418: The Long Game: Time, Meaning, and Living Beautifully in a Finite World

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to the Future of Leadership. I'm your host, Zoe Routh, leadership futurist, author and adventure seeker. Here we like to ask the big questions of what if? And figure out what we need now for what's next. Together we will work through leadership in life transitions with grace. Now on with the show. Hello there, it's Zoe Rath. Welcome back to the show. My question for you today is how should we think about time as a leader and as a human? And what does this mean for our leadership? Let's get into it. Well, on Planet Zoe, some personal updates. Last week I spent, uh, a whole week in Canberra and mostly it was visiting friends and getting immersed in the Canberra winter weather, which was downpour, it was windy, it was wet, it was cold. And I am so grateful to be back in Newcastle where it is 10 degrees warmer and quite lovely. And it was also fantastic to catch up with my friends there. Um, I know you're all wondering, yes, my hair is back under control. I know you tune in every week to hear my personal updates about my hair and other injuries, but there you go, there you have it. I'm sort of injury free. I now have a new problem on my foot, which is this little peanut sized cyst of some sort. But apart from that, everything is going well. Um, what else can I tell you? Oh, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on in the background with my author business and I am looking to set up a new author website and a new shopping cart. I know you don't really care about that, but these are the things that I, I grapple with and that will take a lot of investment of money, time and energy to set up properly. And it's part of a whole rebranding exercise I'm bringing to my newsletter. So for many years I've kept my author newsletter, bookish, separate to my leadership newsletter, the Future, the Fit for the Future Leadership, uh, ezine. And why? Because as I was thinking through my author branding, my two worlds are really one world. The way that I think about leadership and the way that I think about my literature and my fiction writing is through the same lens. It's asking what is the story of us? I'm interested in power, leadership and the human story. Whether that's through my leadership work that I do with teams and organizations, or whether it's through my fiction and exploring that. So, yes, everything is coming into under one umbrella and, and my ezine will be rebranded as the Long Game, which I think is rather clever. Thank you, Claude. Who suggested that Claude Yes, Claude AI. I've been using Claude quite a lot to work on my business strategy and to identify where I can streamline things and just make life easier for me so I can do less online things and more human things, which isn't that what we all really want? I think so. Also, uh, in the background, I've started working on the second editions of my first three books, Composure, Moments and Loyalty, which will include new covers to be in line with people stuff and power games. And sometime next year I will do a Kickstarter to launch it as a bundled package. So that's kind of bubbling away as one of my projects. I've also been digging in deep and well into my first novel in the Roman series, the ancient Roman series on Servilia. The draft title is the Pearl and the Dagger. Don't know if it will survive the editing process, but I'm 50,000, 15,000 words into that and the first draft should be done probably towards the end of July. And I'll get it started on the editing process with my aim to have the first novel done and dusted and out by the end of the year. So that a lot depends on the editing process. I'll be working with a new editor, so see how that goes. But I'm enjoying it heaps. And all that news will be in my newsletter, either on the bookish newsletter or the Fit for the Future newsletter. And in July it'll become the long game. So if you're not part of the newsletter, just go to my website and sign up to either one of those ezines and you'll get the updates and the launch stuff and the special deals will come for first readers. Speaking of first readers, or any readers whatsoever, I had the most amazing author story happen yesterday. So here in Newcastle, I went and put a copy of the Olympus Project, my first sci fi novel, in one of those lending little lending street libraries. And I walked past the other day, I'm like, oh, it's gone. Somebody's picked it up. I wonder who picked it up. Never thinking I'd ever find out. Of course he's off. You launch these things into the ether and often you don't meet the people who read your books. And I was looking at my Amazon data and. And I have sold uh, 10,000 books over the course of all of my books in the last 10 years. Yay for me and 10,000 people. That's a lot of people. Well, it's a lot of books. So some books went to the same like five books probably went to the same person. But anyway, you get the gist. A lot of people never meet all of them. Uh, then I got a purchase through my website for two of my sci fi books. So I wrote to them and said, thank you for buying my book. Is so excited that, that you invested in the books. I hope you enjoy them. How did you find the first couple of books? And he said, well, I was in Newcastle, I'm from Perth, and I went past the lending library and below, and behold, I'm like, oh, my God. He was a person who found my book and it traveled with them all the way to Perth. He enjoyed it so much he bought the next