Garrett Sutton and Mona Gambetta for their championship and tireless efforts in mobilizing the team at RDA Press to publish this work under an ambitiously tight time schedule.
Ken Harp, Susan Kammerzell, Jason Wiskerchen and Becca Martenson for their service as chapter reviewers and their excellent feedback, which were invaluable additions to the authors’ best efforts.
Ron and Peg Stewart for generously providing the remote cabin retreat where the planning and concept work for this book was carried out.
Maryann Taggart for designing the visuals that appear throughout the chapters.
Kenny McElroy, because many of the ideas in here were jarred loose that day on the back trails of Sedona, along with a few molars.
The thousands of participants in our Peak Prosperity seminars, but especially the few hundreds that have attended the intimate gatherings at the Rowe Conference Center, who helped us shape and refine the material in this book over the years.
The millions of wonderful, dedicated visitors to the PeakProsperity.com website for inspiring and encouraging us to share this message of resilience more widely, and who were patient with us as we hunkered down to write this book.
Finally and most importantly: our wives and children for their tolerance and support during the long months we were absorbed with writing, being generally negligent as husbands and fathers. For Chris, that’s Becca, Erica, Simon and Grace. For Adam, it’s Ashley, Merritt and Charlotte. To us, you are the most valuable form of capital.
With great gratitude,
Chris & Adam
You can feel it in your bones: the world is in crisis. You see the signs every day. They are in the overabundance of depressing news, revealed by overly-stressed natural systems, and telegraphed by the emotional strains exhibited by people you know.
This gathering of warning signs is likely the reason you picked up this book.
But what you may not yet know is that this state of crisis is going to intensify over the next several decades—possibly to a breaking point.
Why?
Because we’re living in an age of dangerous imbalances. There’s too much debt in the world and too little economic growth to service it. There are too few fish in the ocean and there is way too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There are too many paper claims on the world’s wealth and far too few tangible resources backing those claims.
A global population of 7.2 billion here in 2015 is projected to expand to 9 or even 10 billion by 2050, requiring vast additional amounts of food, fresh water, and mineral resources. At some point within the next ten years, global oil supplies will very likely peak, which means the cheap energy that has propelled the global economy over the past 100 years will be gone forever.
For every one calorie of food you eat, ten calories of (rapidly depleting) fossil fuels are stealthily expended in producing it. The majority of the nutrients in the world’s agricultural soils have been so horribly degraded by industrial farming practices, that our farmlands now need a continuous supply of chemical fertilizers just so plants can still grow. But these modern fertilizers are made from depleting fossil fuels, creating the obvious long-term predicament: How will we grow more food for more people with less energy?
We can ask the same question about the future of the global economy, as it depends on these same depleting fossil fuels for its growth. And yet, financial markets are currently priced as if nothing is wrong and never will be. We humans keep simply consuming more and more without limit (while calling it a ‘healthy economy’).
Knowing this, you can detect the obvious contradiction that practically nobody talks about in public: our modern lifestyle has become a system of extraction that always requires more of everything but we live on a finite planet. Quite literally, this means our entire way of life is unsustainable. By definition, anything that is unsustainable will someday end. Because of the way our various complex support systems are configured, we have to face the idea that we do not just risk a future of hardship, but the prospect of collapse.
So you feel it in your bones that something big is about to shift and that the status quo simply can’t continue for much longer. Perhaps you just know that there are things you need to be doing, right now, to get ready. But you don’t know exactly what’s coming, when it will arrive, or how big the disruption will be. It might be another deep economic recession. Or a global military conflict. Or an energy crisis. Or perhaps the rains will stop falling on our most important farmlands while falling too heavily elsewhere. It may be any or all of these things, or something entirely different that kicks off a long era of disruptive adjustments.
How all of this turns out is anybody’s guess, but the biggest losing bet anyone could make would be in assuming that everything will simply continue on smoothly, more or less as they have in the past. Given the warning signs it’s obvious that the next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the last 20 years.
But this doesn’t need to mean a lifetime of calamity for you. Not if you take prudent action today.
But what actions should you take exactly? And in which order and will anything you do really make any difference?
The answer to that last question is a resounding ‘Yes!’. At our website PeakProsperity.com, years of collecting and sharing insights with millions of people who are preparing for these changes have yielded a treasure trove of specific activities and examples. Compiling them into a digestible action plan is the reason we wrote this book.
Taking the right steps now will give you the critical advantage of Resilience. Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from adversity, and will be the key to not merely persevering through the coming era of change, but to thriving within it.
This book will instruct you on how to become more resilient and engaged in ways that will guarantee a better outcome for you and your loved ones no matter which future arrives. If the predicted crises arrive, you’ll be positioned to sail through them better than 99% of the rest of the population. And if they don’t materialize, you’ll still be much better off than you are today.
So whether you want to protect against risk, or simply just live better, this book is your invitation to:
• Become healthier
• Be more financially secure
• Have deeper and more fulfilling relationships
• Live a life of purpose
• Be happier
• Surround yourself with abundance and beauty
Seriously, who wouldn’t want these benefits?
These aren’t the idle hopes of a few starry-eyed dreamers. They’re the actual outcomes we’ve achieved in our own lives, as have thousands of PeakProsperity.com community members, after first detecting the approaching storm clouds and then taking the specific actions outlined in this book with a sense of purpose and optimism. But don’t just take our word for it. Read the many stories of personal growth woven throughout the coming chapters and judge for yourself.
Our mission is to create a world worth inheriting. After a decade of research, implementation, and evangelization, we’ve realized the path boils down to this truism: You have to become the change you wish to see in the world.
It’s at once both that simple and that hard.
‘Simple’ because changing ourselves is the one thing that’s 100% within our control.
‘Hard’ because