Several years ago in my first job I was working as an office assistant and translator. I was a young newly hired employee with some computer skills and was fluent in English and Farsi. So I could translate office documents from Farsi to English and vice versa. I was successful but I knew I needed to learn a lot more in order to enhance my success in life.

I used to share a room in the office with one of the senior staff of the organization that had at least ten years of professional experience. He was a very skillful office manager who could manage all the administrative related work of the projects. But he didn’t know English and computer.

My colleague had a much higher salary, more prestige and respect in the office and considered an important asset of the organization. 

But I knew that the world around us was changing. It’s becoming more globalized and speaking an international language beside your own language was becoming more and more important. I also could see that the role of computer was becoming more prominent in the organizations.

So I suggested a couple of times that my colleague also should start learning computer and English. “Things are going to change and you are going to need these two skills, particularly computer” I use to tell him. He used to mock my suggestions and say that he had never been out of work and he was happy where he was.  His answer to my suggestion was that his skills would always be needed somewhere and he would never be out of a job.

It fact, it wasn’t that he didn’t know what was going on. He knew that he would need to change and upgrade his skills. He was a smart guy and he knew that the world around him was changing. But where he was, it was very comfortable for him that he didn’t want to ruin it with adding pressure to his life and try to learn new skills. He was hoping for the best. That there would always be need for his skills and he would always be employed.

 Things started changing faster than we all could expect. Just in a couple of years, my colleague was out of a job. Usually, in the past, the organization would have found another place in the upcoming projects for him since his skills had been very valuable but this time they wanted someone with modern administrative skills who could also use a computer instead of pen and paper. And there were plenty of candidates with required skills. He also couldn’t find another job in any other organizations.

Change is inevitable. The world around us has been changing since the beginning of its creation and will continue to change. Usually you can see the sign of changes and how and in what direction the environment is changing. Like my colleague could see that more and more organizations are adapting their work to replace computers with pen and paper. But there are times that we don’t see the upcoming changes in the environment. It comes rather fast and sudden and don’t give us any clue in advance. We need to prepare for both predictable and unpredictable changes.

The best time to change is when you can afford to change. And that is when you don’t feel the need for change. You are successful and happy with what you have and the status quo is serving you quiet well that you hope to stay like this forever. But then is the time that you need to prepare yourself for change. To stay agile, sharpening your skills on continuous basis and look for the signs that can tell you where the direction of change could be. Even you can have a step forward and lead the change, to be a change agent that bring or at least advocate changes in your organization.

If you wait until you have to change, it is highly possible to reach a point that it would be too late. When you are at the pick of your success and everything goes smoothly, you should know this is not going to last forever. So while you’re enjoying the success, you can afford to invest some of your time and other available resources to embrace the changes instead of ignoring them.

In the other hand, by waiting too long, it will come a day that you will be forced to change. That’s the time that you have to deal with a problem that you didn’t have in the past and now bothers you and this could be a time that you don’t have enough available resources to afford to change the way you want to change. Therefore you will be forced to take an option that might not bet pleasant to you.