couple of books in the series. So, yes, it was a rewarding story for me to meet an actual reader. And. And if you're one of my readers and you haven't written to me or been in touch, please do, because it just makes my day. If you hated the books, I don't care. It's nice to meet somebody who's actually read them and feedback is always welcome. And part of doing the second editions, I'll be fixing up typos and layouts and all that kind of stuff. So if you read any one of my books and you discover an era, it's galling for sure. But they do tend to slip through the net, even though they get multiple passes. So it's just elevating my game in the long game of authorship. So this idea about talking about time, uh, is a pretty significant one. And as I've been working on the Chrysalis workshops with a small cohort of people who've been looking at their late career transitions, and it's been such a rewarding process to work, take people through this. There's a couple things we've been doing. We started with looking at identity. What's our identity in our later years? And starting with that is really important. So. And when I talked to Dan Gregory, who was on the show a couple weeks back, and he talked about thinking about who before why. And the whole premise is who are you? And then that determines the why, the manifestation of your purpose. So that's what we did in the Chrysalis. We looked at identity first, and then last week we were looking at mattering and meaning, how we will generate a sense of purpose and mattering and meaning in our later years. And this week we are talking about, uh, living the good life. And it's all about the philosophy of living the good life before we get anywhere close to putting the detail into the plan for our later years. And though it's the what am I going to do? Is the problem that people wrestle with first, to get to the answer to that, we have to do these other pieces of work first, around identity, around mattering and meaning and, and philosophy, before we look at the actual detail of what that could look like in practice. And that's where we're up to this week, which is exciting. So in the mix of all that, by looking at identity and mattering and purpose and philosophy, is this notion of time. And a couple of the different, uh, participants talked about. I want to make sure I make the most of the time I have left while my brain is still working, while my body's still working. Our time on Earth is finite. What shall I do to make the most of it? And it got me thinking a lot about time. And then I went to see Sarah Wilson, who has released this book, her latest book, I Eat the Stars, which the title comes from a poem by a woman who passed away young, who talked about what shall you do when you face the end? You eat the stars, you suck up all the beauty and wonder of this world. And that is the premise of this book, which is all about confronting the brutal facts of what we're facing down. And Sarah Wilson talks about the collapse to being collapse aware, meaning that our environmental disasters are peaking. We've already surpassed 1.5 degrees temperature warming of the planet, which will lead to ecological disasters, agricultural disasters, starvation, wars. Basically every system, interconnected global system that we have on the planet will struggle to maintain its current trajectory. And what could this mean for us? Basically not much good. So it hardly feels uplifting. And when she spoke, she talked about that and it's like, yeah, you have to get beyond the despair, the wailing, the grief to go, well, what do I do with this now? And the subtitle is how to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World. How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World. And I was talking to a friend of mine, yes, my new friend in Newcastle, about this book and how to respond to it, because it can be gut wrenching, it can be viscerally painful to think about some of these things. You know, the end of oceans, the end of marine life, the end of lots of things. And the way that I have worked through it is to think about aspects of time. All of us are born and when we grow up, we know that we're going to die. All of us know that we have an expiry date. And then when we think about the planet, we don't think about the planet also having an expiry date. So this is going to be a long game picture about, uh, the future of the planet, its end point. So just bear with me. If this is news to you, I'm sorry, It's kind of sobering. And then there's a gift in all of that sobering kind of news. So I went back to ChatGPT and I said, because I couldn't remember the detail, I'm like, I know things. The planet has an end date. Let's talk me through it. And okay, so this is what Chad has to say. The Earth right now is 4.54 billion years old. The sun is a little bit older at 4.6 billion years old and roughly halfway through its life cycle. So the sun is burning off all of its energy, as are all the stars in the universe. In 500 million years from now, the sun will be 5% brighter. Um, and what this means for the planet is climate regulation will be increasingly difficult. Complex ecosystems could begin to struggle. So in 500 million years, so long past, any of us who are breathing and living and listening to this right now, it's going to be, it's going to be challenging from an ecosystem point of view. I'm like, I think it'll happen a little bit sooner. But this is like on a massive, systemic, irreversible, can't do anything about it kind of scale. One billion years from