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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Build for Tomorrow summary
Jason Feifer
An Action Plan for Embracing Change, Adapting Fast, and Future-Proofing Your Career
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4.5 (328 ratings)
18 mins
6 key ideas
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What is Build for Tomorrow about?
Build for Tomorrow (2022) is an action plan detailing how to navigate the four phases of change: Panic, Adaptation, New Normal, and Wouldn't Go Back. It details stories of dramatic changes in the past that brought us the things we enjoy today, as well as lessons learned from various entrepreneurs who lived through monumental changes and emerged successful.
About the Author
Jason Feifer is the editor in chief of the American business magazine Entrepreneur and host of the podcasts Build for Tomorrow and Problem Solvers. He’s also taught his change adaptation techniques at companies like Microsoft, Chipotle, and Pfizer.
Table of Contents
Key idea 1 of 6
Change creates panic when you’re scared of losing what you’re used to.
In a time when music was only performed live, John Philip Sousa was among the renowned names in the field. He composed the patriotic American march "The Stars and Stripes Forever" and the official US Marine Corps march "Semper Fidelis." These, along with his many other masterpieces, catapulted him to fame.
But alas, his reign in the music industry was cut short by two technological advancements: the phonograph, which recorded and replayed music, and the radio, which broadcast music directly to people’s homes.
These devices were new back then and Sousa saw them as a threat. He believed that the phonograph and radio would change the world for the worse. People wouldn't go to concerts anymore, no one would buy music sheets, and radio stations would stop calling musicians in to perform their songs live.
In short, Sousa panicked. He was thinking about everything he’d lose: his money, his career, and probably even his popularity. He was afraid of letting go of the good life he was so used to. So he fought the change. He actively proclaimed and wrote about how bad these new machines were and how they were destroying humanity.
We are, in many ways, a lot like Sousa. When faced with change, we often focus on all the good things we're losing. Moving to a new city? We'll lose our friends! Getting a job in a different field? We'll lose our sense of identity! Living through a pandemic? We'll lose face-to-face interactions!
It's easy to identify the things we'll lose when we’re facing a dramatic change. To make matters worse, we don't stop at focusing on the loss – we tend to extrapolate it, too. We think that losing one thing will lead to losing another, even when we don’t have solid evidence to back it up. This leads to a full-blown panic, where we try to stop the change from happening but create big mistakes that hurt us in the process.
And, of course, you, most definitely, don't want to be hurt. So how can you quell this panic? We’ll look at that in the next section.
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Who should read Build for Tomorrow
- Aspiring entrepreneurs
- Entrepreneurial giants looking to innovate
- Anyone facing a scary change
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