Even the Sun Will Change. So Will Our Careers and Lives.
Jimmy Wong
Transforming people to thrive with AI | Data Science | Former LinkedIn | Stanford | UCLA
What would you predict to happen during the Great American Eclipse in the United States? For me, I believe we can learn about how to handle surprise changes in our careers and our lives from these solar eclipses and other cosmic events.
Centuries ago, people feared the sudden unexpected disappearance of the sun during eclipses with real terror.
Today though, eclipses are generally regarded as a novelty life experience akin to many other “bucket list” activities. Hotels and Airbnbs get sold out as visitors swarm along the path of totality across the country.
Compared to hundreds of years ago, there’s less fear about eclipses now, as they’re reasonably predictable. Scientists can accurately predict solar eclipses for the next 400 years.
As an astronomy enthusiast and career coach, I’ll share with you lessons that we can learn from these cosmic events that we can apply to our careers and lives for a better future.
It’s Coming in 5 Billion Years
I’ve always loved astronomy since I was a kid.
I remember my elementary school teacher gave me an opportunity to teach a lesson to our combination 4th and 5th-grade class. I could pick any topic I wanted. I chose to teach stellar evolution to this class of boys and girls in public school.
As a 10-year-old space enthusiast, I taught astrophysics for a day.
I taught about how stars like our sun get created and then burn steadily for billions of years. Then one day they start to swell up into red giants. Possibly some of them explode as supernovas, leaving exotic remnants like black holes.
My classmates were aghast and disturbed at the thought that the sun would one day swell up into a red giant and burn up the entire planet Earth and everything on it. The idea went against all their own intuitions and experiences that the sun would be there forever. They asked me when will this happen.
I told them that “in 5 billion years” is what scientists predicted.
With this long time frame, they felt relieved. They said they didn’t expect to be around in 5 billion years when the earth gets destroyed by the sun.
Change is Inevitable
From my study of astronomy ever since I was a young kid, I gained the big picture understanding that in the universe, things don’t stay the same.
There is nothing permanent except change. Heraclitus
After graduating from high school, and before starting my aerospace engineering major at UCLA, I had the privilege of taking a philosophy class at UC Berkeley during the summer. I remember the lessons there from David Hume and Bertrand Russell about the problems of inductive reasoning. Although we live our lives each day with each sunrise, there’s no guarantee that tomorrow will be like today or yesterday.
For me this week, besides the upcoming solar eclipse, we see other recent examples of sudden new events rocking our daily lives.
The timing of the eclipse, the earthquakes, the plague of cicadas, and ongoing wars and disasters sound almost biblical in scale.
In addition, in the past weeks, I’ve heard from friends on sudden career and life changes:
These tremendous personal events continue alongside the ongoing societal trends like innovations in AI and medical technologies.
People experience all types of changes, both positive and negative. I respect the way people handle changes in their lives in any case.
Surprise changes are a regular part of our lives and our careers.
Anticipating and Managing Change
The philosopher Heraclitus is also attributed to have said “The only constant in life is change.”
However, even if change is inevitable, the probabilities are often small each day. The best thing we can do is to live our lives one day at a time. Here are three ways I’ve found to anticipate and manage change.
1. Appreciate the Present
Let’s try to focus on today, to avoid getting stuck worrying about the future or lamenting about the past.
For example, if you ate some food today, appreciate it and savor it!
Be like the 4th and 5th graders who became happy again after they stopped worrying about what will happen to the sun in 5 billion years.
The future is always uncertain to us. Although we may assume some things with reasonable probability, we never know what will happen tomorrow with 100% certainty.
The best we can do is to do our best each day one day at a time. Appreciate the people with us in our lives here today. Do your best work each day.
领英推荐
Make each day your masterpiece. Coach John Wooden
2. Prepare For Resilience
We need to acknowledge that some things are outside our control. We still do our best regardless of the situation though.
We may miss seeing the total eclipse because of unexpected rain clouds. The weather is not in our control. However, the best thing we can do is still to do the best that we can. Then hope for the best but be ready to accept that the outcome may be different from what we wanted.
Layoffs? Corporate reorgs? Divorce? We’ll all go through seasons in life with loss of health, money, loved ones, and relationships. It’s all part of being human.
In all these cases, one way we can prepare for resilience is by being in a strong community network for support. We can also learn to anticipate what’s possibly in the future through the experiences of people who’ve already gone through these career and life changes.
And ultimately, for things outside our control, it’s not a bad idea to have some faith so that we can face the future without fear.
Faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. Martin Luther King, Jr
3. Learn Faster
Consider changes in our lives and our careers to be learning opportunities. We know a growth mindset is essential to staying agile and adaptable. Thus, we may feel more in control if we proactively embrace change and learning opportunities.
Although sometimes a controversial figure, Jack Welch said “Change before you have to.”
In addition, agility and adaptability through rapid learning may be the only way to keep ahead of the competition and other market forces.
In the future, the ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. Arie de Geus
What this means for us is to prioritize learning.
Companies are literally prioritizing training for their AI machine-learning models, sometimes even with questionably obtained data sources , in order to stay ahead of the changing business environment.
For many people, continuous learning is often an important-but-not-urgent activity, which means that we need to proactively prioritize learning, else our adaptability drifts to the back burner.
These are ways for companies and people to learn faster in order to thrive.
At 11-years old, I once accompanied my mother to her side job cleaning houses. She cleaned out a room which had been occupied by a college student who left behind discarded college textbooks. One of the old textbooks was from an astrophysics class about the chemical and physical processes deep within the cores of stars. The owner said that we could keep the discarded textbooks.
I read the astrophysics textbook from cover to cover. The dusty old textbook was garbage to somebody but it was a treasure to me. Although I didn’t understand some of it, it certainly accelerated my science learning and motivation.
Sometimes these opportunities for accelerating learning can pop up from unexpected places, like the garbage from my mother’s housecleaning job. Take opportunities to learn faster, whatever the source.
Final Thoughts
As you might guess, I still have a tendency to think far out into the future.
Hopefully I don’t scare people again like I did with my 4th/5th grade class about the future demise of the sun.
The future can be either a scary place or a fantastic place. Eclipses used to bring terror to people in the past. Now our understanding of the predicted solar eclipses has removed fear about them. Similarly, our understanding of what could happen with various life and career changes can give us some comfort in any case.
Change is inevitable. We can’t predict the changes in our lives exactly, but we can prepare as follows:
Ultimately, regardless of whatever surprise changes come to you, know that your life matters. To yourself, to others, and to future generations. Remember to look beyond these surprise changes towards things with eternal value.
Best regards,
Jimmy Wong
Originally published on Medium.com by the author.
About Jimmy Wong
I am a data science leader and business coach, with 27 years in the industry and 12 years at the LinkedIn company.?My mission is to empower individuals and small businesses to transition?and thrive in this new age of AI.
Follow or contact me to learn how I can help you with data science, leadership, and career advice. See my links .