You can do anything if you learned to type on a manual typewriter

It was 1979. My dad declared: “If you learn to type on a manual, you can do anything but if you learn to type on an electric typewriter you’ll only be able to type on an electric.”

A new book by Michael Harris argues that those of us born before 1985 are the last generation who will ever know and understand what life was like before the Internet, that we are “bilingual,” able to “get” the Pre-Digital and Post-Digital Worlds.

Today, Harris notes, we wake up and immediately reach for our digital devices wondering “What did I miss?” In the Pre-Digital World, we’d instead wake up and ask, “What should I do today?” Both questions matter.

Life at the Crossroads. Coming of age at those crossroads between a Pre-Digital and Post-Digital world allows us to build bridges connecting converging worlds. We can translate between younger generations who are nervous or hesitant if they aren’t close to a screen (or often, multiple screens) and an older generation that gets flummoxed just by trying to shift from their flat screen TVs to their new Blu Ray players.

Only seeing part of the bigger picture. That older generation, typically doesn’t “get” the importance of new digital communications tools from social media to YouTube while the younger generation often fails to understand how change conversations work, that Cutting Edge + Classics = That’s It.

Please remember: If you learn the classic fundamentals of why things work the way they do, the changes and innovations that follow can and — and should — make much more sense.

Dad similarly believed if you learned to drive a car with a manual transmission all automatic transmission cars would be easier to drive. My generation was the first to have access to “pocket calculators,” in our elementary school classrooms (an innovation that scared our math teachers into fearing the calculators would keep us from learning to do math without the crutch of calculators).

Sure enough, today most Americans have poor math skills and everyone from The New York Times to the National Review is looking to role models like Michigan Education Dean Deborah Ball, who is showing the answer is building better teachers. Ball’s focus on teaching teachers how to teach is something that seemed to get lost in the transition from Pre-Digital to Post-Digital.

In one of my first graduate school classes at the University of Michigan, Ball’s colleague, professor Larry Rowley handed us each a classic Atlantic article asking “ Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In many ways, online search and other modern tools certainly make us lazy, making it harder to connect dots and see relationships.

Professor Rowley taught us that the best education — and the best communications — occurs from a simple, thoughtful conversation, one-on-one and face-to-face. Digital media allows such conversations to occur online but first, participants need to learn the fundamentals of having a meaningful conversation.

Classic education making a comeback? It’s why some educators are returning to what their successful forebears did in generations past: focus on teaching the classics to understand the root of what we are trying to do rather than relying on incremental change and technology to help us get through our daily agenda.

The longing to get back to basics has even extended to newspapers piping the sounds of old typewriters into their newsrooms and Tom Hanks developing the new №1 app that recreates the majesty and amazing rhythm of pounding out a story (aka content to my younger friends) on a classic typewriter. Those sounds energized newsrooms for decades.

Dad’s wisdom of learning the basics applies to all tech breakthroughs since. Learning on my old Royal manual actually made it easier for me to understand every advancement in communications technology that has followed.

Every day, I encounter someone who is afraid of change, someone very comfortable with the platforms and methods they’re using and very hesitant to change to something they are unfamiliar with.

That includes my dad, who doesn’t want to deal with anything more modern than a Fax machine. But there are also many people my own age and younger who are uncomfortable with changing too much. They stay in their comfort zone, often until it is too late.

The law of the Matthew Effect teaches us that those who play it safe, do little and avoid risk actually risk losing everything while those who take risks and invest their “talents” into growth strategies continue to double their talents — pleasing their investors and loved ones.

I was blessed to earn my Michigan State University journalism degree in the 1980s, completing my University of Michigan graduate work in 2011 so I’ve been a student in both centuries, working with and learning from the pre and post Internet worlds.

Yet there are numerous examples of businesses, nonprofits, governments and individuals hanging on to old habits, their talents and treasures for too long, fearing risk and missing out on rewards.

Working like it’s 1979

In Working Like It’s 1979, we noticed how great the Academy Award winning Argo was at recreating every little detail of American culture in 1979 and early 1980. I quickly wound up in a nearby Big Boy that was behaving exactly as it had in 1979 (from the menu to the music, to the milk shake canisters).

