I’ve had lots of conversations the last couple weeks with fellow educators who are frustrated by their colleague’s lack of enthusiasm and acceptance about their new and exciting ideas. I get it. It stinks. But I’ve kept saying over and over, “Change is not for everyone.”
There are three kinds of people:
1. People who look at the world and think, “If we did it this way, things would be better,”
2. People who just don’t look at the world that way and like things the way they are, and
3. People who aware that things could be better if x, y, and z were to occur, but don’t want to do it it themselves.
The #2 people don’t want change. They just don’t think that way.
The #3 people want change, but they don’t want to instigate it. Change requires energy. Change requires convincing. Change requires sticking out. Being different. Drawing a line in the sand between how things are and how things “could” be. That requires gusto. That requires courage. That requires energy they’d rather use somewhere else.
The thing is this: The world is predominantly made-up of #3 people: People who want change but don’t want to expend the energy to make it happen, whether that be the time required or the social “shazam” of sticking their necks out to make it happen.
The #1 people – the change makers – look at things critically and have within them a burning desire to make things better. To improve. To progress. To correct what they don’t like about the present state of things compared to what they think would make things better. The #1 people don’t care about the flack or the criticism that their “different way of doing things” creates because they know that, in the long run, it will make a difference. A difference that will make things better.
So who do you want to be? Do you want to be a bastion of the status quo? Do you want to be one of the silent critics of the status quo … who never really does anything? Or do you want to be one of the people who sticks their neck out and make things happen.
