As I roll over and open my eyes, I’m greeted by streams of sunlight filtering through green foliage dancing in mesmerizing patterns on the wall above me.

Sunrise and magic.

A surge of pure excitement-energy courses through me and I quickly clamber to the entrance to see what the new day brings. From the opening about halfway up the giant tree’s trunk, I survey the world over which I am king.

It’s time to start thinking about going back.

Sunlight sparkles on a bend in the stream that winds through the island a quarter mile to the northeast, and beyond in the distance a lone cloud shrouds the tip of the mountain dominating the terrain of my small kingdom. To the east, and directly in front of me, the sea sparkles in the bay a few miles off where the wave splashes revel in the joyous rays of sun.

As I swing out and start my descent to the forest floor I do the calculations. Two more days of training, and then I will go home.

Not that anyone will have missed me.

But with my usual prescience I can feel the reality distortion taking its toll.

By whatever strange twist in the fabric, I don’t seem to age a day in this place. And no matter how long I stay, when I return home, not a second has passed since the moment I left.

I’m pushing sixty days on the island at this point, and though not my longest visit, I know that the jolt of essentially hitting a two-month rewind button would come at a cost.

Besides, the repetitions in my training are producing rapidly diminishing returns as I near the inflection point on the curve. I drop the last six feet to the ground, landing lightly on the balls of my feet, and lope off toward the stream for a drink and my morning cold plunge.

I stumbled across the portal years ago, and at 15, I have nearly perfected my system.

I don’t know what most kids would have done with access to a place like this, but almost immediately upon returning from my first visit I recognized that it afforded one giant opportunity.

Skill acquisition.

This place is my secret weapon in the competition of life.

My mom often said I was 3, going on 30.

If only she knew!

Sure, the isolation is difficult at times, but for the most part it suits me well.

The island is peaceful, with miles of widely varied terrain, plenty of food and water, and as far as I can tell, nothing that poses any significant danger. Potential challenges, sure, but nothing I can’t handle.

The perfect training camp.

I pick up a new skill back home, master the basics, and then travel through the portal to perfect the art here in my secret kingdom.

My peers didn’t stand a chance.

A wry grin crosses my face with the thought as I splash out into the crystal water to my knees, sending cascades of scintillating showers in half-circles from my shins as I surge forward. Then again, I haven’t considered kids my own age back home to be my “peers” for quite some time.

I snap out of my reverie and dive headlong into the deep blue-green pool at this elbow in the creek.

There is work to be done.

_________________________

Though doubtless not the first kid to dream of finding a way into J. M. Barrie’s Neverland or C. S. Lewis’ Narnia, I may hold the distinction of being the only oddball who fantasized about using such a place for accelerated learning and skill acquisition.

And though I may one day regale you with tales of adventures that befell me in that most wondrous world, now, as then, we have much work to do.

We are living in exciting times. Times our parents are having a difficult time imagining, even as it unfolds before their eyes.

The last two decades have brought more change than was seen in hundreds of years preceding.

And the next decade will make the last two look like child’s play.

You want to know the crazy part?

I expect those previous two sentences to hold true for you today, whether this book has been published this year, or you are reading these words more than twenty years after I first wrote them.

The mathematics behind the technological advancements tell a story that is plain enough for anyone willing to read it.

It is the simple story of very tiny things doubling every so often at predictable intervals.

Although our rational minds know this type of growth forecasts extremely rapid change, we get lulled to sleep, and somehow wake up surprised when the change overtakes us.

You see, for a long time, these doublings don’t look like much.

In fact, they look a lot like zero. .000001, .000002, .0000004, .000008, . . .

It can take an awful lot of doublings to even get to 1. Nothing to get too excited over.

But once we reach 1, something interesting begins to happen.

And we start to take notice.

2 becoming 4 . . . 16 becoming 32 . . . 32 becoming 64 . . .

At this point the trend has likely caught our attention.

But don’t blink!

Within ten steps of first hitting 2, we will be at a thousand.

Ten more steps – a million.

And just ten more steps? Roughly one billion!

One billion seventy-three million seven-hundred forty-one thousand eight-hundred twenty-four, to be exact.

As you take a look around at some of the technology you hold in your hand, that you interact with in the world around you on a daily basis, and that has essentially become a part of you, can you even begin to imagine what that tech would look like at a billion times better in just the next 30 to 45 years?

Of course you can’t! Most of us have a difficult enough time intuitively grasping on which day a pond will be half-covered with lillypads, if there was one the first day, two the second, four the next, and doubling each day until finally on the thirtieth day, the pond is completely covered.

Did you figure out which day the pond is half-covered?

Did it take you more than 3 seconds?

This type of exponential growth takes us by surprise.

And if we struggle to grasp the world we will soon live in, what about the one our kids will inherit?

With many of our technological advancements, we are just nearing the part of the curve where the numbers begin to attract interest. The rapid growth is starting to demand our attention.

But if we blink, we risk suddenly waking to the jarring realization that our world has passed us by and left us hopelessly behind.

Is it crazy to think that from the time my daughter is born to the time when she leaves home 18, or 20-some years later, much of the technology in existence at her birth will be at a minimum many thousands to a million times better?

I fear we are ill-prepared for the rapid changes ahead.

And if we, as parents and adults, are taken off-guard, who has taken thought to properly prepare our children for this new world?

You may not have access to a private time-dilating portal for development and skill acquisition, but as you read this one thing should be increasingly clear – you need one!

What should we be teaching in a world where the only constant is rapidly increasing change?

What are the most valuable skills and attributes in this mercurial future in which it is difficult to predict what life might look like and what jobs might need to be done?

I think it is safe to say that most of the jobs our children will hold in their lifetimes have not yet been invented.

As scary as it may sound, that may also hold true for you.

If the only constant is change, then the only meaningful attribute is adaptability.

Meta-learning.

The ability to quickly develop and rapidly hone new skills to a fine edge.

This is the academic currency of the future.

The goal of this book is to provide you with a framework for building your own core of meta-learning principles, helping you to fine-tune your aptitude for learning and applying new skills in any of the seven fundamental modalities out of which humans operate.