Learn to change, learn to breakthrough

Jason Feifer grew up as very change-resistant boy who hated it when his favorite Miami Heat players moved to other teams and his favorite obscure bands made it big. Probably because of his drive, he improved at making some life transitions as he went from small-town newspaper writer to big city magazine contributor. But when he became Editor in Chief of Entrepreneur, he kept noticing that people (and companies) who thrive “are good at change” and that the entrepreneurs who adapted fastest got ahead further – while many big companies floundered and failed to innovate.

A few years ago, he became “obsessed” with how others manage change, so he started a podcast to learn more. While explaining this to another dad one afternoon (who turned out to be a book agent) as they watched their sons on a playground in Brooklyn, the man suggested that Feifer write a book about it.

Build for Tomorrow is a tool kit within a four-step process on how to thrive through change. There’s nothing easy about this quite complex topic so forgive me for not being brief. Let’s face it: today is probably the slowest pace of global change we will ever experience. Learning how to embrace change is not an easy skill for most people and is becoming even more important for us all! You can’t move from one breakthrough to another if you crash every time there is a sizeable change. Our children will need this even more.

Here’s the short summary of the 4 steps first:

1.    PANIC: Understand why we react to change the way we do (and pause while others panic)

2.    ADAPTATION: Change first or, better yet, before you have to. You will get ahead faster.

3.    NEW NORMAL: Lead the charge to change and become more adaptable – experiment, develop theories, fail, and learn

4.    WOULDN’T GO BACK: Seize the new opportunities ahead. Change happens through doing. 

The PURPOSE OF Feifer’s BOOK = “I WANT TO HELP YOU REACH WOULDN’T GO BACK.”

First, increasingly adopt this new mindset: “More intentionally see everything we do as simply the next thing, but never the permanent thing. It should liberate us from the fear that every decision defines us, or that every failure follows us…who wants permanence in a world of potential?

PART 1: PANIC – how you respond to initial change sets the tone for your next breakthrough:

a)   Most people try to stop, resist, or fear a change. Don’t be too reactive to change you can’t control (think of the Luddites who danced in the street when the British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, who supported the introduction of machines to increase industrial production, was assassinated in 1812!). Feifer tells hilarious stories of how, throughout the ages, everything from books, umbrellas, ballroom dancing, cars, radio, comics, and social media have been slandered as ruining either mental health or culture. Yet these fear-saturated charges ended up proving baseless. When you over-react to a change, you can’t create solutions. “Someone before us already dealt with what we’re dealing with now.” Try to understand the source of the change.

b)   Winning Mindset: Push yourself to see the benefits to the object of change – it will help you adapt, counter the fear of loss that tends to spiral down, and you will make clearer decisions. Use these questions:

i.     What are we doing differently because of this new thing?

ii.    What new skill or habit are we learning as a result?

iii.   How could that be put to good use?

Play the long game and accept that it may hurt for a while – because it probably will!

c)    Learn the lessons from how you adapted in the past

There is a common fear that we can’t repeat our past success. This is exacerbated by nostalgia: how we sometimes mis-remember the past and look on it more fondly than it really was at the time. We often forget the challenges of yesterday. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A GOOD OLD DAYS in history! It is a MYTH. There have been all kinds of trauma, war, inequalities, slavery, disease, prejudice, and human atrocities from bygone periods that no one would want back. “Our past was not, and is not, the only good time.”

Answering these will inspire you to pursue change and reduce panic:

Identify the transferable skills that helped you thrive before:

Q1: What did I overcome (to have success in the past)?

Q2: What skill set did I have then that I still have now?

Q3. What do I know now that I did not know then? 

PART 2: ADAPTATION – Adapt quicker, breakthrough faster

As times change, “you have more control than you think.” When we buy into the idea that change controls us and tech devices are all addictive, we develop learned helplessness. This is not for you. Change can be scary because it seems so all-encompassing and permanent. 

a)    Focus on WHY not WHAT: Instead of focusing on WHAT you are doing differently, focus on WHY = your REASONS. It makes adapting easier. What matters most is WHY YOU DO WHAT YOU DO in your life. Look for the consistency and common ground there. Feifer asked Richard Branson about this: “People get so wrapped up in the day-to-day of what they’re doing. It’s important to sit back and think about why am I on this Earth?” 

