"Today's the day!" was the motto of the late treasure hunter Mel Fisher. After many years of fruitless searching off the Florida keys, Mel Fisher and his crew found part of the Atocha, a Spanish treasure galleon wrecked off the Florida coast, in a hurricane, in September of 1622.
Beginning is 1969, Mel and his crew searched for the Atocha and her sister ships. For 16 years, Mel and his crew went out day after day, weather permitting, and searched for the Atocha, and her sister ship, the Margarita. He paid dearly, losing his son, daughter-in-law, and another diver, in an accident.
Despite the tragedy, Mel and crew kept on searching, with Mel's motto, "Today's the day!" guiding them to keep going. In 1985 they found the front section of the Atocha, a pile of over over $450 million worth silver, gold, and emeralds. In the many years since, they have kept searching for the stern castle of the Atocha, and the Margarita, and they have been recovering more gold, silver, and emeralds, year after year.
Yes, this is not a small business, and not a side gig. But if you have some money to invest, a limited number of people are able to invest in the continuing work to find more treasure from the Atocha, Margarita, and other wrecks they are searching for. If you have the skills, you can even dive the site with their team, or if you're not a diver, you can go out on their recovery boats and help sift through the sand brought up to find some of the legendary Muso emeralds that were aboard the ships. There are still hundreds of millions of dollars of treasure unaccounted for from the 1622 fleet's shipwrecks, and many other galleons lost in that era. If you invest in the Mel Fisher crew's work for a year, there is a party at the end of the year when they distribute the treasure found over the year, and investors get actual treasure in payment for their investment. I don't know of any other deal like that in the world.
Mel Fisher passed away in 1998, but his son Kim, and the rest of their crew, keep searching the wreck sites for treasure, off the Florida keys. The Mel Fisher Museum in Key West, Florida is a place where you can learn more about the Spanish galleons, and see some of the actual treasure from the Atocha and the Margarita.
If you are interested in investing in the the continuing recovery of the Atocha, the Margarita, and other wrecks they searching for, there's information on the Mel Fisher Treasures website.
Here are some more videos about Mel Fisher and the Atocha story:
Here's a 22 minute video of my favorite futurist team, the late Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi. Starting in the late 1950's, they brainstormed as a team about where society was headed, and what the actual future might be like. Alvin began writing articles, and several books, about the changes that human society was heading towards. His breakthrough book was Future Shock, published in 1970. Their biggest concept, I believe, was The Third Wave, published in 1980. Alvin's last book, Revolutionary Wealth, was published in 2006, and he died in 2016. Yet much of what he wrote and spoke of continues to play out today, 43 years after The Third Wave, and about 17 years afterRevolutionary Wealth was published.
A futurist, as Alvin Toffler explains in the video above, is a person who spends a lot of time thinking about, and learning and researching the distant future. They explore what's happening now, and try to figure out who are the people who will build the next aspects of human society, in business and industry, socially, economically, and in our family structures and everyday life. Futurists often write books, sometimes are inventors, and sometimes consult with major corporations, business leaders, and politicians.
When Alvin and Heidi Toffler first began to explore where the future of human kind was headed, the United States early on in the post World War II boom of the Industrial Age. After graduating college, where Alvin and Heidi met, they both went to work in factories for several years, to test their theories about how the world works, to get real world experience, and learn about the world of industry, from the bottom up. In the video above, Alvin says it was the best kind of grad school possible. This experience ultimately helped him in his goal of becoming a working writer. Alvin and Heidi Toffler are my favorites, by far, of all the futurists around in the past few decades. I think they had a more grounded, and well rounded view of where things were headed than anyone else.
Futurists are not psychic mediums or visionaries, which have always existed in human society, from tribal shamans to the visionaries in many different societies, like the oracles at Delphi in ancient Greece. Futurists, as a group, are not the visionary novelists like H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and all science fiction, and other writers who have written what they thought may happen in some distant future. Some of these writers, in today's world, may be seen as, or see themselves as, futurists, as well as novelists. These writers, and the TV and film directors portraying the future in the past 100 years, have had a huge effect on exploring what might happen, and often what we hope won't happen, in the years and decades ahead.
