- Have you ever found yourself unsure of what to do next in life?
- Have you ever felt stuck in an endless grind with no end in sight in your career?
- Have you ever felt insecure because you don’t have exact clarity on how things are going to play out with your job situation over the next season of life?
- Have you ever hoped that “the answer will come” but you just keep waiting and waiting for a sign as to what to do next?
- Have you wondered if you are just wasting your time pursuing certain interests that you have thinking they will just lead to dead ends if you pursued them professionally?
If you have ever felt any of those things listed above, would it surprise you to know that everybody feels that way at various points of their life, even if they appear to have all of their sh!t together at all times.
Here’s the truth, the only constant in life is CHANGE itself. Change is unstoppable. Everything changes over time in the economy. Why? People get older and retire, technology adapts, customer trends evolve, resources either become scarce or new ones are discovered that are more efficient. The result is that change happens. The world adapts.
When you are all trying to figure out what your future holds, one thing is certain, you will have to keep changing and evolving to adapt to the ever-changing world. Some people find those episodes of uncertainty very uncomfortable. What people seek is consistency, predictability, certainty, absolutes. But those are myths in an ever-changing world. Nothing will be perfectly consistent, predictable, and certain in the years ahead.
You won’t experience perfect consistency either. You will get older. You will have different seasons of life that come and go; kids, health, activities, interests, time-constraints, and financial resources.
And as you get older you will keep having these episodes of wondering, “What am I going to be when I grow up?” The truth is, you just don’t know because you don’t know how the world is going to change and what it will take to adapt. Don’t be alarmed. This is all a natural part of the human experience. If we all knew exactly what we wanted to do as kids and actually followed through with those plans, we would have an abundance of Princesses and Cowboys in our economy. But we changed as we got older, didn’t we?
I remind others that not everything has to (or will) make perfect sense as we go along our journey and human experience. There are jobs today that didn’t even exist 10 or 20 years ago. Let me give you an example. I love jiu-jitsu and am very passionate about the sport/activity. The sport is really blossoming and expanding right now. But 20 years ago, it was just some super fringe activity pursued by an extremely small amount of people on earth. Now what if everybody in this tiny jiu jitsu group all said,
- What’s the purpose of this?
- What’s our future?
- Why should we spend all of our time pursuing this seemingly meaningless activity?
What if they all just quit and went on to become electricians or salesmen? But they didn’t. They did what they felt was the right thing to do. They didn’t do it for the money because there was zero money in the sport. That’s not the case nowadays. There are probably a few thousand people that make their entire living off the sport of jiu-jitsu; teaching, making equipment, running tournaments or events, producing online resources. In 20 short years, everything changed.
And those in that small group of crazies that did it for no purpose at all are now popular heroes. They were the founding fathers of something much bigger than themselves.
There’s just a lot of things in life that you will never be able to explain. There are no guarantees. There are no proven paths. There are no absolutes. There is no certainty. That’s just the way life works.
If you keep waiting for certainty before doing anything, you may end up waiting (and wasting) your life away. Time is going to pass you by if you don’t keep engaging in things, trying things out and pursuing new things that are of interest to you.
- Keep moving forward.
- Make small progress.
- Experiment and learn along the way.
- Push your own boundaries.
- Try things on a small scale and see what you learn.
Along the way, you will have to keep an eye out for emerging opportunities. Keep your eyes out for new trends. Ask yourself how the world appears to be changing and how you can change with it on the front lines. This doesn’t mean inventing something revolutionary. It just means solving modern day problems with modern day solutions and positioning yourself so that you are ready for the changes that are coming down the road tomorrow.
If you are breathing and alive, then you aren’t too old to make forward progress and adapt to change. The only limiters are the ones you put on yourself. Everything is changing.
- modern medicine and healthcare is changing
- global finance is changing
- technology is changing
- housing trends are changing
- transportation is changing
- new sports are emerging
- new cities are growing
Change, change, change.
Your goal is to change and adapt and overcome. Do things today that make your life a little bit easier and more adaptable tomorrow. If you are feeling unsure or uncertain about tomorrow, don’t spend too much time stressing about it. So is everybody else. Everybody should change. Don’t fight the change, embrace the change. Have faith in yourself. Most people suck at changing. They are terrible at it. So, if you are just a bit better than everybody else in the category of change, you are already a big leg up on 95% of the population who fight it.