It can’t be said that any founder is entirely comfortable with the status quo; after all, if they were, they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of seeking to upend their industry while doing the same to their entire life. But there is a certain level of comfort that is cultivated in our lives and our business, and for many, it can be hard to disrupt that comfort, in favor of uncertainty and change.
A young woman takes a break to do something analog like writing in her journal and drinking tea. … [+]
Not all changes are hard, of course — we make changes all the time of a minor kind, and most don’t warrant a second thought or a moment of lost sleep. Big, significant changes, though — those we’re not inclined to make and keen to avoid. We enjoy the comfort we have in our current circumstances; the familiarity is a balm to get us through the day in an otherwise chaotic existence. Moreover, change can be good, sure, but it may also be bad, and the new state of affairs worse than what would exist had we left well enough alone.
And so we avoid or delay changes, sometimes to our detriment. Life and the universe aren’t especially interested in your desire to maintain things as they are, however, and change is thrust upon all of us, whether we would have it or not. Our choice, then, is in how we deal with those changes. It’s that old adage, it’s not the crisis/mistake/challenge, it’s your response.
Some might try and return to the old way of things, setting their business back to the way it was, but that’s an impossible task; nothing can ever be as it was, and even if it could, is that what you really want? We make a habit of idealizing the past in a way that it doesn’t merit, forgetting the problems and challenges, while burnishing the happiness and success. Everything was perfect, and if only we’d been allowed to live forever in that moment our lives and our work would have been simple, easy, and joyful.
There’s no truth to our fantasies, only the reality of change. And perhaps that change is harder for us to deal with than we’d like, but there’s no circumventing it, no forestalling it; no past generation of entrepreneurs had the luxury of a perfect environment to do business with nothing altered or shifted for years at a time. Change is the constant of life throughout history; who are we to think we can short-circuit it?
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What we control is our reaction to change. Rather than feeling bitter about what’s happened, we can embrace that we’re all subject to forces beyond our control and satisfy ourselves with doing our best with what circumstances are within our power. Perhaps things haven’t shaken out in our favor, but we’re not alone in that regard, and it’s important to remember that there are always those with worse luck than our own. Conversely, it’s important to recognize when we’re the recipient of good luck or felicitous circumstance and not mistake it for pure merit and understand that future changes might see us knocked down from any high perch we set ourselves upon.
Change presents an opportunity to challenge ourselves to adapt to a new set of circumstances and a new way of doing things. We don’t need to look very far for an example of just such an example: the pandemic represents nothing if not a huge change to the way almost every business operates. While it would never be said to be any sort of opportunity, it does demonstrate the ability of many businesses to do what they can to adapt, though far too many have suffered and lost their livelihoods and their lives to say that the lesson is anything but a grim one that we wish hadn’t been visited upon us.
That said, change forces us to move forward and not dwell on the past. It’s a fine line between lesson learned thinking and mentally chastising yourself for mistakes. My mantra is #onwards and that means not fixated on the rear view mirror of my experiences. However, moving forward I must remain flexible and open to change to survive.
Change also presents us with the chance to consider who we are: are we going to be among those stuck in the past, clinging to how our business used to be, or will we press forward? Those who seek to gain more knowledge and an understanding of the market, pushing to change and become something better than they were before, also tend to accept that failure, setback, and difficulty are simply facts of life and not reasons to be angry at the world. Life is change, and the sooner we can embrace that, the sooner we can become more fully realized people and entrepreneurs. #onwards.
