Hamster on a Wheel Syndrome

Photo courtesy of Flickr

 

My kids love the local pet shop.  

We can’t walk past it without multiple protests from them.   

Our oldest, Hayden, takes great delight in showing his younger siblings the assorted animals, explaining what they are.   

“Look Madison, fish!”  “Look Logi Bear (our nickname for Logan), hermit crabs!”  

And then there are the hamsters.  You may know them as guinea pigs, small furry critters in their hutches.   

Invariably they have one of those wheels in their inclosure.  You know what I mean, their little legs moving quickly, the wheel turning, but the hamster isn’t going anywhere.  Lots of activity, but no progress.  

Sound familiar?  

Equipping Yourself For the Knowledge Age

Over the course of human history, we’ve gone through many transformations. 

We started as Hunters and Gatherers before realising that it was much more effective to plant crops and domesticate animals and thus the Agricultural Age began.  People started to settle in towns and 90+% of traditional hunter gatherers got on board and began to till the earth.

Then in the late 18th Century, people learned how to increase efficiency even more through the greater use of machinery, giving us the Industrial Age.  Mass production started and raw materials were able to be turned into something useful. Even farms began to industrialise, meaning that less people needed to work the land as they became more efficient at producing food for the ever-increasing cities that were being formed.  Today, only 3 percent of Americans are farmers, feeding the entire country and providing exports elsewhere. 

Now we are well and truly into the Information or Knowledge Age.  It’s an age when computers have increased efficiency so much that traditional manufacturing jobs are disappearing at a rapid rate, especially in the developed world.  It’s a time when ideas are king, when emotional intelligence is crucial to your success and when you have the opportunity to do much more meaningful work than was possible to previous generations.

So how can we prepare ourselves for the Knowledge Age?