This is Moe Abdou and with me today is Dan Burrus, author of Flash Foresight which in my opinion is a real game changer.
Dan thank you very much for joining us.
It is my pleasure.
It’s great to see that you’re here in San Diego.
I know. What a great place to be especially this time of year. I was just in Florida yesterday giving a speech. This has Florida beat.
I think slightly. Dan, as I briefly mentioned to you, I see the work that you’re doing specifically the book Flash Foresight as a real game changer specifically in changing the thinking paradigm of entrepreneurs in particular.
I thought it would be a good starting point for you to kind of lay the context out for people who haven’t read it or maybe even the ones who have read it. So people can start to understand your thinking behind it.
You just made an interesting comment and that is change people’s thinking. I think managers change how people behave, leaders change how people think. Yet, they don’t tell them what to think. They change their context for thinking about, in this case, their future. In this case, about the opportunities that are there. In this case, about how to solve seemingly impossible problems.
The reason that I titled it, Flash Foresight is that we have foresight. As a matter of fact, I’m sure you and many other people that are listening to this have said at one point in time, I knew that was going to happen or, I knew I should have bought that stock or, I knew I should have sold that whatever it is. You had a foresight. The trouble is you didn’t know if you could trust it.
Just like we read about trends and of course some work and some don’t. So we just don’t know if we can trust it. Of course, the problem with hindsight is it only brings lament, you know, if you didn’t buy Google, too bad, too late. I mean, you could still buy it now but you won’t get it at the price when it first came out, if that’s your lament.
With hindsight, you have no power. The power is in foresight because if you can learn how to control it and use it, that’s where you can shape the future as where the past has already been shaped. So that’s the idea.
Flash foresight is a blinding flash. In other words, it’s a true flash of insight about the future. Something that you actually know will happen versus something that might happen. It tends to open up invisible opportunities and often gives you solutions to problems that you wouldn’t have otherwise seen. That’s the why the subtitle of Flash Foresight is How To See The Invisible and Do The Impossible.
If you think about it just a minute most of the things that you and I do on a daily basis including recording this and getting it distributed out to all of our listeners was impossible at one time in history. Technology has allowed us, coupled with a vision, to do things that were previously impossible; from putting a man on the moon to all the great things that we’ve done.
The key to doing impossible things and solving impossible problems is looking where you’re not looking to see what you’re not seeing. So the seven radical principles that will transform your business — that’s one of the lines on the cover of the book — is really the seven principles are triggers that help you to see where the invisible is.
If you like, I could just go through a couple of them and give you examples so you know what I’m talking about.