Page 86 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

58. Embrace the new frontier

Fortunately, for all of us, a new frontier is upon us. Because our nation, and
world, has entered the Information Age, the old patterns for living are gone. An
article by business writer John Huey appeared in the June 27, 1994 edition of
Fortune. In it, Huey observed, “Let’s say you’re going to a party, so you pull out
some pocket change and buy a little greeting card that plays ‘Happy Birthday’
when it’s opened. After the party, someone casually tosses the card into the
trash, throwing away more computer power than existed in the entire world
before 1950.”

In the old paradigm, forged in the Industrial Age, human beings became less
and less useful and adventurous. We found lifelong employment in guaranteed
jobs and did our jobs the same way until retirement. Then, once we reached
retirement age, we became thoroughly useless to society and lived lives
dependent on the government, our relatives, or our own savings that we
accumulated in our “useful” years. Now, with the technological explosion and
entry into the Information Age, employers are no longer as interested in our job
histories as they used to be. They are now more interested in our current
capabilities.

One of the romantic appeals of the early Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett
frontier days of our nation was the usefulness of individuals. If you were living
out on the frontier, farming, cooking, and hunting, and you turned 65, it would
never occur to anyone to ask you to “retire.”

We have finally come back to those days of honoring usefulness over age
and status. For example, if my company is trying to enter the Chinese market to
sell its software and you, at age 70, can speak fluent Chinese, know all about
software, and have energy and a zest for success, how can I afford to ignore
you?

Bill Gates of Microsoft has said, “Our company has only one asset—human

imagination.” If you took all of Microsoft’s buildings, real estate, office
hardware, physical assets—anything you could touch—away from the company,
where would it be? Almost exactly where it is now. Because in today’s world, a
company’s value is in its thinking, not in its possessions.

This is great news for the individual—because usefulness is back in style. If
you can cultivate your skills, keep learning new things, study computers, learn a
foreign language, or become an expert in a foreign culture and market—you can