Every organization, we’ve noticed, seems to pick a time period where it feels “comfortable” and to largely keep most things relatively unchanged for years or even decades.

David and Goliath. Malcolm Gladwell, in “ David and Goliath,” chronicles how the David’s (the smaller, innovative, younger risk takers) actually routinely beat the big established giants who keep doing things the way they’ve done them for years — until a smaller, seemingly unthreatening newcomer rapid fires a rock that knocks them out cold.

Or as 1 Corinthians similarly argues, “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong.”

Montgomery Ward, Blockbuster and Netflix

Fear of change ultimately bankrupted Montgomery Ward: After World War II, Ward’s leadership expected a second great depression and hoarded cash rather than expanding into the suburbs. By the time Wards followed the lead of rival Sears into the suburbs, it was forever one step behind until Wards eventually died. Sears would then struggle against Amazon and newer rivals.

Similarly, Blockbuster Video thrived in the VCR and early DVD era until Netflix came along with a better model. Netflix itself risks being in the same position as digital changes remake the content landscape again.

From typewriters to terminals to the Web. When I was a Michigan State University freshman, our college paper, The State News, had just gotten Compugraphic VDTs and they were selling the paper’s old manual typewriters for $25.

By the time I was editor, MSU journalism researcher Stan Soffin lead a team that re-made an issue to remove “editor’s cues,” from the newspaper (readers hated it). That experiment looked remarkably like the early Yahoo home pages that would be dominant a decade later (before Google surpassed Yahoo).

My Great Grandfather Cezary Serwach went through his own version of the evolution of media: he came from a long line of printers and began as a typesetter (a job that was later automated) but kept learning and eventually ran the entire press room for The Polish Daily News. His son, my grandfather, saw and was excited by new changes as they were developed (an early adopter).

From terminals to the Tablet. I worked for Knight-Ridder Newspapers in the late 1980s and 1990 as they experimented with “The Tablet.” I said “THATS it! That’s the future!” and loaded up on Knight-Ridder stock but after a few years, Knight-Ridder ditched its tablet experiment seeing everyone move to the web.

Knight-Ridder eventually fell from being the nation’s second largest newspaper publisher to going out of business and Steve Jobs finally made something very similar we now call the iPad. But it was all there in that Knight Ridder Tablet . Similarly, I worked with Newhouse (the nation’s largest privately owned media company) when the web was really taking off but they instead focused on a rather goofy system where you dialed a phone number to get news.

Newhouse learned from its mistakes and pioneered online news experiments like AnnArbor.com, MLive and PennLive. Lesson: You never grow old as long as you’re willing to keep trying and keep learning.

Every mistake offers great opportunities to innovate further. Lessons learned from early audio and video pioneering efforts allowed us to quickly embrace the opportunities offered by today’s two minute primer videos.

Niche publishing foreshadowed today’s personalized platforms fueled by Big Data

I was also fortune to work for Crain Communications as they invented niche publishing, which is today blossoming in the world of Big Data and personalized, one-on-one outreach efforts that make digital word of mouth a reality.

Our friend Tom Hartle in 1995 upended the publishing world again with Hour Detroit, seeing that established companies were tied to the expensive infrastructure they’d invested in, enabling a newcomer to focus on the new technology and beat them. Today, Tom is working with Apple on cutting edge apps he hopes will change healthcare.

Thought leadership sites foreshadowed inbound marketing. Similarly, I was blessed to be with Arthur Andersen LLP as we developed web sites establishing their experts as thought leaders at the turn of the 21st century, true pioneers of today’s modern inbound marketing.

That lead to being on the ground floor of brand journalism at the University of Michigan and the University Research Corridor, which lead to a rare chance to help the State of Michigan expand its Pure Michigan brand and win national honors for building the best online newsroom.

Today, every brand — including organizational brands as well as our own personal brands — have the ability to own their own media, to shape their story in the court of public opinion the way lawyers make their cases in the court of law.

With so much more competition, we prefer to build on a classic approach telling great stories that move people fueled by the latest modern tools, to start with what’s beautiful then move onto what’s good and true.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.