by Serguey Shinder
There was a shift in how my kind of work gets done that I saw coming and chose, quietly and stubbornly, to ignore. New tools were arriving, and the people around me were starting to use them, and I told myself the reasonable-sounding story that they were a fad, that the fundamentals were what mattered, that I would adopt them when they had proven themselves and not a moment before. It felt like wisdom. It was actually fear, wearing wisdom's clothes.
The fear was specific, though I would not have admitted it at the time. I was good at doing things the old way. I had spent years becoming good at it, and the new tools threatened to make that goodness less special, to flatten the distance between me and someone with far less experience. Refusing the tools was a way of protecting the value of what I already knew, of keeping the game on a board where I was already winning.
So I waited, and while I waited, the world did not. The people who adopted early were clumsy with the tools at first, worse than me for a while, and I took a private comfort in that. But they were learning something I was not, building an intuition for how these things worked and where they failed, and that intuition compounded quietly, month over month, while I stood still and congratulated myself on my patience. By the time I finally picked the tools up, I was not an experienced person learning a new tool. I was a beginner, late, among people who had a year's head start I could not buy back.
The lesson was not that I should chase every new thing. Plenty of tools do turn out to be fads, and indiscriminate adoption is its own kind of foolishness. The lesson was about why I refused this particular one, which was not a clear-eyed judgment that it lacked value but a quiet defense of my own existing advantage. I had let the fact that a change threatened me decide whether the change was real, and those are two completely different questions.
What I try to do now is separate them. When something new arrives, I ask first whether it actually matters, honestly, setting aside how I feel about it. And then, separately, I notice how I feel about it, because if my resistance is strongest exactly where the tool would most devalue what I already know, that is not a reason to dismiss it. That is a reason to look harder, because that is precisely the direction I am most motivated to be wrong about.
The future does not wait for you to feel ready, and it is least patient exactly with the people who have the most to lose from it. The tool I refused would have cost me a little discomfort to learn early. Refusing it cost me a year.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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