What is change - and why you should learn to like it
Change comes in many different forms. Time make change happen all the time. Change will find you wherever you are hiding within your comfort zone. Change is not always voluntary and an active choice. Sometimes you choose to make a change and are enthusiastic about it, but other times you are forced to change i.e. after a separation, an injury or you loose your job. Regardless of the reason for change, it will be easier if you like it, or at least pretend you do.
What do you mean "time make change happen"?
The most obvious example for me is when I meet old friends that I have not seen for a years. They have not seemed to change. I do not feel like I have changed. Our relationship does not seemed to have changed. But their kids have changed! In fact, everything has changed, but most changes are subtle, barely noticeably.
When I was a child I used to be really annoyed when my parents friends commented on the obvious fact that I had grown since we last met. Now I realise that the comment probably was just a way of handling the surprise of change, as a way of trying to say something nice to the irritable little cute (in my case) child in front of them.
Much of the factors that drive change are the same for your personal life and for companies.
Economy
Technology
Competition
Sociala trender
Customers/Friends.
Time is the driver for all of these areas. Time is like a current that pushes you forward at an increasing speed. For several hundred years time was pretty much the only thing that changed. People where farmers and priest, noblemen or royalty. If your parents where farmers you became a farmer. You lived in the village you where born and your kids grew up to take over your work when when the time was right. And so it continued. The only thing that seemed to chang was that time made everybody older.
But actually all the elements changed, but at a very slow pace. The Economy evolved over centuries, new tools where invented and traded, other farmers started competing with you at the local markets and even if social media was a few centuries away the social landscape slowly changed.
Now the pace has increased, mainly driven by advances in technology. We talk about exponential change and a lot have changed from when our parents grow up. For 3-4 years olds it is for example perfectly normal to talk to your watch or mobile and expect answers. That was science fiction only 20 years ago.
Gordon Moore realized that the processing power of an Intel chip dubbled every 12-18 months. This became Moores law and it is still valid and more relevant than ever. It used to be true for computers. If you wait 12 months you can buy the same computer for half the price or one that is twice as good for the same price.
Now this applies to any other sector that uses computational power. With digitalization, artificial intelligence, Internet of thing etc. this affects almost any sector. This means that soon everything around us will develop with the same speed as computers has for the last 30-40 years.
2045 The Year Man Becomes Immortal
The differens between linear and exponential can be hard to fully understand. A good way to exemplify is by comparing linear and exponential steps. If you take 30 linear (normal) steps you end upp about 20 meters further ahead, but if you take 30 exponential steps (length of the stride dubble for each step, e g 1, 2, 4, 8...) you have traveled 26 times around the world by the time you take your 30th step.
If the change your experience used to be from 0,1 till 0,2 in one year, we are now at maybe 512 to 1024. The strids are getting longer. Imagine next years change...
A few examples of how technology might change your life
Your children (if they are under 10) will never need to drive a car
Facial recognition and Augmented reality (AR) will make it impossible to lie in 4-5 years
Solar energy will give us an abundance of energy by 2045
Advances in healthcare (DNA sequencing, stem cell research etc) will give you +40 healthy years by 2045 - 100 years old is the new 60
In this TED-talk by Peter Diamonds, he explain what is driving the rapid change, and why it will never be as slow as it is today again.
This will change your life in ways you cannot predict!
You can deal with this in different ways. You can deny it, like those who don't believe in climate change. You can say that you are to old to bother, that this is only for our children. Or you can embrace it and start finding your own way into the future.
“Learning is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. But to survive, we must learn”
In this blog we want to start a dialog around who we need to be and what we need to do to thrive in a world of constant change. We aim to share examples, links, inspiration and failures from our journeys and would love your feedback and your own thoughts.
Lets start making changes, just for fun!
