I thought about that for a while. I thought about it enough that I never forgot it, and it has been almost two years.
I listen to people say things like, “I’ll never understand that,” or “I just don’t get how these things work.”
It all comes down to choice. I work in information technology, a field that changes all the time. The competitive landscape, the tools, the customers…you have to evolve or die. That is something that permeates my work life but also my personal life. Do I embrace the 'new' because of the job?...and then have it overflow into my personal life? Actually, no. I embrace the 'new' personally, and it makes me effective at my job.
Why are new things so challenging to people when they get over forty?
Because they stop. They stop trying. They stop growing. They halt their own evolution. Like my friend, they stop learning. They paint their own finish line. And they paint that line in a race that only they are running.
Do you realize, that you are giving up at a time when you possess the greatest advantage?
To illustrate, I look at my work life. To have been in a business environment for twenty five years…to have gone through three economic cycles…to have observed technology change from a PC where the operating system was a floppy disc and the data storage was a second floppy disc, to what we have today…is experience no new worker can buy. You can spot the risks instinctively. You can work to a better and more successful outcome because you know how to protect your backside. You can see the problems that lay hidden in front of you, because you have been there before…so you can steer the ship and avoid a collision.
That’s a business analogy. It’s the same personally. You have been around the block. Your kids don’t know that. They think you’re stupid. They have no idea you may have tried drugs, binged on alcohol, skipped school, partied with your friends, been dumped by a girl/guy, drove without seatbelts, made fun of the teacher, or been suspended from school. They think you will never get it. Their methods may have changed, but their social habits haven’t. Their social needs are the same as yours were. They are just playing on a slightly different field.
You have experience. It’s the greatest competitive advantage known to man. If you throw in the towel now, you are quitting right as your opportunities for success have their highest potential. Opportunities in all walks of life. You have never been in a better position.
If you choose to be old now…if you choose to embrace the perceived comfort of stopping now…you have painted your own finish line.
I was watching a TV mini-series recently that ended a couple of years ago, but a friend told me I would love. He was right incidentally. It’s the new Battlestar Gallactica series. It's not the one from the seventies, it's the one from this decade. In it, there is a race of aliens known as the Cylons that have evolved from robots that man built. They are part flesh and part machine. The advantage they have over the humans is that if they die, they download their consciousness into a collective hive and then that same consciousness is then uploaded, or reborn, into an exact but brand new replica body. In essence, they never die.
As I watched the episodes, there was a line that really made me think. One enlightened human said to the other, “How can we ever beat them? You kill them, but they keep coming back in new bodies. And the new ones never have to be retrained. They come back stronger and with all the experience and knowledge that their predecessor had.”
P90X. As I do these workouts, I think of that concept. I’m not ready to stop. I’m not ready to give in. Like the Cylons, I am creating a new body to live in for the next ten to twenty years. I will be in as good a physical condition as someone twenty years my junior, but I will have all the advantages of experience and knowledge.
True living is evolution.
I absolutely refuse to paint the finish line of my own life.
Yoga X tonight. Ninety minutes of some of the toughest ‘posing’ you will ever see.
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