I just got an email from one of my (Netconcepts') first clients (circa 1995) that he's now completed his MBA, doing it while still working full-time as a marketing exec. It takes a lot of courage to get an MBA after being in the workforce for several decades. Way to go, Greg!

Lifelong learning is where it's at. Even if you don't go back to school, you need to keep developing your brain and your skills.

Once you stop learning, you become a dinosaur, unable to compete in this increasingly complex world. This has never been truer, considering that technology is advancing at an exponentially faster rate.

Simultaneously, technology — such as the Internet and podcasting — is breaking down barriers, making it easier than ever before to access knowledge and information once only available to the priveleged elite. For example, MIT are making publicly available course materials and videos of lectures — for FREE! It's not just MIT, there are Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA lectures and UC Berkeley lectures too, for example.

If nerdy professors aren't your cup of tea, then how about business leaders and technology pundits? IT Conversations offers some amazing material, again all for free. Such as talks from Malcolm Gladwell and Tim O'Reilly. And entire conferences such as Web 2.0, PopTech and Accelerating Change, all of which I highly recommend.

The way I make time for learning is by subscribing to podcast feeds of this material and having it download to my iPod. Whenever I work out at the gym or go for a bike ride or drive to the office I'm listening to gurus rather than singers or DJs.

Speaking of gurus, here are two to definitely listen to: Steve Jobs (from his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005), and the Dalai Lama when he was a visiting lecturer at Stanford. Download from here (iTunes required).

I love this description of the World Wide Web of today, from Kevin Kelly in his recent Wired article We Are the Web:

The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive.

How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan.

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.

This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It's there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn't everyone?). I doubt angels have a better view of humanity.

Woa! Sounds like an awesome achievement, doesn't it! But we've only scratched the surface. Remember, we're in a world of accelerating change, so this is just the beginning. Strap in folks, we're in for a wild ride!

I've finished reading the book The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. It is a novel about a brave new world that we could face in this century, when nanotechnology is pervasive. I quite enjoyed the book. It is clear that the author really did his homework on nanotech. The book is titled "The Diamond Age" because a significant milestone in nanotech will be when diamonds can be manufactured artificially to atomic precision. The possible applications of "diamondoid" will be huge. For example, coating a replacement artificial organ with a super-thin layer of diamond will render it completely non-reactive with your immune system.

One reason I was drawn to reading this book was because mega-millionaire VC Steve Jervetson lists it as his favorite. (Steve was a key funder of Hotmail before it got bought by Microsoft.)

Besides being a fun read, the book really got me thinking about the huge changes that we'll be going through as a society in the coming years and how the evolution of technology is accelerating. If you feel it is hard to keep up now with all the latest stuff, it is going to get a lot harder. In fact, according to the brilliant Ray Kurzweil, at today's rate of change the last 100 years of technology development could fit into the next 20 years, but because it is continuing to accelerate, it would actually fit into the next 12. Steve Jurvetson has some interesting things to say about accelerating change and societal shock.

Just think how absurd it would have sounded to someone living 100 years ago to hear that people will be walking down the street apparently talking to themselves, wearing a tiny earbud in their ear — in actuality they're talking to people who are halfway around the world.

Now imagine that things you currently deem to be science fiction could very well become reality in just 12 years time. Can you keep up? Can your business keep up? Businesses that'll win in this new world order won't be the ones that merely cope with accelerating change, they'll be the ones that embrace it. In fact, I think this resilience, flexibility, and enthusiasm for things to come will need to be part of their corporate DNA.

The next book on my recreational reading list is a brand new one from my friend and colleague Ramez Naam called More Than Human. In addition to being a nanotech visionary, Mez is also an exec on the MSN Search team.