Tag: change Page 1 of 4

Still the same may be a flattering way to describe someone you haven’t seen in 20 years.

But while changing something can be difficult, remaining the same is most certainly a surefire way to achieve disaster in all things personal and business.

Sure, it’s only human to want to feel safe by doing something a certain way that has been successful in the past.

If you want to truly live long and prosper, however, you’d better be prepared to make regular and continual adjustments throughout your personal and business life.

Common sense, right?

Not really.

This is because while people think they know what this means, they continue to do the same thing they’ve always done–demonstrating an obvious lack of common sense when they choose this tack.

Why is change so difficult?

Because of the factor that is the unknown.

People are afraid of the unknown and I get that. We like the familiar. That is, until we don’t.

Sometimes becoming bored with the familiar leads to our taking a calculated risk.

That is the kind of change we should all attempt before we become too static.

Staying the same means acceptance of the eventuality of becoming mediocre–both in our personal as well as business lives.

Someone once told me if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. This individual had a nice business, but eventually it underwent a death spiral of ineptitude resulting from a disdain for adopting new technology in favor of the way they had always approached day-to-day business activities.

Another person once told me if it ain’t broke, break it!

This should have been a “Eureka” moment for me at the time, but it was not.

At that time I was firmly in the, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” camp. I enjoyed the familiar, even acknowledged it was becoming boring, but saw no need to change basic life philosophy at the time. I was doing alright, wasn’t I?

Well, yes, I was overall. But, there was no planned growth on the horizon in either my personal or professional lives. I didn’t think that fear of change was holding me back until many years later.

Did the passage of time cause regrets concerning all of this?

Not really. Why? Because I always had enough, and never was troubled for either work or companionship. I always had a job and I always had a companion. Yes, sometimes the companion was an animal, but that’s beside the point of this story.

What I needed to get over was my fear of change. My life was set up in comfortable fashion. I had the basics of life, but I started to get bored.

I used to say people who outwardly exclaimed, “I’m bored!” were actually boring people themselves. And now my fear of change had resulted in my own sense of boredom with myself. How ironic is that?

It’s like mixing tenses when you write. Professional writers always counsel against it. But, it’s my blog and like my parties, I can cry, I mean, change, if I want to.

The change for me personally that I have undertaken presently, and portends further change in my professional life, is the moving of hittingthesweetspot by Bob Skelley from WordPress to a self-hosted blog.

My blog had become too static. While everything was so automated that I could just feel free to write, the lack of control over everything else stunted the development of the blog as well as my writing.

I don’t suspect laziness was as much to blame for my unwillingness to change as was complacency. I didn’t want to do all the work that was involved. I bemoaned not setting the blog up as self-hosted in the first place. How could I drive myself to make the transition now without ending curled up in a ball on the cold, basement floor?

But now it’s a reality. I can’t believe it. It’s scary in that I don’t have the protection of limited options imposed by an administrator. I am now the administrator as well as the developer with all the prospect for trouble that lies ahead therein.

I do call all the shots. It’s thrilling and frightening simultaneously. But, I am the one who decides if adopting a new blogging feature or look for the site should be undertaken. I have final say.

I own it.

And that makes the continued journey more satisfying.

Thanks for being there with me.