Feifer adds: “We are not what we do. We are why we do it. Even as our jobs or lives change…we still have innate skills, abilities, passions, and beliefs that define us.” There are many ways to be entrepreneurial and make a positive difference in the world. Who are you called to help? 

b)   Winning Mindset: See your life as one where you are always testing and refining – forever a work in progress. That way failure merely becomes DATA. Be less certain about what you know. You want to make decisions informed by many possibilities as they will align better with reality.

i.              When evaluating the future, ask yourself: If I were starting over today…

ii.             Ask this question: “What would happen if somebody took us over, got rid of us – what would the new guy do?” Andy Grove, Intel - TRY TO TAKE AN OUTSIDER’S PERPSECTIVE.

iii.            Three tactics from Katy Milkman, author of How to Change:

Tactic 1: “A vastly underused strategy (to get better), which is the simplest of all, is copy-and-pasting things that have worked for other people.”

Tactic 2: Give advice to someone in a similar situation – it will nudge you to take more action.

Tactic 3: Pre-mort your decision: What will I regret 6 months from now if I do it? 

c)    The best time to CHANGE is BEFORE YOU HAVE TO – preferably the moment you’re AWARE change is happening, not once the pain hits. Think long-term – yes, it will be hard for a while – and be really open to where it may lead. 

Ask yourself: What do we need to believe to be true in order for this to work? Start working your next job now even if it’s a side hustle. This takes trust and faith in yourself and will help you be more adaptable. Work your next job with FOCUS AND CURIOSITY – be flexible about outcomes as there may be better opportunities where you don’t expect them. Don’t define yourself too narrowly.

“We must accept that the greatest opportunities may be the ones we weren’t looking for, and maybe didn’t even know existed. I meet so many entrepreneurs who laugh – laugh! – at the reality of what they’re doing now.”

If you’re not sure what your next job is, answer this:

a)    What I have

b)   What I need

c)    What’s available?

PART 3: NEW NORMAL – new paradigms lead to new breakthroughs

Adapting to the New Normal is also hard and also temporary until the next jump. IF YOU WANT TO THRIVE IN THE New Normal, YOU NEED to RETHNK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS, treat failure merely as data and test theories about what you do. 

a)   Treat Failure as data: “Great businesses have been built out of the lessons from failed ones. YouTube began as a failed dating site; Twitter began as a failed podcast platform called Odeo; Instagram began as a failed app to help plan meetups called Burbn.” Treat failure as a route to new solutions. You might be learning things that others are not because of your failures: What did I just learn that I didn’t know before and that other people may still not have learned? 

b)   Because we like (crave) new things but don’t want to lose old things, the best way to thrive in the New Normal is to create a Bridge of Familiarity from what you did to what you are now doing. Where is there a constant? E.g., sales of the automobile were weak until marketing shifted to claim “the car is a better horse”. Words like ‘horsepower’ were created and models such as the Ford Mustang and Dodge Colt. What is still the consistent core/need/function that has not changed but is now being done differently? As you transition roles professionally, how do you map or express that change to be more at peace with it?

c)    Present yourself with different theories because they make you think. Sometimes the New Normal is obvious and sometimes it’s hidden and will only be revealed by different questions/theories/perspectives that can then push you into action. “We need to snap ourselves out of expected thinking. We need to see what we didn’t expect. That’s why it’s time to confront theories.”

Q1 Why am I doing this?

Q2 Develop a theory to test AND who’s the best person to answer the question?

What happens if I…

Is X actually the reason you do Y?

What would you do if you had the money to spend on making the company run better?

What else could a (vocation) do to help (niche)?

What is (this person’s) biggest problem and how could I help?

What if the thing I’m doing now, even if it makes me feel good, isn’t the best use of my skills? – are you doing what you do best?

What is this for? Question everything because it helps you not keep doing the same old same old. It forces you to challenge your assumptions. We tend to define ourselves too narrowly. The question can go much deeper – to ALL of our interactions and how we spend our time. What is this time for? “A week from now, what would I rather say I did because of this hour?” 

