Top ten rules for success, Prof. Yuval Noah Harari

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari of Hebrew University, Jerusalem and author of three classic best sellers on the human species, our past and our future, in this video talks of the future of humanity and mentions the top ten rules for success to make ourselves relevant and take oneself forward in the present world.

Quite practical, meaningful and philosophical !! Complied by Carmichael. 

1. Be Adaptive - the world is changing so fast,  with AI disruption going to happen soon, there will be no need for doctors, teachers, lawyers etc.. we humans need to adapt to a world where we will have to change our jobs every ten years and adapt. The best areas to invest would be Emotional Intelligence.

2. Learn how to deal with failure  - Do not get discouraged with failure, instead take failures as great learning opportunities and scale much greater heights with the learning. A person who has failed and knows how to crack the exam has learnt much more than the person who cracked the exam with a straight A in the first attempt.

3. Be a story-teller - Everyone looks forward to listening to things narrated to them in an interesting manner. Let there be a good learning too in what we say to catch the audience attention. Everybody tends to understand better in stories or real life cases. That is one of the reason why the top Universities in the world teach complicated concepts and thoughts through cases.

4. Get to know yourself - through meditation, travel, trekking or sports. The anger we express on others is more damaging for us than to the other person.

5. Practice Vipaasana meditation - it is an ancient Indian / Budhist meditation technique. Click here for more info .. Helps one to see reality more clearly. Just observe  your self starting with our own breath and then concentrate on different parts of your body, relaxing our muscles etc.. It helps us to understand our anger, emotions and other feelings. Listen to S N Goenka one of the global experts on VM ....

6. Engage with spirituality, not religiosity - Morality helps us to see the reality. Spirituality is about questions and reality is about answers. Spirituality is in everybody  and is unique. Religiosity is potent and can divide people on petty issues.

7. Study philosophy - Philosophical issues of Freewill, morality, humanity etc. have been studied by people over centuries without any impact. In the new technologically advanced environment, the society will need more philosophers to study practical issues to gain insight.

8. Read lots of books - Books expose us to the wonderful world of ideas and thoughts, it teaches us something new. By reading books we keep up-to-date with the wonderful, ground breaking, revolutionary ideas of the world

9. Develop your social skills - In the present time, our interactive, communication skills have more impact than our physical features.  To understand the society and people better, one needs to develop the ability to socialise well

10. Find your mission - Try to contribute to society by finding where and what one is good at and do it better. That is the call for which we are here on planet earth.

The video concludes by mentioning what Prof. Yuval considers the three main threats facing humanity by the turn of the century.

• Nuclear weapons
• Climate change and 
• Disruptive Technology

Disruptive Technology and other threats facing us he says, will force us to reinvent ourselves and engage in different pursuits every ten years ..

The late Cambridge Cosmologist Sir. Stephen Hawking had predicted that the three greatest threats facing humanity at the turn of the century are atomic weapons, aliens from outer space and AI robots. Click here for the link ..

Impact of Climate Change, courtesy nasa.gov

The  only difference we observe in their approaches is that while Stephen Hawking accepts the threat of aliens from outer space a major threat, Yuval never mentions anything about it, may be out of his ignorance on extra terrestrial sources of life and EI, but definitely Yuval finds the pressing issue of climate change to be a major threat to humanity than aliens from outer space.

Click here for interesting 25 min video ..

Yuval says that we can predict the future, but not influence it. we find with each passing day, technology is pervading all aspects of our life and by understanding this technology we are able to predict the future better than anyone else. 

The purpose of this writing was to crystallise some thought processes of some of the great thinkers of our times. This should help us to understand our future much better.

George..