Chasing killdeer

Why can you still find people using a rolodex? It is a far inferior technology. Better yet, why can you still buy a rolodex?

It is because of lock in. An unwillingness to change.

Change is hard. Change is difficult. It’s easier to keep doing it the way you have always done it. (However exhausting it is to maintain the status quo.) Change can be scary. Only because it might not work. But people who are unwilling to change stay on the hook. They hope that something better will come along that they can chase. But in the end they are chasing Killdeer.

The Killdeer is a bird that spends a significant amount of time on the ground (particularly around golf courses). They make lots of noises causing distractions to get your attention. The interesting thing about Killdeer is that they will run in front of you to try to get you to chase them. They will pull ahead and stop. Repeating this process over and over again. At first, it is really amusing to chase them. But after a while you realize that they stay just far enough away so that you can never catch them. They just make you think you can. But you can’t and you never will. This gets so infuriating that eventually you quit.

There are lots of Killdeers out there in the world. They are distracting us. Taking us down a path you don’t want to go. Causing us to waste our time and talents. They frustrate us. They take away hope.

Too many of us think that we have missed our opportunity. We were too distracted. Too many of us saw what was happening and got caught up in following Killdeer. Now we think that it’s too late to try that thing we always wanted to try. So we keep chasing Killdeer: by checking our status, seeing if the world has ended, catch up on a never-ending conversation, watch more cat videos. It is all leading us away from the work that actually matters.

The iPhone is not even 10 years old yet. Think about that for a minute. (It will be on June 29, 2017).

We have come so far in the last decade. But the leap is now. And we are only starting to scratch the surface of what is to come. Right now, it is only getting easier to do something that matters. Not harder. But it won’t be like this forever.