Don’t let yourself become irrelevant. By irrelevant, I mean not meaningful to your business or what you do for a living. Irrelevance can assign you to the scrapheap of your industry, or worse, it can show you the door. Becoming irrelevant dooms you to a path toward the dead end road of a career, and worse, it can creep up on you, seemingly without notice. One day you are a vital cog in the wheel of commerce. The next day, you have become an afterthought. Today’s highly-competitive, global marketplace will not long reward irrelevance and once you are deemed “irrelevant,” you fate is sealed. Departure becomes a certainty.
As I watch many of my former colleagues slide out that dreaded door of irrelevance, I keep asking myself, “How did they not see this coming?” Carefully reviewing my own career and job decisions, I believe I have discovered a possible explanation..contentment, mixed with a high degree of certainty. Let me explain.
In my own career, I was fortunate enough to have been thrust into a mix of highly competent, highly motivated people who were on the cutting-edge of our profession. We were even featured in a cover story of our trade magazine and touted as the “saviors” of our chosen line of work. We attended workshops, conventions and trade shows and were in demand as speakers and leaders. Many of us left that company for other organizations where we could now “weave our magic wand” and make things happen. Success and salary increases followed and many of us enjoyed wonderful careers and the sure and certain rise through our organizations. We became, as the old axiom goes, “Fat, dumb and happy.” Contented, with just a sprinkle, yet growing, sense of certainty. Certain that what we were doing would always work the exact same way and content in our own vastly “superior” knowledge of our industry.
We were wrong. Wrong in our certainty, wrong in our contentment and wrong in not always being open to new and even better ideas. We stayed on that sure and proven path, content in our knowledge that what had worked so well for so long was certain to always work in the future. It turns out, though, that the future had other plans.
The future brought with it new technologies that we firmly believed could not possibly last. They were just a fad. The future brought new, young and energetic people to our profession, convinced that the old way of doing things was becoming obsolete. The future tried to tell us that we needed to change and adapt or we would share the stage with countless other species and peoples who refused to recognize that change was in the wind and that cold wind over our shoulder was the harbinger of a new climatic change rolling over our profession like a tornado. Yet, many of us, the content and the certain ones, chose to ignore the early warning signs and those of us who ignored the obvious; like the stegosaurus before us, followed them into extinction. We had become irrelevant. There was a new sheriff in town.
For those of us who somehow managed to survive, well, we had to rapidly adapt to that new sheriff. He was a young and pesky little fellow, smart, quick on the draw with the latest technologies and not beholding to any of the old principles that the old lawman was so fond of quoting. This new sheriff was not afraid to tackle the worst and the nastiest varmints in the corporation and his new and often radical ideas, seemed to work and the townfolk were mighty happy with the results he produced. They did not care how the results were achieved or that the old sheriff would never have done things that way. All the townfolk knew was that what the new sheriff was trying was easy, fast and produced wonderful outcomes. More and more of the old sheriffs were being shown the door and those of us who remained had to learn, adapt and change because that door was always open.
I was lucky enough to have been thrown head-first into a situation where I simply had to learn and adapt. I could see the door on the horizon and I knew where it led. I scrambled to catch up on all of the information I should have been learning while I was busy feeling certain and content. And I feared, every day, that I would not catch up quickly enough. Yet, I did, in fact, catch up and along the way, also discovered that the new sheriff had a really good plan. He had terrific ideas, his technologies were fantastic and his attention to detail was legendary. He had thought of everything, no wonder things worked so well. However, what the new sheriff lacked, was experience with the townfolk. That was something I had and now, with so many of “my kind,” translated, “the older group,” missing, gone or retired, the field was wide-open. I sauntered back into town.
So, I combined my new-found knowledge that the new sheriff brought, with my age-old knowledge of the townfolk and somehow, someway, somewhere, crafted my own version of what that sheriff carried into our town. I sprinkled his concepts with those of my own and carefully forged a niche of my very own design….. and it is working just fine, for now.
I intend to never be that close to irrelevant ever again. I now know that this new sheriff will one day be replaced by an even newer, even better, sheriff. This time, however, I will be ready. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “I will study and prepare myself and one day my time will come.” Yes, I must become an “every day learner,” not an every year or every month learner, but rather, an every day learner. I will have to become more open-minded to new ideas and new concepts, that could be the first early-warning signs that a new sheriff might just be over the horizon.
I cannot ever be so certain and so content in my knowledge that I become blind to the changes taking place all around me. And I will not ever again be so smug as to assume that I have the last word on where this is all leading. I will never be content again.
Do not let yourself become irrelevant to your job, your industry or yourself. It can creep up on you while you are busy resting easy in the certainty that what you did you did well and it will never change. Just because something worked in the past does not always guarantee that it will certainly work that way in the future. People change, companies change, the world changes. We too, must also change. Those who recognize that simple fact will survive. Those who do not, will not. Contentment and certainty. Two very dangerous words, indeed.