We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. Carl Sagan, astronomer (1934-1996)
I got a new phone yesterday. It’s one of those fancy, newfangled 3G smart phones and has a whole host of awesome features that my old phone didn’t have: a touch-screen, Wi-Fi, video—you name it, its got it. When it arrived, I was like a kid on Christmas morning. I couldn’t wait to get it out of the box and start using it.
Then I turned it on.
From the moment my finger hit the touch-screen, I hated it. I fumbled and hit the wrong letters repeatedly. I got irritated and within an hour I wanted to toss it out the window.
That’s when I got scared. Not being in that techno-sweet spot 15-to-25-year-old demographic anymore, I realized maybe it wasn’t the “stupid phone’s” problem—maybe the problem was me. Everywhere I turn I see kids with these phones, shooting off e-mails and texts in seconds, while at my current rate of typing it may take me an hour or so to get one e-mail out the door. So, I made a call to customer support and as we got my minutes and messages squared away, I also offered constant complaints about how terrible the phone was. The tech support guy told me, “You just have to stick with it and in a few days you will be a wiz!”
I decided to take his advice.
Within a couple of hours I was moving around pretty well with my new top-of-the-line gadget. Now I am feeling a little better and a bit less concerned about the onset of my antiquity.
Wondering what the moral to this story is? If so, here it goes: Adapting to change is hard, and the older we get, the harder it is to adapt. I have always believed myself to be tech-savvy and adaptable, but we all get into techno-ruts (even my spell-check dictionary is behind the times and doesn’t recognize the word blog). It’s often easier to use what is familiar, but in order to survive in business and stay at the forefront of what is on the horizon, we must force ourselves to adapt to new technology, trends and new ways of marketing and selling in an ever-evolving world.
So log on, blog on and become a fan, because its a whole new world wide web out there.
