technology – Make It Your Problem

Does joy, happiness, pride, anxiety present itself in our lives or are we producing it through our mindset, disposition, and choices? I tend to believe that we are in the midst of circumstances and get to choose how we relate to them. I can be fearful of an adventure to the top of Mount Norquay or excited by the challenge or prideful that we are attempting the climb or many other emotions and feelings or combinations of many of them.

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It doesn’t seem likely or possible that joy is floating around looking for a place to land. I can’t accept that anxiety is in the ether waiting for a turn to crowd into my life.
They all come from within and can be prompted by external situations, but if I run the sum of the circumstances through a reflective sieve, I can choose to be optimistic, pessimistic, realistic, skeptical, or naive. What gets collected after being examined has more to do with the process of rendering that the initial ingredients.
When faced with a choice between positive and negative, what prospers a man to lean into the dark? I am committing to the awareness that I most often do get to make a decision. From that point, I am adamant that I will turn to the hopeful, the outrageous and even the ridiculous instead of spiraling into the pit of despair, distrust, distance. When I can move closer to a friend and her joy or sadness, I will draw near and spill happiness at her feet. If I am faced with a situation or struggle, I am willing to live through it and see how my anxiety and pain can be sapped.
In the end, it seems that I/we get to decide what we are feeling, how we react and what we embrace. The emotions live inside us not in the world so if I desire joy I need to begin being joyful.

I think it is worth restating, the future isn’t the past. Yet, so many clients conversations lead to the opposite conclusion. ” I know things are changing but why can’t it be like it used to be?” or less overtly ” It is getting so hard to keep up”.

The recurring theme is that we recognize change is upon it – don’t like it much, can’t comprehend the pace and speculate that tomorrow will be a variation on today. The first to don’t matter and the third is likely wrong.

You can not like change all you want but it doesn’t slow or stop it. It only slows or stops you and will eventually leave you behind. It will leave you behind way faster than you imagine. If you think it will take a year for something to take a foothold – it will be adapted and adopted in a month. If you believe that you have 5 or 10 years for your work, product or service before it becomes obsolete – think1 to 3 years. Tomorrow will only look as much like today as is necessary for us to accept the paradigm shifts. Technology allows and encourages new models (AirBnB, Uber) that have become normal and then be usurped by the next shift. We are storing up memories in placeholders like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest so we are ready for the next iteration that completely surrenders biological to digital (or something stored and represented at the molecular level).

I am choosing to embrace and play with as much of the changes as possible. I am choosing to see the apps and intrusion into my life as cool. I am choosing to look for the next wave so that when the big next earthshaking transformation happens, I might be able to stay on my feet.

The future isn’t the past. Three years from now there will be elements of our lives that we are living comfortably in ways that we can’t imagine today. In the 5 minutes that it took you to read this, someone had an idea that will make how we do something today seem like we are cavemen. The difference is that it won’t take millennia to make the change a reality.

Make Today Remarkable, by embracing something radically new,

Tag: technology

Joy

The Future isn’t the Past