Build for Tomorrow: An Action Plan for Embracing Change, Adapting Fast, and Future-Proofing Your Career

"you also sold subscriptions so that people would get this content and advertisements. Money on top of money. Now the game has changed. Subscriptions are way down at every media outlet. Advertising is difficult and unpredictable, sponsor dollars continue to shift toward the likes of Google and Facebook. Content is an increasingly hard thing to monetize. So what does a media company do? Well, if you're a traditionalist, you might say, must convince people that they want all this content. We'll make more an tent, and we'll make cheaper content, and we'll blast it all over the internet That is the recipe for a downward spiral. The content becomes cheaper, which means fewer people want it, which means it becomes even harder to monetize, which means it must become even cheaper to produce, which means even fewer people want it, and so on. But if you ask my question-what is the content for?-you start to reveal an interesting new way forward. Because content does have a purpose. It's just a different one than it used to be."

"Butter ultimately made a comeback. But today, dairy producers are in a similar panic about the growth of nondairy "milks" like oat milk and almond milk. As a result, they're following the same panic playbook: Instead of innovating, they're pushing laws that limit the use of words like milk. The result will be predictable. When someone tries to stop a change, rather than tries to understand the source of that change, they'll only hurt themselves in the long run. Panic is not something to harness, and it is not something to hide from. Panic is something to overcome. Let's start."

"Goals can be motivating but limiting. It is a direction but not a map, and it cannot define your whole journey. If you look ahead too narrowly, you'll miss all the promising off-ramps in your periphery. This is why, when we work our next jobs, we should do so with equal parts focus and curiosity. We can't control our future. Remember the truisms of change: It's inevitable, it's unpredictable, but it's opportunity. When you expand your skill sets, you're simply increasing your potential setting yourself up for multiple zigzag paths that can lead to an amazing payoff."

"What did the elevator industry do in response? Here, history also repeats because the industry built a Bridge of Familiarity. You can still find it in some elevators today. Manufacturers began installing a soothing female voice into the elevator, who would make basic announcements: Going up. Going down. And so on. This (along with some hefty marketing) did the job. It gave the terrifying, faceless machine a dash of humanity. It made travelers feel like somewhere, somehow, a human being was involved in their safety. So they went along for the ride."

"This is how failure can become data. If you "fail," it happens because you're further into the storm than other people are. You're seeing change first-which means you have insights that others do not. That can be a powerful position if you're willing to recognize it. And how do you recognize it? You begin by stepping back from every moment of perceived failure, as well as from every time you feel disrupted by the forces of change, and you ask yourself: What did I just learn that I didn't know before, and that other people may still not have learned?"

""The most important thing is that you're working for a future self," De Brigard says. "I mean, let me just put it this way: What life do you prefer-one in which you can have fifty experiences per week but you won't remember any, or one in which you could have twenty-five new experiences and remember them all? If you're like me, I hope you're going to say, 'I want to have the ones that I can remember, because there is something supremely important to having the good experiences now but being able to remember them later."""

"He's developed a formula for how he believes everyone should describe themselves. It has four qualities, he said: First, a self-description must be measurable-it must contain an exact, quantifiable thing. Second, it must be stateable-it should fit into a sentence, or be spoken in about seven seconds. Third, it must be understandable-delivered in third- to fifthgrade language, to avoid any confusion. And fourth, it must be desirable—it must contain something that other people already want."