I'm also not talking about the Futurist art movement of the early 1900's, unfortunately tied closely to Mussolini and fascism, which I didn't know existed, until I started looking up futurists on YouTube.
All of these, in their era, had some effect on getting people to think about innovation, dream of possibilities that could happen in future years, and put expectations of "the future" into most of our heads.
The futurists I'm writing about, like the Tofflers above, are people who seem to have taken on this title in the late 1950's and 1960's, when new technologies like television, the early mainframe computers, early robots, and the first moves into space, were beginning to actually happen. These futurists were intellectuals and writers who looked at technology, and began to spend a lot more time thinking about the what would be possible in a few decades, and what kind of world we actually wanted to create.
In the 1960's, as the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (Russia) took off, humans began to make jumps in technology that seemed outlandish only a decade or two earlier. I was born in the middle of the 1960's, and remember watching the later Apollo missions, where we landed men on the moon, as a little kid. My dad was a draftsman then, working on a secret super sonic airplane project, the SST. There was a sense, just in general, that all kinds of wonderful and work saving devices would be invented in the coming years, and we would live in a much better, much more modern world later in our lives.
At the same time, the year 2000, the dawn of a new millennium, was a convenient benchmark to look forward to. What will the 21st century look like? That was a common thought at that time. Many of us 1970's kids, and a lot of adults, thought we actually would have practical flying cars, and be able to take vacations in space, by "that far off year 2000."
The futurists spawned in that era made it their job to seek out the technological changes, and sociological changes that would lead us into "the future." These futurists wrote books, or gave lectures, on the possibilities they saw as all these new technologies came into practical use.
Along with the late Alvin Toffler, here are a few of them:
These people range from really far "out there," to pretty down to Earth. There are many others as well. I, too, am a futurist thinker. The job of a futurist is not to predict exactly how the world will look on a certain day in the future. The job of futurists is to look at the trends happening, the technology being invented, and the possibilities we might face. Futurists also look for the potential problems that may have a catastrophic effect, the "black swan" events that no one else sees coming.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a perfect example. It turned into a train wreck for society as a whole, and three years later, most of us average people, are still dealing with its after effects. Why didn't someone warn us that a pandemic like that would happen? Bill Gates, aa well as some scientists, did try to warn people, years before. As a whole, we didn't listen. Which brings us to another continual aspect of futurists, most people, including most political, business, and other social leaders, don't listen to them.
Like many of these others above, I have my own take on what's happening in our world, and views on where things are going for our society. I'll go into much more detail in future posts. In a nutshell, I think the decade of the 2020's will probably be the most chaotic, toughest, and most transformative decade in our lives. I think millions of people, just here in the U.S., will have to find new, or better, ways to make a living, myself included. I think the U.S. needs literally MILLIONS of new microbusinesses (1 person business) and small businesses. Some of those will grow into larger businesses, many won't. So I'm starting this new blog to dive into what I see happening in our society, the issues we're facing collectively, and most important, look for things that will help people start, run, and grow businesses that fill some need, and make them a good living, in this rapidly changing world.
I'm a futurist thinker, an avid blogger, and I've made several pretty damn good calls, in advance, on some of the changes that have happened in recent years. I want this blog to help you find bits and pieces of information, and new ideas, that will make your life better in these chaotic times. That's what this blog, and everything that springs from it, is all about. If that sounds interesting, stay tuned, there's a lot more to come.
I thought about embedding David Bowie's song "Changes" above. I'm not a huge Bowie fan, but it's a great song, and the lyrics fit well with my idea for this post. But this video above, of the Gen Z kids trying to dial a rotary dial phone, just sums the idea up so much better. If you're over 40, maybe 45, you likely remember rotary dial phones, and probably knew someone who had one. I'm 56, I spent years using them as a kid. This was how THE WORLD communicated when I was a kid. We don't live in that world anymore. We are all struggling with the changes being throw at us, to some degree. That's what this blog is all about.
