Living in The Future...Anyone Can do it.

I had a few dinners in San Diego this week with my pal JP who was visiting from London. JP lives years in the future because of his career, his network and his passions.

I was telling him a story about an experience I had late one night in Chicago where I used ‘Hotels Tonight’ and ‘Uber’ and he mentioned how I was living in the future.

I have never thought of myself as ‘living in the future’ because I can’t program, I live on an island, and have little interest in computers and computing. JP assured me I was living in the future.

JP reminded me of this great quote he shares all the time (it’s from a famous ‘futurist’ friend of his):

His dinner inspired me to change up a talk I was giving yesterday in San Francisco at an Investing/Trading/Options Conference (TradeMonsters). The two slides that resonated most were these:

This kid would really be living in the future if he was smoking an electronic cigarette and was wearing a Fitbit. (note to self – an easy laugh). Also, I worry about chronic hot balls for this child (note to self – bigger laugh).

By watching our kids, we can live in the future. Basically, watching Rachel and Max use Snapchat the last six months confirmed my belief that Facebook should/worries/needs to buy them. The game is on with very high stakes I am sure. Main Street is thinking about the silliness of it all (lack of profits), but the big Social Web companies are thinking about ‘attention’ and engagement.

In the second slide I talked about the ‘peleton’. Most of the Tour De France is about staying with the peleton. It is the time trials and climbs and the breakaways that decide the race. In the real world today, most of the world flies commercial (the peleton), but by adding Uber and Hotels to the mix, two apps available to anyone, I can live in the future, and save time which is money to me.

I live in the future by reading JP, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld and others who make their living off the future. We can all draft behind them.

In the financial world it used to be about reading the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, and having a Bloomberg and/or Reuters Terminal.

The streams are quickly changing that. If you live in the streams and have been curating and filtering, you are away ahead of the old guard. The old guard is sending ‘walled’ links into the social web. Not only do they ignore the streams, they pollute them. A friend chimed in on the stream yesterday with:

‘But the rich and the powerful read these papers and use these machines!’

My response:

Trading/Investing may not even be about living in the future that matters anymore if your competition keeps living in the past.