15th Nov, 2021
My Mentor always said, “You don’t live in the world you were born into, so stop making comparisons.”
Mark Cuban, The American Billionaire and the star Venture Capital Investor, wrote these words in a 2011 blog, “We all have the tendency to believe that we are living in a very advanced technological period. We get all excited about the new tech we got at Xmas and what we read about that will soon be available to us. In reality, everything we are excited about today is going to be incredibly old and boring much faster than we ever expect.”
“No matter what year you were born, by the time you finish(ed) high school, its (was) a completely different world. Today’s high school seniors were born prior to the World Wide Web, wireless internet, smartphones, tablets, HDTVs and changes in world politics that were never imagined. Without question each of us can remember the things that were new and exciting to us when we were kids, that were unimaginable to our parents, but are now nothing more than old memories.
The rate of technological change is not slowing down. In fact, the argument could be made that it is speeding up. In our lifetimes, we will reach a point when we reflect back on the good old days of the internet, Facebook, Twitter and other tech that is ubiquitous today. We might even look back at digital the way we currently look at analog. Things change. Of course, this isn’t a problem. It’s a huge opportunity.”
Almost everyone eventually falls into the trap of comparing the way things are today with the way things used to be without acknowledging that the present looks nothing like the past.
I, for one, no longer think what I learned in the 1980s and 1990s about the world, economics, markets and the right way to approach life has really much value now, other than as a historical backdrop”
We think we’re making apples-to-apples comparisons but we’re not. In a 2016 commencement speech, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock said “I believed I had it figured out, but I was wrong — because while I wasn’t watching, the world had changed.”
The way we learn, the way we earn, the way we spend leisure time, the way we entertain ourselves, the way we travel, the way we spend time with, interact and communicate with our family and friends has all changed.
Stanford professor Scott Sagan says, “things that have never happened before happen all the time.”
You don’t have to like the new rules, but you have to at least acknowledge them. The rules are different today than they were in the past. Either accept the change, adapt or die.
What if you were told, ‘10 or 20 years from now, your life will be exactly the same, Will you be happy?’
I doubt it very much, so why be afraid of change.
Albert Einstein made a very strong remark when he said that “doing the same thing and expecting a different result is insanity.” If you do want a different result then the only thing that you can do is to change the things that you’ve been doing thus far.
Leaders understand that change is not only inevitable; it is an opportunity to lead. Steve Jobs once said, “Everything is a remix.” Steve had an amazing skill, some would say notorious skill, of learning as much as he could about technology and computing and combining those elements into something unique and often beautiful.
The Apple Computer wasn’t the first computer or the best-selling computer. But Steve showed everyone, how he had combined features that had never been delivered together before into a computer, that all users believed Mac was the best computer ever made.
The iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone, but he combined features into a beautiful phone that he made people believe they must have. There is a long list of Apple products that Steve Jobs created that confirm for all of us that we no longer live in the world we were born into.
My maxim has been, “If You Focus On What You Left Behind, You Will Never See What Lies Ahead.”
Move on, Use the huge opportunity which change offers and Stay Blessed Forever.