My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings
tl;dr-
My 'vast and trunkless legs of stone' is foresight.
Foresight has traditionally been my way of avoiding - and at times, rejecting - change. It has been my answer to the question of my mortality since I was little, an impulse born from a mixture of my innate curiosity with the rational idea that I need not fear what I can foresee. No one is a born oracle, so I have spent much of my life becoming expert on foresight and all of its supporting skills - rapid information uptake, contextual processing, analytical thinking, cognitive scaling, synthesis, and so forth.
Obtaining foresight has been fulfilling. However, it has not helped me build longevity towards the ravages of time - mainly because I have been leveraging foresight as a way to avoid change, rather than as a way to accept and adapt to change. In fact, I find it rather amusing that instead of solving the original question, my conscious cultivation of foresight has instead created more problems, as the underlying fear I have towards change has only been amplified by a hyper-awareness of even more futures to be stressed out about.
I also now find my thoughts often drifting to how this insight - that we tend to build to endure rather than to accept change - may apply to other situations - individuals, teams, companies, and society. Specifically, I wonder how our acceptance of conventional wisdom (including benchmarks, best practices, playbooks, and so forth) relates to our feelings collectively around change (and, on the individual level, towards our own mortality). Do we adopt these standards because we truly believe they have withstood the tests of time, or because we find them comforting versus having to change or adapt to an unknown? And if our faith in conventional wisdom stems more from the latter - are we only setting ourselves, our teams, our companies and so forth to be like Ozymandias' ill-fated statue?
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Perhaps these musings are most fascinating when we think about how our approach to change results in emergent effects across society, governance, and culture. Do we believe in tradition because it is worth preserving, or because we cannot accept how it has evolved? Why do some focus on recapturing past glory versus adapting to and shaping the future? Is curation and gatekeeping truly the path to longevity, or is it mere illusion to assuage our fear of change? How much of the modern world has been built in service of longevity - and how much actually fulfills that purpose?
How much of our lives is built on a fear of change?
Venturing a guess at this question will take far too long, but I can offer instead a simple reframe. What comes to mind is a quote I read attributed to one of the owners of Le Bernardin (my favorite restaurant in NYC), Maguy Le Coze. Splashed upon her bio page on the restaurant website reads the following; "You must always evolve. If the restaurant were still like it was the day we opened, it would be old!" It is neither change nor aging we should fear, but becoming old; rigid, immobile, and unable to adapt.
It is perhaps, the difference between Ozymandias' statue - an old thing built to endure the test of time - and Ozymandias' legacy - a living idea adapting to each era through reinterpretation to remain ever present in our collective consciousness.
Talk soon.
-WY
Associate Director, HCP Marketing at Insmed Incorporated
2moWah- thank you for sharing your wisdom with the world. I love reading your insightful posts. And happy belated birthday!