PART 4 WOULDN’T GO BACK – many breakthroughs lie in the unknown and unexpected opportunities

 The purpose of this step is to find something “so valuable to us that we’d never want to go back to a time before we had it”. NOTE – this may look like the opposite of what you had in mind originally!!! It may challenge your identity, be a humbling process and feel like a contradiction! “But the Wouldn’t Go Back moment, terrifying as it may be, can become the most reliable source of what we never knew we needed.” 

a) Reconsider the Impossible - “True opportunity exists in the unknown”

“To reach our Wouldn’t Go Back moment, we must reconsider the impossible. That is to say, we take another look at the things we once discarded – the things we thought impossible, illogical, too difficult, too radical, too ridiculous to even consider – and explore whether they were the real opportunity all along. I will tell you: Over and over, as I meet people who thrived after a time of change, they made a discovery like this. They are doing the thing they once thought was impossible. And it defined their lives.”

Feifer argues that people are like the dogs who wear electronic collars and stop short of invisible fences. We limit ourselves based on our definition of what we’re good at just like a now big company that doesn’t know how to innovate anymore: “the company shifts away from doing new things and into doing old things better.” Does this describe you?

We need to look closer at what we don’t know because we can get trapped inside what we know - we need to reconsider the impossible (or hard or ridiculous or radical) because our limits are self-imposed. This isn’t easy either, is it?

“The greatest ideas aren’t always revolutionary ones. Sometimes they’re the things we placed outside our boundaries. 

What do we think we know but that we do not?

What’s something we know, and that others know too?

What’s something that other people know, but that I do not?

Process to reconsider the impossible:

1.    What do I know about my situation?

2.    What do other people know that I don’t? Spend extra time here. Who might know? Who should you ask?

3.    How can I illuminate an unknown (shed light on something I don’t know)? What am I wrong about? Seek outside and diverse perspectives. You will be forced to reconsider old ideas and consider new ones. “New solutions come within reach… because they were never impossible to begin with.”

I recommend this mantra: I will keep striving to find out what people want and don’t want. I don’t know what’s impossible which is why I’ll keep pushing beyond the boundaries. Nobody ever truly knows where the limits are.

b)   Get to the Second Time

i.              Do it Badly first. Actor Ryan Reynolds changed careers and became an ad exec: “I always say that you can’t be good at something unless you’re willing to be bad. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten way more comfortable with not having the answers.”

You’re mentally ready to experiment and do things badly first when you can…

ii.             Be clear about your purpose in life and/or have an empowering dominant question. You want to figure this out because it impacts what you focus on. A good example is: How can I use this? 

How do you identify your dominant question? Brain coach Jim Kwik notes that it tends to show up when you are stressed. He recommends journaling. Clarify and likely upgrade your dominant question so it can speed up your progress. If you want to BE MORE in your life and pursue breakthroughs, you need purpose to push yourself. Take what you believe is your dominant question and rewrite it into something that prompts an empowered answer that gets you into empowered action. I shifted my miserable, fear-based: “Why don’t I have enough money?” into “How can I make the biggest possible impact?” 

c)    Winning creates winning. We are built to be constantly striving. If you face this hard task rather than give up or avoid it out of embarrassment, NEXT TIME you have a hard task you are more likely to push through it – and success breeds momentum. DO hard things and it’s a muscle to build that makes it easier to do more hard thing things and win more wins. It builds self-discipline, grit and resilience.

 d)   The 99% There Problem. If after a change, you’re still not comfortable, happy or satisfied, it’s because you’re only 99% there. To figure out the final 1%, you can’t focus on the new thing itself: you must look in the margins around it and make adjustments where nobody else is looking. Some things that look easy are actually difficult – “what you see isn’t all there is.”

Feifer’s solution is to list the “but reallys.” “I assume the missing 1% is x, but really it’s…” And if you want to appreciate something new, list the ‘but reallys’: e.g., I was afraid that making change A would cause this bad outcome, but really….

e)   It’s okay to forget your old identity. Our memories are flawed, and we manipulate them unwittingly to paint different pictures of the past and to paint a picture where we tell ourselves we are continually improving even though it may well not be true or any different to our past outcomes. All that matters is to understand that Wouldn’t Go Back is our most natural state not a radical discovery: “At our core, inside our very biology, we are built for change,” and “our lives are richer and fuller when we pursue new.”

Keep building your self-belief, trust yourself, and start building for tomorrow. Make the tools within the four steps a Conscious Cycle and you can skip the Panic next time and move onto the good stuff.

To embracing change!

Matt

Copyright Matt Anderson, 2023