Everyone wants long term success. But it is elusive for most.

Long term success is dependent on knowing where you are now and where you are headed. Then closing the gap. Frequently. Continuously.  Whether it’s your business, your career or your life at home., it’s easy to get off track, lose touch or get buried under. Without a true sense of where you are in the moment, it is impossible to realize your dreams or be a leader in your field.

Re-calibrate your profound knowledge

The only way we can take 100% responsibility for sustaining our success is to keep re-calibrating-in every aspect of our lives and organizations.

Key to successful recalibration is to acquire what my dear departed mentor, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, coined as Profound Knowledge. This umbrella phrase emphasizes understanding change and how to measure it, being aware of emerging trends and shifts, and learning how to apply this knowledge to leading and sustaining long term success.

Bottom line: If we don’t acquire Profound Knowledge we cannot know how to prepare for and leverage coming change, thus how to sustain our success long term.

Understanding change means understanding shifts in our personal world as well as tracking trends that capsize us, overtake us, or cause us to flounder.

Learning the Hard Way

Unfortunately one of my Gen X male clients learned this the hard way. A rising star in his field and recently married, he was planning far a great future for his kids, tons of time for fun and all the trappings of success. As if out of the blue, the rug got pulled out from under him. His “Happy Homemaker” wife fled, saying I’m out of here!

Somewhere along the way there was a breakdown or perhaps many small fissures below the surface. Had they been recalibrating an checking in with each other, communicating the truth of what was so for each of them…perhaps they could have saved their marriage…or at least ended it with love, grace, and forgiveness.

Even in the most secure relationships, unexpected change happens to ruffle our plans. A recently returned to work mother of teenage kids reported that her new career is now going gangbusters and she no longer worries about the empty-nest . But, the new ripple in her life is that her once very successful husband, in his late 40’s, now faces an unknown future. Surprised by the shifts in his industry, “suddenly” he and his business partner are facing the probability of closing their doors. What once appeared to be the sure path to their dreams, is no crumbling beneath them.

Change is inevitable. If you can learn what Profound Knowledge is and apply it you can avoid these same pitfalls and NOT LEARN THE HARD WAY!

What steps are you going to take to future cast your long term success?

I’ve talked before about the ongoing trend of women leaving the corporate world to start their own businesses. This is no surprise considering the glass ceiling is still unbreakable in many companies throughout Corporate America.

Many women, especially women over 50, who have spent their working lives climbing the corporate ladder are faced with the difficult choice between leaving to start their own businesses or staying with their company and striving to be one of the exceptions, perhaps fighting to change the system from the inside, like such notable women as Virginia M. Rometty, IBM’s next chief executive, or Anne Mulcahy at Xerox, Indra Nooyi at Pepsi, Peggy Foran at Pfizer, and Sarah Teslik at Apache Corporation, who led their companies to sign the Aspen Principles, by which companies, investors, and corporate governance professionals agreed to commit to long-term value creation over short-term profits.

The question is, with the Great Recession and the worldwide Occupy protests against corporate greed, fraud, and environmental destruction, will we soon see a shift? Will we collectively force the hand of Corporate America to recognize that transformation begins with visionary leaders who understand how to do good while doing well? Are we on the verge of seeing the collapse of the old corporate culture, and if so, will we also see fragments of that glass ceiling among the debris?

Some would say only time will tell, but that view discounts the power we have to change our own future. Time may tell us what has worked, and what hasn’t, in the past. (For a fascinating and timely look at the past and present of corporations, I highly recommend the film The Corporation). Time may tell us when we are repeating history, and what we can learn from how we have reacted or responded to epochal change in the past—conservative and restrictive, wild and revolutionary, consciously evolutionary, or downright transformative.

But time doesn’t tell us everything. Time doesn’t have a voice. We do. We can’t predict the future, but we can lead the way toward creating alternative futures that transform the world as we know it.

Whether you are a career professional or a new or seasoned entrepreneur, you cannot afford to ignore the opportunity we have right now to step up amid the chaos and lead the way to a greater future—not just for women, but for the world. Protesting is powerful, but it’s not enough. We can’t just decry the problem. We have to step in with solutions.

Now is the time to listen to that visionary voice inside you. No doubt the world chaos has stirred her. The world is literally crying out for creative disruption of the status quo, for new ideas to change business so that it reflects our values, honors our responsibility to each other and to our planet, and capitalizes and strengthens the interconnected global society we have become.

How do you want to see the future of business, big and small? When you envision the ideal marketplace, what do you see specifically? What are you going to do today to start making that vision a reality?

Always Add Value is one of my 52 Quintessential Principles of Greatness codified to keep us moving from great to greatness.

I forget to apply this principle myself every once in a while. In fact, just last week I was asked to by a really sharp associate leader, “what value will you bring to my membership?” What caught me most off guard was that the Value Added editorial thrust of this issue was already in the works.  Here I was being confronted with having lost sight of this very principle.  Will the learning ever stop?  Nope.  I sure hope not.

