The Element of Staying Up to Date and Its Hope for Being One Step Ahead of Opportunities, Challenges, Changes, and Threats

Time can move on and leave us behind.

No matter what our business, field, line of work, or hobby, we need to stay abreast of the latest trends, skills, statistics (and technologies), so time does not leave us behind.

We should review our situation frequently, and we should identify improvements and changes we could make.

It will be tempting for us to wait for things to fall in our lap, “I am so comfortable where I am” or “I will let the cards fall where they may”.

But “Comfortable where I am” is fine, only until it is not.

We may wake up and find out time has left us behind.

The longer we stay in one-track thinking and acting modes, the higher the risk.

Before I became a consultant, I was employed at one company for 5 years.

The learning curve was steep when I joined. But after 2 years at the company, I knew all the ins and outs of the job, and my work became routine and comfortable.

So I chugged along at my job for another 3 years.  Besides being familiar with the work, there was the added attraction that my boss allowed me to work from home 3 days a week, and in the afternoons on the other 2 days of the week as well, so I was pretty much working from home. Who could ask for more? It was a happy place to be in.

That is, until it was not.  When the economy took a nose dive, a new manager was brought in over my manager.  That was when the trouble in paradise began.

I found myself fighting. Fighting to hold on to my telecommuting; fighting to justify the hours I spent on my work; fighting to stave off being made to take on work unrelated to commissions, such as MDF and revenue recons.

One fine day, I quit – I had an emergency cushion to support myself, but little else.

I gave up my job in a depressed economy with sky-high unemployment rates.

I did not know if I would ever be able to find my footing again.

Looking back, it was one of the best decisions of my life.

I discovered there’s nothing like a little bit of self-induced life stress to caffeinate the brain.

By quitting, my brain moved from auto-pilot to pilot.

To use a riding analogy – when a horse is new, our brain is in high alert, and we have to focus.

After a while, we get used to the horse, and riding the horse becomes second-nature for us.

The longer we ride the same horse, the more comfortable we get, and the more resistant we are to the idea of riding a new horse.

To us, a new horse carries the risk of being wild, and untamed, and problematic.

A new horse also carries the risk of us falling flat on our face.

Some of us secretly fear we may not be as smart, clever, or successful at riding, as we appear to be.

We secretly wonder if we just got lucky - getting a good horse to ride, and being able to ride it all this time.

This second-guessing repeatedly plays in the back of our mind.

Along with that, there’s the associated fear, if something ever happens to the horse we are riding, we may never be able to find another horse to ride.

As we advance in life, the fear of not being able to find another horse to ride, becomes bigger and bigger.

Well, when I walked out of my full-time job in 2010, I was forced to deal with this fear head-on.

I had an emergency cushion, but nothing else to fall back on.

Would I be able to find a horse to ride again, and would I be able to have staying power on that horse? Both of these were unknowns.

Happily, the answer turned out to be yes.

What was my secret?

I was willing to look at different stables, and learn to ride new horses – that was my secret.

I decided to learn Xactly.

It was an unusual decision.

In my field, every Commissions Analyst learns Xactly (or Varicent or Callidus) by being sponsored by their employers for training.

But I decided to take the bull by the horns, and to do the training on my own dime, and on my own time, ahead of getting a job in a company that uses Xactly for their commissions.

I called the Xactly Trainer and said, “I am unemployed, and cannot get a job because I do not know Xactly.  Can I do the Admin course? I will pay from my own pocket.”

And so, thanks to Sonia, the Xactly trainer, who convinced Xactly to bend the rules to accommodate my request, I did the Xactly Admin course.

A few months later, Sonia put me on to an implementations company.

Again, I had a choice to make.

Wait to get a full-time Commissions Analyst job with benefits, or do contract work for this implementation and testing company, and get Xactly implementations exposure.

There was the risk of falling on my face, but I chose to ride this new horse.

I earned less than an unemployment check in the next 14 months, but I learned to ride a new horse, and it has benefited me ever since.

What new horses are you afraid to ride?

If you are afraid to ride these new horses, think back on all the things which made you uncomfortable once, but which you are relaxed about doing now.

When things are unfamiliar, we make a bigger deal of them than they are.

Because of growing up without a phone, and getting into a career where I had to spend my time writing advertising copy, I used to be uncomfortable about talking on the telephone, even scared to.

If I had the choice, I always wrote someone, rather than call them.

Now since I have gotten over this fear of talking on the phone, I cannot believe this scenario once actually happened in one of my jobs:

Scenario:

I was waiting on some information from the sales reps, which I needed to process commissions.

In spite of sending repeated emails to the sales reps, requesting the information, some of them had not responded.

When my manager asked me where I was on that work, I complained I hadn’t been able to finish it, because some of the reps had not responded to my email.