now, the sun will be 10% brighter. Earth's oceans will start evaporating rapidly. So bye bye oceans, A, uh, runaway greenhouse effect may develop and most complex life would likely be extinct. So not just humans, most complex life on this planet in one billion years. Gonski. So this wonderful experience that we're having, uh, has got an end date on it. So scientists project about 1 billion years from now, 2 to 3 billion years from now, surface temperatures become extreme. Oceans are gone. Only microbial life might survive. Five billion years from now. The sun exhausts the hydrogen in its core and begins expanding into a red giant. It swells enormously and becoming hundreds of times brighter. And 7.8 billion years from now, um, certain uncertainty increases, so we're not really quite sure, but the Earth is engulfed by the expanding sun. Bye bye Earth, totally. Um, it could alternatively just be scorched and be, uh, an airless rock like the moon or the Earth's movement orbit moves outwards as the sun loses mass, allowing to remain being, to avoid being swallowed, but not remain habitable. So yeah, life on Earth is going to, has an end date. So Looking much further ahead in 10 to 100 years, which is called a gogon. Did I write that? Is that correct? What it's called a gogon. A goo gone. A goo gone of time of years. So a ten with a hundred, um, with 100 zeros after it is a goo gone. A Google, sorry, a googol goo gol g o l so 10 to the power of 100. So 10 with 100 zeros after it and that many years, which is more than chilling, chilling, chilling years. Um, it's not good. In the universe. So all the stars are doing the same sort of cycle as our star and are burning out. So in the best current physics, the prediction is no stars shine, no planets are habitable, habitable, no chemical reactions of significance occur, no biological life can function, no computers can process information. The universe simply continues expanding. So what remains after that? So after all the stars burn out their energy and if there's still protons, they might be unstable. You might be having only photons, neutrinos, maybe some electrons and positrons, extremely diffuse quantum fields. Now there's some theories that maybe there's other universes that pop into, in, in and out of existence. Maybe we go through another big bang reverse thing. But really it's pretty bad. It's bad. We're putting a judgment on it. It's happening. So is it good or bad? Well, it just is. So this is the sentence that I'm trying to find here, which is pretty, is pretty challenging here. So you can imagine this. Imagine trillion, trillion, trillion years of nothing and then another trillion, and then another trillion years going on into nothingness. So yeah, what did I say? Sobering. It's just like nihilism, if that's how you pronounce it. It's kind of like it's all going to end someday, one day long into the future. So we ask ourselves then, uh, what am I to make of that? Well, for me it actually helps put in context today's worries and just to live a little bit more lightly and easily and to not get too wrought up about the collapse aware systems. Because while that is going to be painful, in the end, it's all going to dust anyway. So how is this uplifting for me? It helps me to come back to the present moment and go choose to live well and lightly now. And I think that's what Sarah comes to. I haven't quite finished the book. I'm about halfway through and, and it's implied in the subtitle anyway, how to live fully and beautifully in A collapsing world, you kind of get to that point where it's going to be tough. There might be some tough challenges and choices to make. If you're struggling to make ends meet now, it's hard to make, uh, payments on your mortgage and to keep up with the cost of living. And you're having a hard time feeding and clothing your children. These are real concerns now. And it's not to make light of any of that. And that's why we need each other. We need to be thinking about, okay, there's all these different pressures. What can we do now to alleviate suffering, to help everybody to thrive in this collapsing world, or at least survive it, uh, as best we can so that we can all enjoy the gift of life that we have managed to be, uh, to have been given. So that's one way to think about time, to expand your brain and then come back to the present moment. Um, it helps me just to chill the out. The other thing I wanted to think about when it comes more immediately to our lives and especially when I was doing this chrysalis work, is to think about as a kid, you know, a year felt like 10 years, right? So when you're 10 years old, another year feels like a long time because it's 10% of your life up to that time. And that seems like a long time. And if you think about what happens between the ages of 10 and 20, a full decade, each year has, is so rich with development and ideas and growth. And there's a lot that happens in our world between those ages. And so in our earlier years, time is really quite a long thing. And then I've noticed, and you may have noticed this too, when you hit 50, a decade feels like a year. You blink and it's like, God, I was, you know, just a year ago, wasn't I? 40? Oh, just two years ago. Two years ago I was 30. Like we look back in our decades, I've been 30 years in Australia and I blink and it feels like just yesterday, really, honestly. And it's. I sound like a cliche, an old person cliche. Think it was just yesterday and it was 30 years. And when you're 20, 30 years is. You haven't even lived that