These on-target questions inspired me to re-think how I add value by what I do.  I responded that her high achieving and accomplishing members match the profile of my clients.  They are successful in their chosen field; they want to expand their referral network and are seeking to improve the results.  Coaching entrepreneurs, family firms, executives and professionals, I appreciate their business challenges and professional concerns.

All of these movers n’ shakers want to improve the performance of their firms, attracted new and maintain current revenues and customers. But that’s not all.  What I’ve learned is that these truly accomplished folks relish the opportunity to fine-tune and to stretch. Even more so, they know that becoming a better communicator and a leader ensures that they will thrive in these challenging times.

I also added that we all aim to keep our personal and professional lives in balance.  It’s just such a struggle when buffeted constantly with destabilizing sound bites and constant emails announcing disruptive shifts in our world and demands on the personal front. Add that to having to deal with the pressure of invigorating a work life, keeping the home fires burning and just having fun. Whew! That’s why powerful people look for coaches who add value by moving them to greatness and to building legacies that are unforgettable.

I could have kept riding my dead horse, not “hearing” what I was being asked. Instead, I took in the question and changed my language so that I could add greater value, On the other hand , if my response fell on deaf ears, then I would need to change horses by seeking out another grouping of people who would be more in sync.

In the process of re-stating my value added, I was reminded that more and more of us are wanting to realize our vision for a better and sustainable futures for ourselves, our loved ones, our workplace, community and our planet.

What I’ve found is that today’s vanguard leaders are seeking to make meaning as well as money, and build legacies as well as bank accounts.

What’s become paramount is that if we are to reach our greatness, we are must take a good look at our lives, our leadership and our relationship asking the probing questions:

Am I in the right tribe?  Am I adding value in all do?

All over the world, people are working past the usual retirement ages. In some cases, this is due to the minimum age rising, and in others, people need or want the income, the security. But, as I’ve discussed before (e.g., The Retirement Age Myth), many people are continuing to work because they want to, because being 65, 70, 80, even 90 is not the same today as it once was. The idea of retiring at 65 today often feels as foreign as it would feel to a 45-year-old.

This trend is not going to go away, especially as more and more boomers approach and pass retirement age, whatever that age may end up being.

All over the media, we see constant discussion about the possible growing rift between the generations as younger people are (or simply feel they are) being edged out of the workforce by the over-65 crowd. Many take for granted as fact that every person who chooses not to retire is essentially taking a job from a younger person.

Yet this is not always true.  A  Bloomberg article quotes Eric Thode, senior expert at the research institute Bertelsmann Stiftung, who points out that countries like Germany and Sweden, which “have high rates of senior employment[,] also have high rates of youth employment. . . . Other countries fail both groups.”

Experienced workers are also filling positions that younger workers are not qualified for simply because they haven’t had the time to build the necessary skills, experience, and specialized knowledge. On the other hand, there certainly is a growing trend in hiring people over 60 for retail and similar jobs because of the perception that they will be more responsible than a younger employee. Even if they require a higher wage, the savings in training costs alone, a problem plaguing high-turnover service jobs, can be worth it.

But even with all of this in mind, focusing on ways to get more people to retire, under the belief that this will free up jobs for subsequent generations, is a mistake. Even if it were realistic, which it’s not (as I note above—eschewing retirement is a trend that will only continue to grow), increasing the numbers of people receiving retirement benefits would offset the possible gains in youth employment.

So what can we do about this situation, particularly about the possibility of increasing conflict and distance among generations over perceived and real job competition?

First, we need to communicate with each other about it. This seems obvious, but how often do the generations really talk about this situation with each other? It tends to get talked about through politicians and the media rather than in collaborative, hands-on, deliberately multigenerational conversations.

These conversations are crucial not only to get our fears and perceptions out in the open but also to clear up the misconceptions that can lead us all to make decisions based on incorrect information or assumptions.

Second, we need to explore alternative solutions together based on the probable future, not the past. Yes, social security was an effective solution to many problems that stemmed from the Great Depression, and it continues to be a necessary element in our economy, but pursuing ways to once again push millions of post-65 people out of the workforce is not going to work. Being 65 today is not even close to what it was in that era.

Third, we should look at generational partnerships, such as job sharing/mentorship arrangements that enable two people to be employed instead of one, enable training costs and salary to combine, stretching a company’s dollar and quickening the pace at which younger employees can gain the skills, knowledge, and some of the experience they need to be more valuable to that company and in the marketplace. These could work with a shifting percentage of time, starting with the mentor working 3/4 of the job, then gradually decreasing to 1/2, then 1/4, with an ultimate shift into mentoring another employee or into a consultant arrangement.

Which brings me to my fourth and final point (in this post, anyway). We need to encourage people over 60 (and in fact over 40 and 50) to remain employed by starting their own businesses. These could be simple solopreneur operations or larger operations that would not only remove the competition for the same job between two generations, it would generate employment.

