3 Reasons You Must Change How You Change

During all the research for my latest book, Disrupt!, I spent a lot of time studying change and the people and circumstances that cause it.



My biggest conclusions: 

We need to change how we think about change. 

We need to be better at adapting change. We need to be more comfortable embracing all kinds of changes. We need to be more comfortable creating and driving change.





(With many more posts on this topic to come), here are the top three things I've learned about change in the past two years.





1. Disruptive change is here to stay, and it's only going to get more intense every day. Change has become so intense that it's almost always disruptive — where it constantly alters the course of your life, and where your To Do list is being ripped up before you've finished writing it. Welcome to the age of continuous personal disruption. 



2. The people who will succeed in this era are those who figure out how to benefit from, or take advantage of continuous disarray, disorder and disruption. This is a radical departure from the past few decades of trying to catch up with change or get ahead of it. Now the only way to succeed is to embrace it as an opportunity. Ride it like a wave and seize whatever comes with the wave. Or get crushed by it.



3. If you stay an employee, you'll get crushed. Not always, but more and more: pledging allegiance to the corporate flag sets you up to be crushed in a big way. No employees can be just employees anymore. Everyone who draws a paycheck must ALSO be an entrepreneur or have something else on the side. And that something else can't be just for more money. You need to be building your own disruptive change, some product or service that increases in value the more that disruptive change increases.



What have you recently learned about change?