Never Change Nelly

This is the second caricature in my blog series. My first caricature was the True Believer. This character could well overlap with True Believers, Never Change Nelly. Never Change Nelly wants everything to remain as they are currently. The ultimate conservative (not in the American political sense) who wants everything to remain constant day-to-day and so on. They refuse to take any chances no matter how detrimental their current position may be. Any discontinuity to their never changing world is taken as a threat without regards to the effects in their lives.

What may drive this worldview? My guess is a variety of things.
1. As people age they get set in their ways and want to change less
2. Personality, some people do not like surprises or challenges
3. One pathology of this thinking creates the mindset of I know everything. (Hint: no one knows everything or even possesses the majority of knowledge humans have. This really is another version of narcissism.)
4. They have worked hard to set their lives up in a certain manner which they like.
5. Life has been easy for them

Whatever the driving factor behind Never Change Nelly, a problem quickly arises. Our world is a quickly changing, highly dynamic place. Change will come. Change is inevitable. You cannot stop it. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow. Stubborn refusal to adapt creates dinosaurs. Being an expert with the typewriter 3 decades ago would have given someone employment. Today, it would equal unemployment. Adaptation is vital for survival. To paraphrase Andy Grove, the cofounder of Intel, in reference to the budding computer industry, "Only the paranoid survive".

I truly believe successful individuals adapt to changes. Never Change Nelly will never find a place among the successful.