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"Learning faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage in an environment of rapid change."
Arie deGues

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Our work continues. There is a lot of fear around us, and yet, for the most part, people keep on doin’ what they’re doin’. I mean this in two ways, first that we keep slogging on despite some of the craziness. The poet Oriah Mountain Dreamer writes in her beautiful poem, The Invitation, http://www.oriahmountaindreamer.com/ 

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

And there is a second meaning in my comment about us “keeping on doin’ what we’re doin’.” And that is the oft quoted, and usually attributed to Albert Einstein, line, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting different results.” In the midst of some of the craziness out there, does it not seem that we’re all too often doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results? And I don’t just mean big global issues like terrorism and climate change. I mean the small but very consequential elements in our daily lives.

For example, we know in our heads that we need to have a difficult conversation with someone, but all too often we rationalize ourselves away from the conversation by having an ‘emergency’ that suddenly comes up, or we say ‘its not the right time’, or we think that if we make a joke, they’ll surely understand the point. And we know in our hearts that we still need to have the conversation. But we keep avoiding it, expecting a change each time.

Or we find ourselves being the outlier, the one person in the room who doesn’t appear to agree with the group. What is the word we all too often hear from ourselves? “Whatever.” When you hear that word coming out of your mouth (assuming you’re not 14 and your parents are stupid anyway), ask yourself, “what am I expecting to happen by saying this?” Am I hoping that they’ll get my point? Am I hoping that they’ll see how much of a martyr I am? Instead of ‘whatever’, why not say something like, “I disagree, I think we need to….. If it is the will of the group to do it, I can live with it, but I’d appreciate a couple of minutes to make my case.” This may not result in you moving the group, but I can guarantee that you’ll have a better chance at change than simply saying “whatever.”

If you’re not happy with the situation in which you find yourself, what do you need to change to make it work for you? In the end, what happens in our world is up to us.