During his days as a Professor, a student ran up to Albert Einstein after an exam and said -“Professor, I’m not sure if you realized that the questions you asked were exactly the same as the ones you asked last year.”
Einstein famously replied – “Yes, but the answers have changed.”
Safety is self delusional. We need a healthy amount of self delusion to be happy. But, too much stifles us. It’s tempting to always look at what’s been tried and tested.
The trouble with tried and tested is that it neglects context. What worked yesterday is unlikely to work today. The knock-on-door-and-push-the-sale car sales men of yesteryear are all but gone. Selling today works with different rules – trust and permission being the foremost among them.
Standing still isn’t different from moving backwards. In some ways, it’s worse.. it’s often easier to change the direction of a moving object than to make it move in the first place.
A Learning a Day 