When I had just finished 3rd grade, my dad got a new job, at company called Fate Root Heath, later called Plymouth Locomotive Works. He worked as a draftsman/engineer, in the office part of a factory in tiny Plymouth, Ohio. The company made custom locomotives, custom lift trucks, and ceramic extruding machines. For the 4 years he worked there, my dad designed locomotives, like this one. PLW was bought out, and went out of business in 1983. There are still a few Plymouth locomotives running in places 40 years later.
Our family moved to a big farm house on route 603, a couple of miles southwest of Shiloh, Ohio, which was a few miles from Plymouth. That was in the summer of 1975. Like all the houses I'd lived in up until then, we had a rotary dial phone on the kitchen wall, with a long cord, and a second one, like the one in the video above, in my parents' bedroom. Both phones shared the same line, which was how things were in those days. But not only that, our house, since it was way out in the country, shared a single phone line with houses at five other farms. It was called a party line. Even in 1975, that was rare, and only still being used in very rural areas.
That meant that when my mom wanted to call someone, she picked up our receiver, and had to make sure no one else, at any of the five other houses, was on the line. Really. It wasn't just my mom, dad, my younger sister, and I sharing a single phone line, it was five other whole families. Sometimes two of the older women would pick up, since we could all talk to the other five houses for free, and two of the older women would be gossiping or sharing recipes, and my mom would have to wait half an hour or more, until they hung up, to make her call.
Now, compare that to now, 2023, where there are 5-year-olds walking around with a super computer in their pocket that can call, text, take photos, and share photos and videos, with maybe 4 or 5 billion people on the planet. And they watch Peppa Pig videos, or whatever the cool 5-year-olds are watching these days. This is just one tiny example of the changes, just in telecommunications, in the lifetime of Generation X people, like myself.
I've been interested in thinking about the future since I was a little kid. I'm just old enough to remember watching the later Apollo space missions on TV, back when TV's had three main channels. The Space Race was on, the future looked bright, and most people thought there were all kinds of great achievements in our future. We were told that we'd all have flying cars, and be able to go to space, in the far off year 2000. Technically, flying cars do exist, but they're not practical or widespread. Sorry George Jetson. And, technically, we can go into space, for a few minutes, if we have a quarter million dollars, or more, to drop for the ride.
My point in this opening post is that our world has changed tremendously since I was a kid. The world has changed dramatically since today's young Gen Z kids were little kids. It keeps changing at a rapid pace. Life, work, school, shopping, and society, in general, are struggling to catch up to all these changes in technology and social norms.
Personally, I've always wanted to run my own business, but I was really shy in my younger years, and terrible at selling things, which are key factors in any business. The closest I've come to owning my own business is driving a taxi for 6 1/2 years, which is in the gray area between a job and a small business. But I've worked for many entrepreneurs and small business owners, and was always thinking up ways to make those businesses better. In addition, I've always been fascinated by where things are heading in the future. I finally realized that I'm an amateur futurist, by nature, many years after diving into the work of the late futurist Alvin Toffler, over 25 years ago.
I've been studying economic and market trends for over 30 years now, just as a personal interest, and have blogged about many of my ideas over the last 14 years, in bits and pieces. This blog aims to bring my thoughts of where things are headed in the future to the people who run microbusinesses (one person businesses), and small and medium sized businesses. Small businesses, in general, have gotten hammered over the past three and a half years, and thousands of them have closed down. We all know that. I believe that the actual future of the United States depends on building up a really strong base of small businesses in the coming years, and helping current businesses navigate these crazy times. Millions of jobs have been lost to new technology in the last 40-50 years, and millions more will be lost in coming years. The only way to the numbers work to put so many people in new jobs is by the creation of millions of new small businesses. In this blog, I'm going to dive into the economic trends, business trends, the changing business landscape, new opportunities, and any other ideas that may be helpful to micro, small, and medium sized businesses in today's world. Hang on, I think the 2020's are going to continue to be a bumpy ride, but they will also provide amazing opportunities as well.
