Quotable Articles #12

Journey On

Life is always moving, so keep up!

“The illiterate of the future are not those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” — Alvin Toffler

Change is absolutely inevitable.

Everything changes, no matter how much we try to stop it or slow it down. If you want to understand just how quickly things change, just take a look at the latest estimates at how much data is being created every day.

328.77 million terabytes of data are created every day.

That’s 2.3 billion copies of Starfield or 328 billion copies of Minecraft.

That’s a phenomenal amount of data that is being created every single day!

With the advent of technology, the sum of human knowledge — good and bad — is at the fingertips of those who have access to the internet. As a result, there are now more people thinking about more varied and disparate topics than at any other point in history. This means there is more information and data than ever before — leading to more change than ever before.

Now let’s be clear that not all of this data is good — but we’ll get to that in a minute.

What’s really important to think about right now is that change is inevitable simply based on the sheer amount of new data and information that is becoming available and accessible every day.

For those of us who take on leadership roles or who lead from within, the inevitability of change is an important concept to support keeping our heads above water — both personally and organizationally. Where once it was good enough to have a business plan and then enact it, you can’t just stick to the plan anymore.

“You just cannot have something new if you’re committed to the old.” — Gary John Bishop

In order to be successful in business, as in life, we must not only accept that change is inevitable, we have to meet that change head on. There are dozens of case studies of businesses that haven’t met the challenge of change and all of them resulted from leaders who didn’t accept that change is inevitable.

No matter where you are in your career, or your life, or your journey to the C-Suite, or to building your own business, you have to accept that change will happen and that it will affect you.

It’s always good to have a plan. Know where you’re starting and where you want to end up — but make sure you are planning with a compass, not a map. Not only does it leave space for change and unexpected interruptions, but it also leaves space for adventure.

No matter what you do, once you’ve recognized that things have changed — in essence once you’ve set out on the journey — you have to let go of your commitment to the way things are…you have to let go of the old. You cannot effectively change anything if you are still committed to the way things are or have been.

If you are going to be any type of an effective leader, you cannot be committed to anything once you recognize that the principles underlying it have changed or that the “thing” itself has changed.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t honor what came before, and it doesn’t mean that we don’t move forward in the same spirit, but we cannot be committed to the old if we are trying to build the new. We absolutely can build something new that resembles and honors the old, but it won’t be exactly the same.

That’s the nature of change.

If we cannot teach ourselves and those we lead to learn, unlearn, and relearn absolutely everything — then we will always wind up “committed to the old” and we won’t survive change.