I’m starting to think that a lot of people hide behind the excuse of “I want to Simplify my life” to avoid doing things. Specifically, learning new things that challenge what they’re used to doing, particularly when it’s more complex.
Technology has brought forth the need to learn all sorts of new skills to handle what once were seemingly simple tasks. I don’t necessarily condone the abuse of technology as a replacement for that of which we used to do manually (or some other difficult way), but it’s certainly important to keep up with your competition.
That’s right. You have competition. Personal competition: You against everyone else in the world. It might be career competition, breeding competition, attention competition – you get the idea – everything in life is a competition. Guess what? It’s not fair. Are we past that part yet? You’re not? May I suggest the following reading: Why am I stuck?
Whether you choose to compete or not will play a big role in your personal fate. But that’s another blog.
The fact is, I see more people pushing back on learning a new skill and proclaiming something to be too complex or difficult.
Truth is, we’ve become complacent in our old country ways. For example: remember when you could run your home finances with just a checkbook, account register, roll of stamps, telephone and decent penmanship? Today – you don’t need (and increasingly aren’t allowed to use) ANY of that. Uh oh.
Yep. Things are changing. Not always for the better, but they are changing. You can sit around, whine about it or you can stand up and do something about it. No, not rage against the machine. That works just about as well as you should expect it to. I mean become educated about whats changed. Do you really want to be the pouting adult about how you don’t want to learn the new Windows operating system or how you don’t think automatic traction control shouldn’t be mandatory in all new vehicles? At least educate yourself on the subject. That way, at least you can say with some authority (and “It’s just too complex for me” is not authority – that’s a cop-out) why you’re not a fan.
You see, your responsibility to learn new things doesn’t end when some old guy hands you a piece of paper after 4 years of learning worthless ancient history. Nope. That’s when it just gets started.
Think about it. When you stepped out of college, what was the first thing you did (after the hangover)? That’s right – you started looking for a job. If you are really ambitious, you may have started your own business (in that case, I doubt anything I’m saying here is new material to you). The amount of energy you undoubtedly poured into either branch easily out-did any late-night crammings or thesis papers in terms of it’s ability to produce results. Real results. Not a worthless letter grade.
Now I’m sure there are a few of you wondering what the hell my problem is. That’s fine. You don’t have to agree with me. That’s the beauty of the Internet/America.
Just make sure you’ve done your homework.
Gregster’
