Embracing Change
Change is a big part of being successful. Not only is change good, but it’s accelerating at an increasingly rapid pace. While it took 75 years for 100 million users to adopt the telephone, it only took four and a half for the Internet.
This means that you need to keep adapting. It’s both a survival skill and a success skill.
However, change is difficult for people. For some of us, it’s pure laziness. But for others, we don’t like the lack of control or the uncertainty of worse outcomes, bruised egos, embarrassment or failing. People also seem to hate losing more than they love winning.
But, if you don’t learn to embrace change and if you don’t move forward, you will be left behind. So, whether it’s changing the focus of your business, having to learn new technology or replacing a prized employee, you need to know how to deal with change.
As an Oklahoma City realtor who has visions of greatness for the downtown OKC community and surrounding areas, I truly believe there is still a lot of change that needs to take place in order for us to compete as a thriving city. Over the past 20 years, there has been a lot of change due to the MAPS project and other private developers who have taken the risk to help improve the landscape in the OKC Metro. My only concern is that we are still being a little to conservative with those changes and not fulling taking that leap of faith that will help OKC stand out from other competing markets.
Oklahoma is of course known for being an oil/gas state but I believe we can encourage the right real estate development changes so that we can attract small to medium sized tech companies, larger law firms, finance companies and many other businesses that will provide higher paying jobs. With the price of living, there is know reason why we haven't already been successful at this.
We look at markets such as San Francisco and NYC where a majority of the larger tech companies, the Goldman Sachs and many other industries out side of oil/gas and wonder why people choose to live there. It's not because they enjoy paying high rent or that the "American Dream" of owning a home is near there grasp of possibility. It's because these cities have learned to grow and adapt to the changes of there consumer aka the local resident. They have created destination points within there city so that people living there can easily enjoy the latest real estate development concepts have to offer. These are shopping, restaurant and living experiences that are years ahead of there competition.
If Oklahoma City can start working on a business plan of creating real estate growth opportunities so that we can continue growing, I believe the affordability of our market can help us get back on track with other larger cities. We can sell the ideas of being an affordable city that can offer the living experience people are looking for and have found in those other markets. They will be able to afford buying a home and not having to always rent and move from apartment to apartment.
We need to encourage those that are willing to take the risk of delivering innovative concepts to the surrounding Oklahoma City market. We need to show them that we are willing to embrace the change and help grow the local economy. We truly need to put the fear of the unknown behind us and start moving forward with these innovative concepts so that our future generation can continue excelling and succeeding with the ongoing change.
I feel like change is something we try to embrace and chase after but being impatient and quitting after the first failed attempt has held this city and many other cities back from continual growth. We have to know the steps of change which begins with small steps, laying aside our ego and knowing how to properly fail so that we can continue to move forward.
"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often." - Winston Churchill
"Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups." - Elon Musk
“In the real estate business, you learn more about people, and you learn more about community issues, you learn more about life, you learn more about the impact of government, probably than any other profession that I know of.” – Johnny Isakson