Embracing Change

I hear it from people all the time, “It’s too late, there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

Hogwash. Utter nonsense. As Dan Gilbert points out, one of the things we human beings are just flat out awful at doing is evaluating how much like the person we are today we will be in 10 years. I’ve lived this. I am clearly, abundantly, massively not the person I was 10 years ago. My interests, my focus, my attitude, and so many more things are so startlingly different than they were 10 years ago that, as I say a bit too often, if you went back in a time machine and showed my 10 year ago self a picture of me today, he’d refuse to recognize or accept the possibility that he could evolve into the guy in the picture.

We tend to think change is hard, but it’s not.

What’s hard is that we are resistant to the changes that will happen regardless of how we feel about them. Unless you die, you are going to get older. That’s the kind of inevitable change I’m talking about, and as Dan points out so well, every other change in your life is just as inevitable. You will not like the same music you like now as much in 10 years. You also won’t like the same foods, the same ways of spending your spare time or even the same people in precisely the same way you like them today.

So, if that’s the case, why would anyone be so quick to assume that he or she couldn’t make a deliberate or conscious change?

Are you fat? Are you weak? Do you have terrible and unhealthy habits? These can change, and the more receptive you are to those changes, they more you believe in them, the more likely you will be to make them come to fruition. You won’t be the same person you are today in a few years. Why not embrace that fact and see if you can guide it a bit?

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