue to learn new skills, exploring the depths of opportunity and challenge with all the new technologies that surround us. This brings me to the point of today’s post – I spent a little bit of time yesterday, pulling together this PDF and website – 101 Learnings for a Better Life. It’s a series of lessons that I’ve worked to summarize over time that tries to summarize my approach to things.
I would encourage you to read it and share it – you might find some optimism among the gloom that seems to be a big part of our world today. And in fact, that’s the origin of today’s quote – because our future truly is a canvas of endless opportunity! I asked ChatGPT to summarize my 101 learnings and that is what it came back with!
Oh, and if you would like a personal little 6-frame cartoon with my ‘little guy’, send me a message with what you are looking for!
Decoding Tomorrow: Your Daily Future Inspiration – Innovation Sclerosis: “Slow innovation, timid ideas, process over imagination, small-minded thinking, diminished ambition: these are the signs of an abandoned future.”
“Slow innovation, timid ideas, process over imagination, small-minded thinking, diminished ambition: these are the signs of an abandoned future.“- Futurist Jim Carroll
So Apple had their big developer conference the other day. This is the event where they lay out their plans for the coming year and the future about software, hardware, and new lines of business.
And it seems it was an entirely ho-hum affair – essentially consisting of a new software design (that many are panning), scaling back their AI efforts, and introducing a few new features here and there, This from the company that reinvented the phone, music, computer and other industries with bold visions, a fundamentally new technology that reimagined entire industries,
Apple finds itself trapped in what I call the “innovation plateau paradox” – having achieved such extraordinary success with revolutionary products like the iPhone and iPad that subsequent releases inevitably feel incremental by comparison. While the company continues to refine existing categories with better cameras, faster chips, and enhanced services, the absence of a truly category-defining breakthrough since Jobs’ era is glaring.
Way back in 2014, I wrote a document – 25 Trends for 2025. You can find the post and PDF here.
What was trend #24 for 2025 on the list? I suggested this:
Apple is delisted
Once one of the world’s most innovative, cash-rich, highly valued
company, Apple enters a new phase in 2025 when it is delisted
from most global stock markets.
Why?
Most industry leaders never survive; there is always someone
with a better idea.
It’s the age-old rule of business: incumbency is not a guarantee!
Tongue in cheek, my main point was that eventually, unless they keep relentlessly focused on creative innovation, every company eventually fumbles, makes mistakes, loses its mojo, and starts to fall behind. (Check out trend #25 on my list from 2014 – it’s kind of fun! And I did a full analysis of my prediction from 2014 in a post last December – read it here.)
What’s the point behind the point? Relentless innovation and reinvention. Over the years, I’ve written about Apple a lot, such as this post from 2019:
Can you reinvent yourself at the same blistering pace as Apple and other hi-tech companies?
If not, you’d better figure it out – your market and industry are becoming part of that same reality.
At one time, Apple was in a situation in which 60% of revenue came from products that didn’t exist 4 years earlier. Once an aberration, that is increasingly becoming the norm in most industries. If you can’t reinvent at the same blistering pace, you’re done.
I then noted:
If you can’t reinvent, you don’t survive. Your customers won’t put up with it. Their mind is already far ahead of you, because increasingly, they know what comes next, and that’s what they want!
Clinging to your legacy like the drowning seize a life preserver is not a strategy – it’s desperation!
That’s where some people are pointing out how Apple seems to be drowning. Sure, it’s had stunning innovation in the last few years, particularly with its staggeringly fast and extremely powerful new Mx-computer chips. But the rest? It’s stumbled badly on AI, abandoned a long-running effort to get into the car industry, and failed with the mass consumer market launch of its VisionPro headset. It also lost the key design for many of its boldest initiatives, Jonny Ive, to OpenAI.
The real challenge isn’t just about creating the “next big thing,” but about maintaining innovative momentum when you’ve already transformed entire industries. Apple’s cautious approach to AI integration and its fortress-like ecosystem strategy may be protecting current profits but is also constraining the very risk-taking that once made it legendary. The question isn’t whether Apple can still innovate – it’s whether it can rediscover its appetite for audacious bets that create the future rather than simply polish it.
When it’s one big announcement is something like “liquid glass,” you have to wonder. When you think about it and to be crass, it now seems to release a few new emojis, tweak its software, and ride to success on the back of its services revenue – things like music which essentially give it a guaranteed revenue and income stream without a lot of innovation. That’s a rather simplistic overview, but when you get right down to it – what have you seen Apple do that matches the blistering pace of innovation that it saw during the period from 2000 to 2012?
The point is this – as soon as you start to see a company falling into the trap of “slow innovation, timid ideas, process over imagination, small-minded thinking, diminished ambition”, you know you are witnessing the warning signs of an abandoned future.
Decoding Tomorrow: Your Daily Future Inspiration – The Economic Storm: Most people don’t recognize the depths of their failure until long after they’ve been in there”
“Most people don’t recognize the depths of their failure until long after they’ve been in there.” – Futurist Jim Carroll”
So the question on most people’s minds is – when will all of this end?
Go on, admit it. If you are like most people who follow me and read these daily posts, you get up every morning and check the news to see if a certain event has transpired.
So far, no.
And you check again the next day.
And the next.
So where are we now?
What’s the path out?
No one knows. But I do know it will take quite some time. I’ve long learned through observation that most people don’t understand they’re on the wrong path until it’s far too late. CEOs always believe they are invincible until the wreckage of their company surrounds them – Jim Balsillie of Blackberry fame comes to mind, and as of late, Elon Musk. Star athletes keep on trying and trying, failing ever more frequently as their body begins to fail them, never quite accepting the reality of their condition. Alcoholics and addicts always face a tortuous path to acceptance of their condition. Entire nations become convinced they can follow a path of destroying their economy to “improve” it.
