Digital Transformation of Life

In a couple of weeks, I will be heading to Miami, FL, to participate in what promises to be a unique opportunity. In "The Social Movement: 4 Days To Save The World", teams of ordinary people are placed in ten-person groups and tasked to solve an impossible social challenge in just four days! "Solve" is admittedly a hyperbole, but the team challenge is to create a viable business model to solve some intractable social ills like hunger, literacy, racism, or suicide. 

The ethos and mission of 4 Days To Save The World is to impact humanity at scale, make a real difference in the world, and inspire a real social movement. To do this, Executive Director Chris LaVoie is leveraging streaming television services in a relatively novel manner. Since the series airs on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, H2H, Roku, Xbox, Vudu, and Google, the reality show expects to garner 500+ Million impressions and a minimum of 5+ Million subscribers. This production model is the digitalization of social action on a global scale.

One of the "ordinary" people heading to Miami with me is Marcy McDonald. Marcy has helped professional women balance their work-life with their personal lives for more than a decade while also assisting them in beating back the inevitable stress this may cause. As a transformation coach, she has worked with 100s of subject matter experts from National Geographic, Smithsonian Institute, Culinary Institute of America, the Hayden Planetarium, AAAS, and every major American university. She tailors a unique 1-on-1 coaching program to assist professional women over-40 in dealing with their transformation. By focusing on this critical area, Marcy delivers an invaluable service to those suffering through this often neglected human aspect of digital transformation. If this kind of assistance isn't available, it can cause more stress, which sometimes leads to despair and suicide. Marcy is the one that brought my attention to Poorna Bell's story of the tragic suicide of her husband, Rob, and the terrible tendency of men, and women, to hide their true feelings from loved ones. This common challenge is why I am highlighting suicide as one of the global social challenges caused by digital transformation. 

Read Poorna's short article "Hidden Pain: Everything Is Not Fine" for the full story, but, in essence, Rob battled drug addiction and depression on his own for so long that he reached a point where he thought it was better to die than to have his wife find out he was having problems. He died because he was unable to contemplate any future in which he was inadequate. He died because he was never able to find permission to say, "I'm not fine. Things are really wrong." He died because he couldn't bring himself to ask his wife or a professional like Marcy for help to transform himself.

According to Forbes contributor R.L. Adams;

"In this Digital Age of technological revolutions and conveniences that seem to beckon us at every turn, what was once hailed and conveyed as life-altering benefits in this real-time era of instant-and-always-on communications afforded to us by the internet and its subsequent birth of social media, have arguably left the masses no further ahead than we were decades ago." 

So as we forge on into our global and digitally transformed future, let us not forget the importance of continuing to help each other as humans.

If you're interested in collaborating with Marcy, Chris, and me on our mission to impact humanity at scale, please watch "The Social Movement" Season 1 release on Labor Day 2021. Marcy and I will be filming Season 2 in Miami in June 2021 for an Earth Day 2022 release. You should also Follow "4 Days to Save The World" on Instagram @socialmovementtv or Linkedin.