Change Vs Constancy

General and former National Security Advisor HR McMaster in his book “Battlegrounds” mentions the two conflicting forces of change and consistency: diametrically opposed concepts that must be balanced to successfully fight a war. This embracing of antagonistic ideals is critical for success in business and life in general too, and should be explored occasionally to expand our thinking and deepen our understanding of self, one of the most critical factors for those who give guidance for a living.

The world today is not the world of Alexander the Great or Marcus Aurelius or Ben Franklin or when we were kids, and yet it is also fundamentally the same in more ways than we want to admit in our egalitarian and technologically driven evolution. Two thousand years ago Aurelius reminded himself “Today you shall meet with meddling, ingratitude, insolence, treachery, slander, and selfishness”. Today you will encounter orders of magnitude more because of larger populations and greater interconnectivity of the economy, all enhanced by traditional and social media giving the loudest and most extreme a disproportionate power of influence. Ben Franklin’s own grandson ran a slanderous newspaper that spread lies and deceit through the early years of the United States, maliciously and falsely spreading misinformation and attacking everything from how the yellow fever epidemic was handled to taxes to his own Grandfather.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

McMaster first reached prominence beyond the battlefield for his book “Dereliction of Duty” (released in 1997 as an expansion of his Ph.D. Dissertation) which analyzed the flaws of leadership and logic that doomed the Vietnam War. The Afghanistan War supplanted Vietnam as the longest and most ineffective military campaign in US history for many of the exact same reasons he had discussed. Change is the only constant but war remains brutal and no matter how technology and tactics evolves; the fundamentals are the same as when the first tribe attacked another with fists and sticks. We are still human.

We are still making the same mistakes in our lives as our great-great-grandparents even with all the advancements in equality and employment and psychology and technology. When in business someone says “This time it’s different” or “people have changed” without understanding simultaneously why they have NOT, I shudder and roll my eyes and go back to the Dot Com era or the Roaring 20’s or the conquest of the Americas because we don’t…

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