Adaptation to Change Quotes

For the world has changed, and we must change with it

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

There's nothing wrong with a plan, but remember Von Moltke's famous dictum that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The danger is a plan that seduces us into thinking failure is impossible and adaptation is unnecessary - a kind of ‘Titanic' plan, unsinkable (until it hits the iceberg).

Wishes of one's old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in it's changing and change with it.

Nearly everyone is aware of dramatic changes in the world. Yet we continue to live in the assumption that we can ride out the changes without changing ourselves, coasting, as we have always coasted, on the historic wave of human development. What it will take to wake us up is a wave of equal size traveling in the opposite direction. That wave is already on its way.

Age, habits of business and experience have modified many characters.

Life is a continuous cycle of once-terrifying things becoming normal.

Always, in your career and personal life, be evolving with technology.

When you get old, everything changes - your body changes, your family changes. You can't do what you've always done, anymore. And, either you can complain about things changing - or you can be content. Instead of complaining, you can say: "Oh, yesss! Look at all this change!" You can welcome it.

It was inevitable for people to try to create a sense of normalcy in a place where nothing was normal. It helped one get through the day, to add predictability to a life that was inherently unpredictable.

You think I live in the past. You don't understand that I actually change with every era, I always have as best I can

For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won't change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties.

The wind of change, whatever it is, blows most freely through an open mind.

Things are recalibrated according to new perspectives and perceptions. It's fascinating to me.

Are we changing as fast as the world around us?

Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread – these are two lows of nature. If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! I am utterly convinced of this.

It follows that acceleration in the rate of change will result in an increasing need for reorganization. Reorganization is usually feared, because it means disturbance of the status quo, a potential threat to peoples vested interests in their jobs, and an upset to established ways of doing things. For these reasons, needed reorganization is often deferred. With a resulting loss in effectiveness and increase in costs.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

Our great trouble is that we tend to bring up our children for the world in which we ourselves have lived. We rarely take into consideration the changes which have come about in our own lifetime and which are likely to come about before our children are fully grown. Perhaps we handicap them unnecessarily by too much anchoring to the old and too little preparation for the new.

Does a man shrink from change? Why, what can come into being save by change?

The Lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change

You want the world to be set up for you, but sometimes it just isn't.

Even if your body doesn't work the way it used to, the heart and the mind and the spirit are not diminished.

Everything has a lifecycle. You have to believe it’s going to change.