On a podcast, I was recently asked, “How do you keep up with change?”
What we know about the world is that it is constantly changing; it is the rate of change that is overwhelming.
Here is a tweet that nicely sums up how technology and our perspectives change.
So, with change happening at a pace that is seemingly impossible to keep up with, what do you do?
Accept that you can’t keep up.
That is the first step.
Once you accept that, it is much easier to figure out a new plan.
If you have been watching anything with generative AI, you can see how quickly it went from generating text to creating lifelike videos with the launch of Google Veo3 in an exponentially fast time frame. Here is an example:
A college professor doing a class on Gen Z slang and the video pans over to all the boomers taking notes and seeming super interested #veo3 pic.twitter.com/AogNFeiDLd
— justin (@HonestBlogging) May 21, 2025
Who knows what new technologies will be released by the time I publish this post?
Over the years, I have been asked the same question hundreds of times: What big technologies do you see coming to the world in the next ten years?
My answer is always the same, no matter when I am asked.
I have no idea (and neither do you).
What I do know is that whatever comes my way, I will be able to figure it out and leverage it. That is also the most essential thing any school can teach its students.
We can’t predict the future, but we definitely can shape it.
This belief system has been instilled in me since my early teaching days.
In the early 2000s, I was teaching information processing to a class, and I thought I was pretty comfortable with technology at the time. Yet, I remember an acquaintance through a mutual friend being probably the smartest person I knew then with technology. As he was graduating from the College of Engineering at the University of Alberta, he was being pursued by both Microsoft and Google at the time to take a prominent position with either company, and it was apparent that, although I taught technology, he had probably forgotten more than I ever knew.
I was amazed at how much he knew, and I remember distinctly asking him the question, “On a scale of 1-10, how smart do you think you are with technology?”
He looked at me, and I will never forget his answer.
“Maybe a six?”
I immediately argued with him and said, “There is NO WAY you are only a six out of ten?” You know more about technology than any person I have ever known, and if you are a six, what would that make me?”
I will never forget his answer.
“George, there are so many technologies in the world, and there is no way I could ever keep up. Even though I probably know more than you do about technology, there are certain applications that you use that I have never heard of, and don’t know how to use.”
His answer kind of made him a ten in my eyes.
There is just so much that it is impossible to know everything, so accept that and always be open to learning.
But I also knew that he would be able to figure out anything I was using, especially if I showed him how. He might not find it useful to his area of focus, but he would still be able to use it.
When he said this to me, I remember hearing someone say that people only use Microsoft Word to maybe a maximum of 10% of its capabilities. I know this is an old technology, but if you think back on all of the buttons and options that are on the software, if you use 10%, you would be lucky.
But I started to realize that if you use 10% of a technology’s capabilities, and I use 10%, our “10%s” are probably different. If we are willing to learn from one another, maybe our 10% will grow to 12-15%. Add the 10% of others, and that knowledge will grow even more.
To summarize, you can’t learn everything, but if you are willing to leverage the wisdom of others, you can probably learn anything that is meaningful to you.
You can never keep up, but you can always get better.
Isn’t that the goal?
(I did a shortened video version of this idea on Instagram recently that you can see below.)
View this post on Instagram