Anyways, here we are. What’s interesting to think about is how this unfolds from here.
What we are dealing with is what we might call “delayed failure recognition.” What’s that? It’s a cold, hard truth that there is often some seriously twisted wiring in the human brains of folks around us, with the impact that they are often blind to their demise. Simply put, the typical logic of failure acceptance is non-existent.
Let’s break down the psychological landmines that is “delayed failure recognition:”
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: The “They Don’t Know What They Don’t Know” Trap
This is ground zero. They think they’re on the right path. They’ve convinced themselves they’ve got it figured out. Why? Lack of knowledge, conspiracy theories, crowd thinking. They’ve become so utterly incompetent in a specific area that they don’t even possess the knowledge to recognize their incompetence. Let’s just say it’s a feedback loop of blissful ignorance. They’re sailing along, charting a course for success when in reality, they’re heading straight for the jagged rocks. Their brain is actively preventing them from seeing the warning signs because they don’t know what to look for.
Self-Serving Bias & Ego Protection: The Blame Game, Elevated
Their ego is an armed fortress of grievance, and it’s ready to explode at any moment. That means that when the winds of failure start to blow, their first instinct isn’t to confront it – it’s to shield themselves from acknowledging it. Instead, they try to rationalize what is happening, believing it’s a game of 4-dimensional chess. They blame others. They do anything to avoid confronting the chilling reality they face — because this would crush the years of belief they have built up in their minds that they are on the right path. Psychiatrists speak of a sophisticated psychological defense mechanism that ensures a healthy lag between the moment failure occurs and the moment they even consider owning it – which is, sadly, a long, long time.
Normalcy Bias: The “It’s Always Been This Way” Delusion
People crave stability. They cling to the familiar. So when things start to subtly degrade, they rationalize to themselves that “it’s just a phase.” “Things will pick up.” “It will get better soon.” They become so accustomed to the slow unraveling around them that they ignore the increasingly obvious cracks of instability. Only when the whole damn building collapses do they finally look around and say, “Huh, guess that wasn’t normal after all.”
Change Blindness & Gradual Decline: The Boiling Frog Syndrome
Remember the boiling frog story? That’s the one that has a frog in a pot of slowly heating water – and it doesn’t jump out because the change is so incremental, so imperceptible. That’s them. Right now, frogs are boiling.
The Depths of Delayed Awareness
So right now, we are living through one of the most extreme cases of “delayed failure recognition:”.
Sadly and tragically, we are all impacted.
And we don’t know how and when it ends, but we all suspect it won’t end well.
Plan accordingly.
Decoding Tomorrow: Your Daily Future Inspiration – Mastering Knowledge: “Experiment learn repeat. The only formula you need!”
“Experiment learn repeat. The only formula you need!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Wrap your head around the growth of knowledge – and what you need to enhance your knowledge to deal with its reality.
You should know that you don’t know what you need to know.
You should know that you need to know it.
And then, set out to know it.
When you do so, know that you can only know if you get involved with it.
Get involved with it.
You’ll probably fail.
But that’s ok because you’ve learned about it,
So do it again.
Put this on repeat.
Compound what you know.
That’s what you need to know. Warren Buffet said it best:
“Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
In that context, keep in mind the idea of the Power in Tiny Gains. This graph says it all.
Think about this idea of compounding in the context of knowledge. Hit up the article, The Power of Compound Knowledge for HR: 6 Steps To Earn Learning Dividends. It’s here. The compounding growth curve idea is that knowledge—like compound interest—builds on itself over time, leading to exponential improvement. Here’s the gist of what you need to know.
To put the article in context, there are three phases of knowledge growth:
- Initial learning: You start by acquiring foundational knowledge. Growth is slow because there’s not much to build on.
- Growth acceleration: Once core understanding is in place, learning becomes faster and more efficient—especially when diving into more advanced concepts.
- Expertise accumulation: At this stage, each new bit of knowledge has multiplier effects, helping you rapidly deepen expertise and tackle complex challenges
Think about all that in the context of my idea: Experiment. Learn. Repeat. Let’s take that apart:
- Keep in mind the importance of experimentation. Too often, we think of an ‘experiment‘ as something confined to a lab. But in the context of knowledge, experimenting means simply trying things out. It’s asking, ‘What if I tried learning this way?’ or ‘What happens if I apply this new concept to my daily work?‘ It’s a low-stakes, high-reward approach to discovery.
- link the idea of knowledge compounding to your experiments. While reading 500 pages a day is a powerful habit, remember that true compounding often comes from doing things. Don’t just consume knowledge; design mini-experiments. Can you apply a new concept from that article to a current project? Can you teach someone else what you’ve just learned? Can you set up a simple test to see if a new idea holds? These deliberate actions turn passive intake into active, compounding knowledge.
- and be ready to fail! Always remember that failure is not the end of the road; it’s the richest part of your experiment. Think of failure as immediate, personalized feedback. It tells you what didn’t work, why it didn’t work, and, most importantly, illuminates a path forward. Each ‘failed’ attempt refines your approach, making your next ‘Experiment‘ more informed and effective.”
- put all this on repeat! This isn’t just about doing the same thing twice. It’s about iterative improvement and deepening your mastery of new knowledge. Each repetition builds on the last, solidifying neural pathways and revealing new layers of understanding. It’s how nascent knowledge transforms into ingrained skill, how simple facts evolve into profound insights, and how you genuinely ‘own’ what you know.
New knowledge? Start slow, and build a solid foundation. As your base grows, your pace of knowledge acquisition speeds up. Before long, every new insight has a far greater impact—turning your learning into a powerful compounding engine.
That’s the compounding growth curve—strategic, continual learning that accelerates over time.
Call it just-in-time knowledge on steroids.
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