The Only Constant Thing

It’s remarkable how many people spend valuable time and energy fighting against change. I assume you know the people I’m talking about. If not, they’re relatively easy to spot: they treat new ideas with the same enthusiasm you and I would show for a root canal. Without Novocain.

Remarkable is probably not the right word insomuch as the word has a positive connotation. Consider how much change we go through in a relatively short period of time. In my adulthood (not my whole life, just adulthood, mind you) I’ve seen the following:

• The music industry was nearly knocked out by a computer company.
• Computers have shrunk to the size of a wallet.
• Soda serving sizes have increased to the size of a small cooler.
• Smoking has become just slightly more acceptable than hardcore drug use.
• Airport security x-rays me more than my doctor and dentist combined.

Book writing switched to the computer. Then book shopping. And now, book reading is too.
The list could go on and on, but the point is that change is occurring at a pace that would have made our forefathers dizzy. And while I’m not well-equipped to accurately predict the next big change, I’m comfortable with the statement that the pace will only accelerate from here.

There’s basically two camps when it comes to change: the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. I fit into the first camp and that has some drawbacks. For starters, people who change too much are seen as unstable. That said, I think the second camp has a tougher road to travel.

So if you’re in that camp, or you have an abundance of employees there, you’re going to have to figure out how to embrace the constant change in chunks that aren’t overwhelming. One suggestion is to create a list like I did above. It’s amazing how much we’ve seen in the last 20 years, yet I rarely recognized the impact while it was happening. I just knew it was typically an improvement in some way. That makes me hopeful about the “next thing”.