I thought this was appropriate to start the new year.
We all have the tendency to believe that we are living in a very advanced technological period. We get all excited about the new tech we got at Xmas and what we read about that will soon be available to us. In reality, everything we are excited about today is going to be incredibly old and boring much faster than we ever expect.
No matter what year you were born, by the time you finish(ed) high school, its (was) a completely different world. Today’s high school seniors were born prior to the World Wide Web, wireless internet, smartphones, tablets, HDTVs and changes in world politics that were never imagined. Without question each of us can remember the things that were new and exciting to us when we were kids, that were unimaginable to our parents, but are now nothing more than old memories.
The rate of technological change is not slowing down. In fact, the argument could be made that it is speeding up. In our lifetimes, we will reach a point when we reflect back on the good old days of the internet, Facebook, Twitter and other tech that is ubiquitous today. We might even look back at digital the way we currently look at analog. Things change.
Of course, this isn’t a problem. It’s a huge opportunity. There is that 12 year old that is imagining what we can’t. Another that is combining elements into something new we should have seen, but did not. It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings. “If you are looking where everyone else is for the next big thing, you are looking in the wrong place”
The reality is, None of us are born in to the world we live in.
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