Am I Open To Change?

Eagles molt their feathers.

Snakes shed their skin.

Beetles and butterflies, frogs and salamanders undergo metamorphosis.

Humans? Change isn’t really our thing. Especially when it comes to food and exercise. Most of us just let nature run its course, with sometimes horrendous results. Occasionally – which is defined as January 1 of each year – we get brave and decide to renew ourselves. We sign up for another discounted gym membership and a miracle diet plan. We’re off to the races, and a week later we’re off to the drive-thru.?

Aging needs to be taken with a dose of light-heartedness, but how we spend our time while hurtling toward our AARP memberships is something we need to take seriously.

Like, for example, work.

The majority of us spend four years at a college or university, picking our major, honing our skills and learning a profession to become employable. Some of us tack on a graduate degree. And a few more decide that purgatory is fun and take even more exams and write even more papers for a doctorate.

It’s the inquisitive who invent, the curious who create and the daring who do.

Then we land a job and learn they have a program for even more learning, called “continuing education.” Admittedly, at first I didn’t want my education to continue – I wanted it to end and the money to begin. All I was asking for was a “continuing paycheck” – can I just get those?

However, since then I’ve come to realize the discipline of learning is humanity’s way of molting, shedding, metamorphosing. Without new discoveries, we sacrifice renewal for reduction and become a smaller version of our own nature. The bottom line is that we must take control of our own erudition. (Erudition is a word that means possessing great knowledge or learning. I included it here to show my continuing education.)

Clinging to the status quo is not entirely bad; there’s something to say for permanent truisms. Gravity is a status quo planetary force. Mess with that and our world would turn upside down. Literally. But sometimes we must shed the skin of our mentality to avoid obsolescence.

Some things that have become obsolete in journalism since I first started: the dark room, typewriters, cassette tape recorders, paste-up tools (like X-Acto knives and pica poles), MS-DOS, PageMaker, pagers and now it feels like the daily newspaper itself (God forbid).

It’s not just the equipment. The way we write is drastically changing. The competition for your messages is fierce, so it’s important to understand what resonates with your publics. Recently, one of my co-workers wisely reminded me that algorithms now decide who reads our work. Even if our words are as magical as those of J.K. Rowlings or our writings as voluminous as those of James Patterson, they must follow the rules of the internet or they will get lost at the bottom of the search stack. In fact, right now LinkedIn is probably deciding if this article should be ranked anywhere from “a failed example for high school writing teachers” all the way to “there’s a remote chance some level of brainwaves were used by this author.”

Without new discoveries, we sacrifice renewal for reduction and become a smaller version of our own nature.

It's hard to break the habit of writing headlines in concise, Associated Press style. Whether I like it or not (and I don’t), SEO defines “good writing.” It’s not the novel. Nor the novella. Nor the short story. Nor any other such prose or poetry. It’s keywords. It’s optimized content. It’s trends. It’s the world of Search Engine Marketing. Choosing a palatable word over the perfect word goes against the grain. But reaching today’s readers sometimes requires departing from our former education.

So how do you get to that place of new discovery and reinventing?

For starters, begin the habit of inquisitiveness. Ask questions. A lot of them. Like …

• In my industry, who are the ones coming up with new products and services?
• What are people saying, writing or arguing about in my field?
• Who is talking about the future? Who is spending money on the future? Do I know what they’re saying? Why are they saying what they are saying?
• Should my office hold brainstorming meetings? I mean real brainstorming – huddling up for 10 minutes and throwing ideas on a wall without analyzing or judging any of them. If I start them, how can I ensure what’s raised is put into practice?

We can’t molt feathers or break out of cocoons, but one thing we can do, and I’d argue must do, is to always look for and be open to change. Resisting it is futile; either you will adopt it and prosper or you will avoid it and perish.

Inaction is not a sustainable compromise.