People are strange.

We grow taller and sometimes wider, but we are baffled and often apoplectic when circumstances outside us change.

Despite knowing intellectually that everything is temporary, we tend to operate under the assumption that nothing should change and that once things are finally where we want them, they will remain that way.

It’s true—change is hard. It’s also true that resistance to change makes things harder.

In my estimation, Jason Feifer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine, is one of the best at simplifying ideas to level up your professional and personal growth. He also has a newsletter you should subscribe to on Beehiiv called One Thing Better.

In his book, Build for Tomorrow, Feifer examines why people feel so powerless in the face of change and explains why trying to stop the change will only clip your wings in the long run.

Feifer knows about success and failure, change and stasis, and how to adopt a growth mindset when we too often settle for fixed. Panicking at change means missing some lucky chances, but reframing the situation can allow us to see change as an opportunity.

Feifer tells the story of John Sousa, who composed “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the national march of the United States. Sousa was a household name, an artist who packed concert halls.

That is, until the phonograph was invented and became accessible to the broader public. Sousa panicked: Concert halls were no longer necessary to hear music. You could now play the concert at home.

Then came the radio.

Now fomenting and at the height of his panic, Sousa began a misinformation campaign to eradicate all new technologies. In his pursuit to convince his fellow musicians, Sousa published articles defaming technology, warning that it threatened bonds between mothers, babies, and humankind.

He pushed back against it with everything he had.

Sousa could only see this next evolution in music as a threat instead of as … evolution. He couldn’t envision how to use these changes to his advantage.

Sousa’s phonograph is today’s social media, AI, and everything else we push back against, clinging tightly to how things were. Every older generation looks down upon the next generation as they screw up and change the things that worked well for them.

We are threatened, panic, cling, push back and resist, mock, write think pieces, and eventually give in or live in disconnection.

Everything we live with today was once considered a threat or the worst idea ever, and now, here we are, clinging to the very things our forebears thought surely would doom us all.

It’s common to default to panic when it comes to our personal and professional lives, and if we can take a step back and look objectively at society, we’ll see we do it collectively. When a change disrupts the status quo, we attack, demonize, defame, and revolt.

But, we can train ourselves to see what can be gained. It’s like what someone told Tariq Farid, the founder of Edible Arrangements when he fought back against the cannabis movement for co-opting his word “edible”:

This caused Farid to reflect. After delving into the world of cannabis, he changed strategies and used the word's popularity to his advantage, developing the company’s first-ever CBD powder. When he stopped panicking, he could more objectively assess how this new problem could benefit him, and he made it work to his advantage.

The key is to see change as an opportunity; to embrace disruption as a moment of possibility. When we are overly attached to losing what we have or had, we aren’t making ourselves available to see how things might work in our favor.

Feifer has a hack for this. He calls it: “You come from the future.”

We are the product of all the changes that have occurred in history. And all of these changes were once considered bad (including reading books!), but we are now so attached to these things that we don’t want them to change, despite how many people fought back against them in the first place.

We are living evidence that change can be good.

But WHY do we react this way?