Become a Student of Change by Denis Waitley

AS THE world becomes more interconnected, events outside your industry and career have an impact on your business, your family and your pocketbook.

Whatever your daily routine, it takes place in a larger context of social, technological, political, economic and cultural change. To be successful today, you must understand that world. Without that you won’t be prepared to innovate; you’ll only be able to react and to avoid.

Many people will tell you it doesn’t matter how well-informed you are. “You can’t do anything about it anyway”, goes the refrain, “so why bother to find out about things?”

Here’s a newspaper editorial that sums up this attitude: 

“The world is too big for us. Too much going on, too much crime, violence and change. Try as you will, you get behind in the race. It’s an incessant strain to keep pace and still you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. Everything in business and life is high pressure. Human nature can’t endure much more!”

This newspaper editorial reads as if it were written last week. But it actually appeared more than 175 years ago on June 16, 1833 in The Atlantic Journal back in the “good old days!”