Managing Personal Change by Roy Tennant

Run, do not walk to this:

http://blog.libraryjournal.com/tennantdigitallibraries/2010/09/29/managing-personal-change/

Here are just a few of my favorites:

  • Learn as you breathe. You breathe all the time without even thinking about it. That is how you must learn — picking up bits of knowledge, new skills, and a fresh perspective every single day simply as a part of living. As human organisms, we already do it to some degree, but we all need to get really, really good at it.
  • Don’t be afraid of forgetting. These days you don’t need to remember very much. You can look everything else up on the Internet. And in the age of the smartphone and tablet devices, you can often do this at times where you never could before.
  • Don’t clutch old technologies when you should be tossing them aside. The natural human tendency is to cleave to what we know, and to view anything new with suspicion. There are good parts of this tendency, but so too there are some bad. Staying with outdated technologies too long because they are familiar and we feel comfortable in our mastery of them are reasons that are weak and unjustifiable.
  • Don’t blindly embrace the new. Not every technology that comes down the pike is worth your time and attention. It may be worth enough time to assess it, but don’t think just because it is new and shiny that it should be immediately embraced. For my money, virtual worlds — at least at this point — are of this variety. There was a time when Second Life was the toast of the Internet. Is it central to what you do now? Likely not.

Thanks Roy! I’ll be sharing this with my classes for sure.