long. It feels like forever. And a 20 year old looking at a 50 year old goes, hey man, you're old. And our perspective changes as we, as we age, as you all know. So when we think about time in terms of our life trajectory, our leadership trajectory, and the contributions we want to make, I think thinking about our 50s 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, towards 100 if we get there. Uh, and I think it's useful to think about that. We have five more decades ahead of us. When we're in our 50s, we can think about them in sort of five year segments or five blocks of time. You go, you think, because if each decade feels like a year, we kind of have five years left. If we're 50 right now, five years, five phases. Um, so I had a, I went backwards first to look at what were, what were the themes or the experiences I had in the first couple of decades of my life. In the first 10 years. It's years of magic, isn't it? When you're a child, depending on your childhood. Of course, uh, for me the world was magical, it was fun, it was delightful, it was, it was, it was fairies, it was imagination, it was dragons, it was nights. I read lots of amazing books that sparked my imagination and it was incredibly enjoyable. Freeing time because the world was there to be discovered and enjoyed. In my 20s, like you probably learning how to adult and you know, sometimes doing well with that and sometimes not doing well with that. And it's probably the first time out of home, being responsible for rent, job, uh, education, all that kind of stuff. Relationships, 30s, okay, we step. Or at least I stepped into achiever mode. Like right, I'm working now. I want to make a difference, I want to make my mark and trying to progress my career. Not that I ever thought of it as a career. It was always what I was in service to when I was at Outward Bound and at um, working at summer camp before I came out to Australia in the 40s, it was basically a maturing achiever. Now I've got a decade or two decades of work under my belt. I know stuff, I can make some more sensible decisions, I can lead better and really kind of digging into that maturing achiever into my 50s. I've flagged this as post achiever transition. And certainly a lot of people I've been talking to, leaders, uh, in their 50s, are kind of, we get over the achieving thing and think, well, yes, no more mountains to climb. I don't need to prove myself anymore. What else is there? What is next? And this is a beautiful transition. This is the chrysalis of life experiences as biologically we change our responsibilities at home, change responsibilities to aging parents, perhaps come onto our desk. So there's a lot of transition experiences there into our 60s now. So planning ahead, what could the themes, experiences be for me, my 60s, I'm hoping. Cause I turned 56 this year. So I'm four years away from that decade. It's about cultivation and harvest. So cultivation. I like this gardening metaphor. I've been planting seeds, I've been tending them, something through my author business lens in particular. It's time to keep cultivating that, to keep planting seeds, to keep nurturing plants and to harvest as we go along. 70s I think, yeah, exploration, still exploring this planet while I am still able and still present. 80s I'm thinking this will be a place of wisdom and ritual. So a way of engaging with the world in a very soft, meaningful way where my day to day life is a series of sacred rituals, of enjoyment, of appreciation, of gratitude, of connection. And my 90s perhaps is savoring of it all. That's what I aspire to have my experience, uh, being into the later years of my world. So what do you make of this? Of today's wrap up of the season, of the chrysalis that we've been undertaking and this idea of time for you, I think practice experimenting with this longevity piece, you know, the framework of the trajectory of the planet of humanity and, and explore how that feels thinking about that. Uh, and then come back to what matters to me now, what's important to me now. If I have 10 decades ahead of me, five decades or 10 days, how can I live gratefully, beautifully, fully in this world, be of service to me, my family, my community in a way that makes me feel good about the time that I have in this brief whisper of life because it is precious and it is fleeting and aren't we lucky. I would love to hear from you. Um, the podcast is going to be on a little break, uh, over the winter here in Australia. I have um, I've got travel. I'm heading over to Canada in August to visit my mum and dad and to have a big Herbert hoedown because my mom, we're celebrating her 80th birthday so she's managed to have eight decades. Good on her. And we're celebrating her and getting together and just being present to each other in Canadian summer, which is fabulous. That's August, July, I've got skiing in and out plus I'm be writing the book. So we're going to be on a little bit of a break and then we'll be back with a new season, uh, with. I will have lots to report, uh, in September or so. When we get to that, um, go through the backlist. If you haven't gone through it, sign up for one of my newsletter lists because I will still be publishing my newsletter, so. So you can get some insights in a written form, as well as be abreast of all the changes as well as the new books that are coming out. Uh, in the meantime, live well, lead well. Live with the grace, lead in service, and love deeply. God, I absolutely nailed it that time. Didn't even have to check my notes. See you next time.