I was fascinated with animals when I was a kid. Whenever there was an animal documentary on PBS, I was glued to it.

My favorites were the predator and prey hunts – big savannah cats sneaking up on gazelles, chameleons popping out of camouflage to grab insects with their tongues – that sort of thing.

Mimicking the animals, my friends and I would play hide and seek in the woods – hunting each other with pellet guns (I’m really not sure how none of us ended up blind.).

Between reading, watching those shows, and getting pelted with lead, one thing stuck with me:

When you get comfortable and stop paying attention to what’s going on around you, you get eaten.

Or at least hit in the back of the head with a pellet.

Unable to adapt

Humans are terrible at anticipating change. It’s hard for us to get out of our day-to-day and our local scene. We’re busy, we’re distracted, we’re worried about surviving office warfare for the next 8 hours.

But we live in an age of rapidly-accelerating, Kurzweilian change. To keep one’s head down and assume everything is going to be a.) OK and b.) the same, is a form of intellectual and career suicide.

You know those people. You see them in the hall at work. You pass them on the highway.

They say things like “We’ll never do that…” and “It’ll be at least ten years until…” and “I’ll worry about that later.”

When it comes to technology they make the mistake of thinking that the next five years will resemble the last five. They look at continuous delivery, or BYO, or containerization and think “That’s fancy, but I’ll never have to deal with it.”

It is one thing to disagree about the nature of a change – this is healthy and necessary, but another to claim that something will not change.

Keep moving

We’re living through a major technological transition driven by pervasive compute and connectivity. It’s a big enough step that not everyone is going to make it – especially those who can’t or choose not to re-tool. Many people are going to find themselves pushed into lesser-paying roles or different careers.

It’s heartbreaking talking to those folks, trying to convince them that what’s headed their way is real – that the future is coming and it will be radically different than the present, even though we might all be wrong about the details.

“If you would move literally two steps to the right I think you’ll be OK.”

“Nope, ain’t gonna do it. You’re wrong, dummy. YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME TO THE CLOUD!”

But I’m going to keep trying because the world is in constant flux and the future is coming. In fact (in the words of William Gibson), it’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Image Credit: Shutter Fotos