LIVE WITH PURPOSE. Mental drift is a serious risk the longer we live. A clear purpose cuts through distractions and gives your attention a direction … - Peter Diamandis

Thousands of years ago, it was only kings, pharaohs, and emperors who had the ability to solve large-scale problems. Hundreds of years ago, this power expanded to the industrialists who built our transportation systems and financial institutions. But today, the ability to solve such problems has been thoroughly democratized. Right now, and for the first time ever, a passionate and committed individual has access to the technology, minds, and capital required to take on any challenge. Even better, that individual has good reason to take on such challenges. As we will soon see, the world's biggest problems are now the world's biggest business opportunities. This means, for exponential entrepreneurs, finding a significant challenge is a meaningful road to wealth. Ultimately, as I teach at Singularity University (much more on this later), the best way to become a billionaire is to solve a billion-person problem.

After a novel technology is introduced and begins gaining momentum, we tend to envision it in its final form — seriously overinflating our expectations for both its developmental timetable and its short-term potential. Invariably, when these technologies fail to live up to the initial hype — usually in that gap between deception and disruption on our list of the Six Ds — public sentiment for the technology falls into the trough of disillusionment. And this is where a great many of the technologies discussed in chapter 3 now sit. But when technologies are in the trough, we are again swayed by the hype (this time, the negative hype) and consistently fail to believe they’ll ever emerge, thus missing their massively transformative potential.

The science shows that . . . typical twentieth-century carrot-and-stick motivators — things we consider somehow a "natural" part of human enterprise — can sometimes work. But they're effective in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. The science shows that "if-then" rewards . . . are not only ineffective in many situations, but can also crush the high-level, creative, conceptual abilities that are central to current and future economic and social progress. The science shows that the secret to high performance isn't our biological drive (our survival needs) or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive — our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to fill our life with purpose.