I still remember how he irritably turned to me and said:  “Minoo, please get on the phone and ask them for the information.  You shouldn’t have waited this long.”

As a Commissions Consultant, going from company to company, I have to learn to ride new horses every few months.

At one company, instant messaging was the new horse. 

Before I contracted at that company, I did not like instant messaging.  But the manager at the company had a fondness for instant messaging. It was her preferred method for communicating with her team. Once when she instant messaged me, and I didn't respond, she came by my desk a little later, and irritably inquired (yes we can provoke irritation by not being willing to ride some horses), why I had not responded to her instant message. I quickly adapted to instant messaging after that day.

At another assignment, the horse I had to learn to ride was converting text information into tabular information.  I was writing an FRD for a Varicent implementation, and, accustomed to my copywriting ways, I described all the plan calcs in long paragraphs.  The implementations architect I was writing the FRD for asked me to convert all the paragraphs to tables.  It was a challenge, but I was grateful for the challenge after I finished the FRD.  It turned out to be the best FRD I have written till date, and it is because of those tables.

Thanks to working for different implementation companies, I learned to ride all of the following horses –Kick-off documents, FRDs, DMS documents, Prototypes, Solution Process Documents and User Operating Guides. I learned to write test scenarios and conduct UAT. And I learned all the tools to make presentations remotely. My post Are you a Virtuoloso? was inspired by some of the things that became second-nature for me.

And now I have a confession to make. I was a Luddite when it came to smart phones.  I resisted owning a smart phone for as long as I could.  Then when T Mobile acquired Metro PCS, my carrier, I was informed by Metro PCS I would need to upgrade my phone to a 4G phone and to go to one of their stores as soon as possible. I was slow in acting on this, and by the time I got around to it, only the smallest flip phones were available for me to upgrade to; I knew that wouldn’t work for me, because I communicated with several people, most importantly Tanita, via texting; so I took the plunge and opted for a smart phone (the cheapest smart phone available).

Am I glad I did?

Not only, do I use Google voice search and Google maps on my new phone all the time, but in my current assignment, to log onto VPN, we had to download a smart phone app in order to enter a mobile token.  A year ago, I didn’t have a smart phone, so this wouldn’t have been possible. 

What are all the areas in which we could benefit from being up to date?

Not all of them are connected with our jobs and businesses.

In our personal lives too, there are many areas in which it would benefit us to stay up to date.

Take taxes, for instance.

The tax rules change every year.

Tax credits change, 401K and IRA contribution limits change, also our circumstances change.  We need to keep abreast of the changes.

Will we earn any 1099 income this year?

If we are on top of things, we will know we have to pay advance taxes to the IRS on that.

Did we take money from our 401K? We will have to pay a 20% penalty, plus tax at our normal tax rate on the amount we withdrew.

Did our 19 year old child file her own taxes, and claim herself on her taxes? We can't claim her too.

These are just examples.

In general, we should stay up to date on all the rules and laws that are applicable to our lives and circumstances.

Another area in which we should try to stay up to date is in health matters.

This is even more so, if we have a condition such as pre-diabetes, diabetes, blood pressure, or anything else.

We may be surprised by what we discover.

My eyes have been opened so much in the last six months, thanks to medical and health professionals, practitioners and writers, such as Dr. Ronesh Sinha, Dr. Jason Fung, Martin Berkham, Marty Kendall, Dr James Watson, and even the much-dismissed and much-maligned Dr. Mercola.

Here is just a sprinkling of what I learned:

o    When you cross 50, you are more likely to have too much iron than too little iron

o    You can be overweight and deficient in Vitamin D, especially Vitamin D3

o    You can be overweight and deficient in folate and B vitamins.

o    You can improve your insulin resistance more by ‘not eating breakfast’ than by ‘eating breakfast’

o    The insulogenic index is more important than the glycemic index

o    A little extra fat is less harmful to someone with insulin resistance, than a little extra carbohydrate.

So open your eyes, and don't be afraid of finding new horses to ride.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week…..M…..a Pearl Seeker like you.  Thanks to Ajay for his compliments on my last post, and thanks to the rest of you for your likes, pins and shares. Much appreciated.

Links to the health information mentioned in this post. I hope you will check them out:

Dr. Ronesh Sinha – on carb trafficking, body fat storage and insulin resistance

Dr. Jason Fung - if there's one video you should watch on Intermittent Fasting, this is it.

Martin Berkhan - Lean Gains - a body-builder and trainer who has been doing and writing about Intermittent Fasting since 2007

Marty Kendall - lots of great info on the Insulogenic Index, and other topics relevant to diabetes

James Watson - writes on anti-aging topics such as Alzheimers

Dr. Mercola - writes on lots of health topics including aging.