I can only give one solid piece of advice for my friends, colleagues, and customers that suffer from this onslaught of change – get over it. You can’t stop the landslide of innovation and if you try to hold back you will get buried. Truly successful people challenge themselves on a daily basis by doing something that scares the pants off them, and then overcoming it. If it makes you sweat to move from one version of Windows to a newer one, well that’s OK. Just dive in – the water will be cold for a second and then you will get used to it pretty quickly. You say that you don’t have time to learn, but really, do you have time not to learn? Can you afford to deal with it another day knowing that that other day will be just as constricted as today and then some because you put it off?
The secondary reason for my pep talk is that I run into a lot of people who refuse to embrace new or current technology because they are clutching onto what they are comfortable with, regardless if it is actually holding them back. Desktop applications for businesses are being replaced by web applications but people can’t see the value in them. Not because they don’t offer any, but because they are used to what they have. Lets take Outlook for example. This widely popular application has alway stunk on ice when not used in conjunction with a Microsoft Exchange email server. People got used to it and now can’t let it go. They seem to love how the PST file gets corrupt and wipes out all of their email, calendars, & contacts. They must truly enjoy accidentally sending a large attachment and having the file get stuck for days in the outbox until a tech can come and remove it. And they can’t wait to see the message that Outlook is scanning their files because it didn’t shut down correctly for 40 minutes at a clip. Why are you still using Outlook when you could switch to a hosted Outlook Web Access account, or better yet a Google Apps account? Because it’s different!
I’ve written previously on how I think you should dump Windows XP and stop using Internet Explorer, and now I’m telling you to take an inventory of what software you currently use and see if there is a better way to get things done. The goal is to find a tool that gets the job done faster and more efficiently overall no matter what the conditions. Maybe that does mean sticking with Outlook for your situation, but more often than not people don’t want to move on for reasons of comfort instead of progress.
The primary reason for my pep talk (or as my wife would classify it – a lecture) is that in 2010, time has become the most valuable asset we have. We don’t seem to have enough of it to get everything done as well as experience the best parts of life without cutting some corners and making some sacrifices. Every second counts and if you can save a few by using better technology, then you and your loved ones will be in a better place for it.