Following up on the theme of cycles and looking back at things from yesteryear explored in my post AI abundance after scarcity cycles, I came across another example.

While looking through some of my old books, I came across Stephen Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People". I remember reading it over ten years ago. At the time, the habits and themes explored in the book had an impact on me. However, since that time I haven't looked at the book again. Today, I cracked it open and skimmed through the foreword. In it, Stephen talks about common human challenges such as:

• Fear and insecurity - This could mean a fear of the future, like losing your job.
• Lack of life balance - Put in the context of being always online, our lives continue to get more complex and demanding.

Given recent talking points of AI coming for our jobs and the accelerated rate of technological innovation, you could pluck these challenges from the time they were written and they'd still be relevant today. You could also place them 500 or 1000 years ago and they'd also be relevant which made me think of the Lindy Effect. In short, it states that the longer a technology or idea continues to live, the higher the likelihood it will continue to exist into the future.

I found it funny though that while flipping through the book and reading about these timeless challenges and principles, I came across the opposite of that. One of my bookmarks was a Borders membership card. If you don't know or remember what Borders was, in a gist, it was one of the large bookstores which succumbed to disruption from e-commerce (i.e. Amazon)