The Future Is Empathy

Merriam Webster simply defines Empathy as:

"the feeling that you understand and share another person's experiences and emotions : the ability to share someone else's feelings"

Empathy requires a deeper level of realism than sympathy. It requires the ability to look from another persons perspective, not to it from your own perspective. 

Monday of this week started with honoring Dr. Marin Luther King Jr. and his dream.  Dr King was able to lead during his lifetime because he had a deep empathy for the other people in this world going through similar struggles. The greatest leaders of our time use empathy to gain followers and with those followers collectively solve large problems.

Today Macklemore and Ryan Lewis released a new song about the role white privilege has played in their life. The song chronicles Macklemore's recent experiences marching in Black Lives Matter protests and being a part of the hip hop community. The song shows an understanding and empathy of both sides of the table. The greatest artists of our time use empathy to create great and relatable work. 

Steve Job's knew empathy in design was the path to creating groundbreaking new products. The best product designers know their customers because they are their customers. Empathy guides the creation of the product. The greatest products of our time were built by founders who had the ability to empathize with the customers they are helping.

Last week I stood in the middle of a field in Africa while a plane flew overhead and dropped bags of food to the ground. Myself and others began to run, grab as much as we could, and carried home what we had picked up to feed our families. I experienced this shockingly first person perspective while wearing a $20 Google cardboard Virtual Reality headset in my living room. I was amazed at how real it felt. You should have seen the look on my Grandfather's face when I had him try it too. 

Technology enabled me and the others who tried it, to in that moment empathize immediately in a way that reading text simply never could do as powerfully or effectively. Empathy is an incredibly powerful ability. With constant new technology and the increasing free flow of information on the internet I expect empathy to grow to be a more naturally occurring and common part of society. The earliest test of this theory is and will be the attitude of Millennials as they have had the greatest exposure to new technologies and open information. In the next few years we will see if I am right, but I believe an open mind and empathy are the way of the future.  

I Dream That Society Comes Together To Solve Global Problems

I have a dream that before I die I am able to give back to this world and society in a way that it is as much a better place as I can make it during my lifetime. Knowing that about myself I find social entrepreneurship a very attractive ideal and nobel venture. The ability to help others improve the world through manifesting there own visions is also one of the core reasons I am involved with the Founder Institute New York.

As mentioned before, remembering to be thinking 10X and the idea of investing in Moonshoots can be a tough mindset to stay locked into. Sometimes you have to think bigger than what you think big is. I have been making sure to remind myself to think exponentially as best I can for the past few months. One of the biggest problems I see is how can we get society to work together to solve problems. Giant problems. Global problems. Hell, maybe even within our solar system problems (I see you Mars).

January 18th, 2015 celebrates the day that a man named Martin Luther King Jr. saw a problem so large it divided a country and defined other nations. He then attempted to solve it and along the way brought the world closer to a one day resolution. He had a dream to make the world a better place and pursued that dream. I am motivated by that greatness.

There is still more work to be done to resolve racial inequality. There is more work to done to cure cancer. And to turn back climate change, help drug addiction, find clean water, and aid in poverty. The list goes on. All important issues that all need to be solved. Ideally in our lifetime.

The simple fact is that someone or some group of people has to solve them. Nature won't resolve these issues on it's own. I believe that we have the power in 2016 to build tools using technology to help advance progress in each of these specific areas. We as a society have a duty to put the Netflix down and work toward that brighter future. That is why I have started to collect the largest problems we need to improve as a society. Visit here to see the first problems I have collected and also propose any existing solutions you know of for those global problems we face. Feel free to submit anything you feel as missing is as well. Comment below if you have any other ideas on how to tackle such a large endeavor. After all, the world has problems, somebody has to solve them.