What Drives Peter Diamandis

Peter Diamandis Gray 1

Who?

Peter Diamandis / founder & chairman of the XPrize Foundation

Where?

Southern California

What?

A serial entrepreneur and one of America’s most renowned futurists, Diamandis and his writing partner Steven Kotler are back this winter with their newest book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, a follow-up to 2012’s Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. In the book, Diamandis makes the case that rapidly ascending technology is something not to be feared, but which will improve life for billions of people.


In the decade ahead…

We’re going to see changes across the board in how we transport ourselves, in healthcare, education, entertainment, finance, insurance and many other areas. Those transformations are going to be shifting industries, the rate of acceleration is itself accelerating.

People are going to be…

More empowered than ever before to solve the challenges that humanity has and will have in the future.

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The world is…

Dematerializing, demonetizing, democratizing access to products and services. It used to be that if you were born in the right city if you were born to the right family, if you had enough money if you happened to have the ability to transport yourself someplace you could get a good or a great education, and that was not available equally to everybody. But what we demonstrate and show in this book is that we’re heading toward a period where all of these converging technologies are actually transforming how people get access to education.

Changes in society…

Bring concerns, but on a whole these technologies have made the world more abundant. We’re heading toward a world where eventually we can meet the needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet.

I de-stress by…

Taking long walks. I’ll try to do 10,000 steps a day. And then playing with my kids. I have two 8-year-old boys, and just bicycle riding with them, and hanging out with them, and playing with them.

For my writing partner Steven Kotler and I…

There’s tremendous respect and we enjoy the process of exchanging ideas and reviewing our writing. We have always had a complementary set of skills, and we work on an outline of a book collaboratively, and then I’ll write one chapter, and he’ll write another one, and then we’ll exchange. It’s been a beautiful partnership.

It’s important to understand…

Where your passion is—what I refer to as your Massively Transformative Purpose (MTP). That MTP is something that really inspires you to learn for your own sake, not for your parents, not for your teachers, not for your business partner, but wakes you up and has you get excited and learn because it’s what drives you, it’s what makes you excited to wake up in the morning.

My MTP is…

I sort of look at decadal-long focuses, so early on it focused on space, and I will always have that passion for space. And right now my passion and purpose is on extending the healthy human lifespan. How do we add 10, 20, 30 healthy years on a person’s life?

Related: Peter Diamandis on Creating Abundance

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2020 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
Photo courtesy of XPrize Foundation

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