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.

Vital Abilities

This post is a continuation of an earlier post, Luck or Skill, discussing the merits of luck and skill towards success in life. In that post, I concluded it is a combination of both luck and skill that leads to an individual's success at any endeavor. This post will investigate two vital skills I believe are more important than either luck or quantifiable skills such as mathematical abilities. The capabilities are abstract in nature and are not really teachable, per say.
1. Accepting the world as is and shaping your environment to reality and not to a desired reality is necessary. Simply put it, adaptation.
2. Looking forward to the future and adjusting the present, while simultaneously preparing for the future is the next even more difficult skill to learn. No one can fully predict the future.

We all want to believe in ourselves, sometimes greater than the truth. Being the great scientist, artist, business tycoon, surgeon and etc. Nothing is wrong with a little fantasy to escape the daily grudge. Once the daydreaming stops, unless we are independently wealthy (majority of us aren't) we have to find a way to support ourselves through employment. Often, many aspects of this employment thing are not pleasant. This is the reality we face everyday and serves as an example. Challenges come daily. The obstacles can be annoying or at the other extreme dangerous. Sometimes reality is a dead end. No where to go. In all cases, successful individuals will accept what is truly presented to them. Obtain something useful from the moment being presented. Not accepting reality allows any situation (potentially threatening) to catch an individual off guard.

Two extreme variations are those who live obsessed with a different time, the future or past. We all know of those who constantly say, "I will do this when this occurs". It is good to put off gratification to a limited extent. Taking this mind set to an extreme will has someone ignoring a possible opportunity though. The future is an accumulation of past (at that point in time present) actions. Carpe Diem loosely translated from Latin is "seize the day". This rings true. The expected tomorrow may never materialize. The opposite side of the coin are those trapped in the past. Life was good when I was a "enter position", but everything is wrong now. It is all my contemporaries' fault. Life moves on through various stages. Past events are water underneath the bridge. The past taught lessons and brought good memories, but dwelling there is unhealthy. The high school football star who won the state championship was glorious, but that is yesterday's news. As the slave said to Julius Caesar while riding the chariot in victory, "All glory is fleeting."

Finally, the ability to avoid negative situations both in the present and future. These damaging events can be layoffs, elimination of a profession through replacement by a newer technology, organizations turning against a member and etc. I personally think this skill is not teachable. It is deep within their mind and soul, a skill that is not quantifiable. The positive end of the skill is the ability to see emerging trends into the future. What is the next big thing? In the computer world, names like Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Steve Jobs are just the beginning. Multitudes of others made their fortunes by doing relatively accurate future predictions. Bringing any organization into the future is going to require some forecasting.