Once More Unto the Change

I’ve Googled. You’ve Googled. We’ve all Googled.

And if you know anything you’ve probably been Googled into obsolescence. You may not know it yet, but you have.

Do you remember when if you needed to know something about something you tried to think of someone who might know?  If you couldn’t think of anyone, you asked others if they knew anyone who knew something about something. Do you know anybody who knows this? Do you know anyone that knows that?

People became known as experts or in the know.  These people were good repositories of knowledge. Going to these people fostered good community and communication. It was personal. Social.

Sure you might learn more than you wanted to know, you might learn nothing or you might get referred along.

Well, forget all that. Your knowledge has been assimilated by the Google Borg.  All your practical knowledge, caveats and wisdom are…

“I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.” — Robert Frost

Not bad words to live by I suppose, but I get the idea somehow that this leads us to believe there is some one choice that will make all the difference.

Life is a lot of choices and in fact maybe life is just a continuous series of choices. Granted, I’m not saying they’re all significant, though certainly a pattern of similar small choices can began to have as much impact as big choices.

You see, sometimes in life you want more choices and sometimes you want less.

Too many choices and you are paralyzed. Too few choices and you feel trapped. The trick is knowing when to limit your choices and when to expand them.

For example, some young people graduating from high school or college have the world before them. They…

I am the opposite of a perfectionist. That is undoubtedly true.

What am I then? Apparently if you’re not a perfectionist you’re a rebel.  I found this out by searching for antonyms of perfectionism. Here’s a list of some of the antonyms:

Oddity, dissenter, defector, eccentric, fanatic, individualist, loner, maverick, radical, rebel, nonconformist, romantic, unorthodox.

I had no idea that’s what the world thought of me. I like the list because I like to think of myself as a rebel.  But on the other hand I don’t like it because it seems to imply then that perfectionism would be the norm. I don’t know. Maybe it is the norm. But that is so wrong. So misguided. I think I need to find a better word for the opposite of perfectionism. I’ll have to come back to that.

Fellow blogger Mirror of Encounters had a good entry the other day on…

Are we just “ugly giant bags of mostly water”?—alien’s description of humans, Star Trek, The Next Generation, “Home Soil”

This may be a contentious topic. Are we servants to our base instincts or are we higher, sentient beings capable of controlling our instincts with intellect and morals? Or, on any given day or situation, somewhere in between?

When we better understand why we, as human beings, “do the things we do” we are all better off. We can be more conscious of our personal choices. In our role as strategy execution and change management leads we can help people navigate their reactions to change more consciously.

Proceed at your own risk: this post includes serious thinking (Simon Sinek’s) mixed in with liberal doses of “mesearch” (observations based on my own experience) and (hopefully) thoughtful reflection.

Do you know when you are moved?

A couple of days ago I was…