Change Just Creeps Up On You And Then? Boom!

Back in July my wife and I played in a pickleball tournament in Newport Beach. If you won your bracket, you earned a Golden Ticket to the National Championship in November in Mesa.

We got ... KILLED.

Two years ago the guy generally covered much of the court, with the woman playing a postage stamp. The guy would hit a drop shot to a woman, then the women would dink back-and-forth until somebody made a mistake.

Last year, the pro game began to change. Guys were more aggressive than normal, and women became very assertive.

Last week, points in the mixed championship match looked like this (click here for this one point). Women driving the ball, guys poaching, gun fights galore (heck, watch the women here just throwin' haymakers ... it's not a game of dinking for relaxation anymore).

And, unsurprisingly, that style of play tricked down to Newport Beach, rendering my old-school strategy useless.

I've spent the following eight weeks reinventing my style of play. I have no choice. It's a long slog, it is absolutely not how I want to play. Adapt or die.

The first month was awful. Let's assume I'd play six games and typically win three of the six games playing the old style. Playing the new style was uncomfortable. My results were not good ... I'd win two games out of six instead of three games out of six. Unforced errors increased. In other words, all of my metrics "looked bad". My partners looked at me ... "what is wrong with you?"

It would be easy to say "nope" and go back to the old style of playing, to just try to "be better" at the old style of play. Had I done that, I'd have gone back to winning three out of six games on average and I'd be ... average ... in the short term. But I'd also be falling farther behind the rest of the world on a daily basis. Eventually the gulf between everybody else and me would be too big ... a canyon too big to cross.

Maybe you see where this is headed.

When you get back from your three-day weekend, give some thought to those who keep asking you to pay Facebook/Google for access to your own customers. Ask yourself if you are falling behind companies leveraging alternate ideas? And if you are in the print world, for crying out loud, ask yourself if the LinkedIn professionals asking you to use the hashtag #printrevival have an alternative agenda to keep you buried in the past? There is no #printrevival, and if there were, why would they be using an ancient digital tactic (hashtags) on an antiquated digital platform (LinkedIn) to promote print? Wouldn't they leverage print to tell you? Are your print-centric partners moving into the future, or are they like I was at the pickleball tournament in Newport Beach, applying outdated skills to a modern game?