Tuesday, August 07, 2018

Motivation rises

Motivation rises
Motivation rises when you get a sense of the limitless possibilities of your work, or your relationships, or of your calling or business.  We can all accomplish more than ever before. Technology, communications, and travel have violently changed all the infrastructures in the modern world. It has changed so fantastically in the 24 years I have been working abroad, it honestly is a great deal like a whole new universe.

In Russia when we moved there 24 years ago, we spent more or less $300 USD each month for about an hour of actual phone time back to America or to Germany to talk to the kids. That's right $300 for an hour. Now I can talk to people on three different continents all at the same time and it costs virtually nothing, $40 a month for unlimited hours and conversations. That one piece alone is a game changer.

Flying used to be a big deal. People did not move around the globe all that much. Now I fly 100,000 miles a year, and so do lots of other people. It is not something I am particularly thrilled about, while the cost to return factor is great, the cost to the body and health is not. Virtual is the way to go. Read that sentence again David! While I am actively winding this one huge change in the world back, it is still a game changer. Now I am focusing more on longer trips but less trips.

Technology is the piece that makes all of this possible. My world is so different now than the big old computers I used to lug around. Now I basically hold a screen in my hand and it has far more computing power than I will ever use. I can also write on the screen, read from the screen, type and collate and compare, and a thousand other things on this screen in my hand. Simply elegance and astonishment.

But the biggest changes are inside me. You have to embrace all these changes, or they are practically useless. On the other hand you don't want to get overly enamored with the changes themselves, but rather how they alter the possibilities of what can be accomplished. These changes primarily affect scale and scope - you simply can do so much more with so many others than you could ever before. And along with these magnificent possibilities, comes new responsibilities to keep that genie in the bottle. But motivation rises with all the possibilities. Go change the world, its within your grasp to do so like never ever before.