What does the extreme competition mean?
On the positive side, this increasing competition creates incredible innovation. As consumers, we have people racing to serve needs we didn’t even realize we had faster, cheaper, and better.
On the negative side, as workers, we are the ones racing to serve customers. It feels like we’re on a treadmill and that if we get off that treadmill to smell the roses of life for too long, we may fall irreparably behind. If there isn’t always a direct threat we can see, there is always the implied threat. For example, there is now a large literature of megacompanies who were disrupted by garage startups because their innovation rate slowed and their hubris swelled.
Matt Ridley sums up the situation in this quote…
“One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later leads to a counterinvention. Every success contains the seeds of its own overthrow. Every hegemony comes to an end. Evolutionary history is no different. Progress and success are always relative… In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things.”
— Matt Ridley
Some harbingers of this reality are already around us.
For starters, the lifespan of companies on the Fortune 500 is shrinking. Charles Fine, MIT researcher and author of Clockspeed puts these numbers in context, “The faster the industry clockspeed, the shorter the half-life of competitive advantage.”
We’re also seeing inequality skyrocket. One of the craziest statistics here is that the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people combined, according to Oxfam. Even more surprising, the 26 richest people own as much as the poorest 50%. It’s astounding.
We can also see how the pace of life has increased on many other levels…
Movies have faster cuts. When my kids were younger, I took it as an opportunity to rewatch the first Star Wars. It was too slow to keep my attention.
More and more people are fast forwarding media content. Netflix recently added the ability to watch all of its shows at 1.5x speed. Even Audible recently increased its max speed from 3x to 3.5x.
Our language is becoming shorter, more informal, and filled with acronyms…
We’re seeing book summary websites get venture capital and now websites that offer book summaries of book summaries.
Not too long ago, Google Calendar added 15 minute increments. Will it soon copy Elon Musk’s 5-minute increments?
Finally, we’ve all heard about increasing rates of anxiety. Many times social media usage and technology devices are scapegoated as the root cause. But maybe all of these are part of a deeper phenomenon… time acceleration.
Big Question: How do we hold Time acceleration?
“In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again.”
— Yuval Noah Harari
To recap, we are on the precipice of an era of extreme competition — which means that the amount and pace of competition will accelerate 4x in the next 20 years.
If you don’t prepare now, you will be progressively outcompeted and overwhelmed.
So the question becomes, how do we hold ourselves in the race?