As I’ve talked about many times before, the future of the marketplace (and the world) lies in the rapidly growing values-based business model. More and more people are spending their money consciously, choosing to buy from companies who are making a difference in the world over those who aren’t, and more often than not, these are small women-led businesses.

People, organizations, and governments need to focus on encouraging experienced professionals and executives, especially women, to start businesses with a strong focus on the Triple Bottom Line—people, planet, profits. In this way, we can solve or at least ameliorate multiple societal problems simultaneously through the specific social missions of these companies as well as their effect on the job market, offering a way for all generations to make a living and a difference, and to secure their future and that of the world for generations to come.

Amazon #1 Best Seller Author of 11 books including The Ageless Way, Gray is the New Green, Visionaries Have Wrinkles, The Greatness Challenge and more.

Midlife crisis. It is a term bandied about, which can conjure images of sports car purchases, new gym memberships, flirtations/affairs/divorces, botox and bikinis. Midlife is, for many, a time of transition, including whether or how to retire. It can be a time of more questions than answers, a time in which you feel less steady as you review and revise who and what you find most meaningful, valuable, and worthwhile. Some changes are desired and welcome, while others feel forced or unavoidable.

I believe, as I share in my upcoming book, The Ageless Way, that  “Those of us who are entering, in the midst of or, like me, leaving our rich middle years, are well poised to use such times of transition as opportunities to tap more deeply into our reservoir of innate soulful greatness – what I refer to as our Signature Greatness DNA. As history has shown, change makers and world shakers always deepen their culture and leave a legacy for future generations by confronting the difficulties of such times with invention, insight, and transcendent understanding.”

It is at these times that many people choose, whether out of desire or necessity, to begin a second (or third, or fourth…) career, which is often referred to as an encore career. There are different reasons people choose to pursue an encore career, such as: financial security; personal fulfillment and meaning; the desire to give back to the local/national/global community; flexibility; work/life balance; learning new skills and utilizing those that have been acquired over decades; sustaining social connections; pursuing a long-held dream…

Regardless of the reason(s) for selecting an encore career, those in their middle and later years have garnered personal and professional experience and wisdom which they can offer to employers and clients. In addition, Boomers and Matures (members of “The Silent Generation”) grew up in eras which inspired active, organized involvement in response to diverse current events, such as WWII, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the fights for civil and women’s rights. As a result, these workers are often valued for their efficiency, sense of responsibility, loyalty, hopeful attitude and strong work ethic.

The trend toward an increasingly older and diverse workforce creates multiple opportunities for building successful intergenerational office environments. Encore career professionals offer a variety of abilities and knowledge to enhance the capabilities of the younger generations and benefit, in return, from their colleagues’ perspectives and talents with new work aspects like technology. Such mutually supportive business cultures ensure a more solid future for everyone, from those engaged in encore careers to the generations yet to come.

There is even a movement afoot to support those choosing or hiring for encore careers. Encore.org’s mission is “building a movement to tap the skills and experience of those in midlife and beyond to improve communities and the world.” It seeks to engage the vitality, wisdom and talents of those in the third and fourth stages of life while emphasizing social purpose. Seeing an aging society as a solution to, rather than creator of, problems, Encore.org connects generations in diverse ways, including hosting an annual conference and offering The Purpose Prize for people over 60 who integrate their passion and experience for the betterment of society. Created in 2005, the prize aims to “showcase the value of experience and disprove notions that innovation is the sole province of the young. It’s for those with the passion to make change and the experience to know how to do it.”

I mentioned the term encore career in a blog posted earlier this week, “Second Time Around” , in which I wrote about Barbara Beskind who is now in her third year of work as an inventor, a lifelong dream she achieved just shy of her ninth decade. Additionally, I have met/worked with diverse women and men who have chosen (are choosing) to embark on an encore career. One 51-year-old woman hot shot media executive left her job to pursue what she always wanted to do as a teenager — she went back to school to become a social worker. Another high flying 62-year-old woman left an intense demanding sales executive post to return to the beloved art career of her youth. A 63-year-old retired teacher became a published author. In her January 16, 2015 New York Times article, Older Job Seekers Find Ways to Avoid Age Bias, Kerry Hannon shares the story of a 66-year-old man who was laid off from a high-powered position. After undergoing the unease of transition, questioning his purpose and averting age discrimination encountered in interviews, he ultimately ended up teaching part-time, making money, and feeling valued. And I am one among many who have found fulfillment in an encore career by creating their own business.

Encore.org and the AARP  are just two of the organizations offering programs, resources and information for those embarking on an encore career. In the short term, this transition may require additional investment of education and retraining (including working with a certified professional career coaching and strategy-creation coach). The rewards, however, can be infinite. Following your passion while giving to others can be stimulating, enlivening and offer adventures which demonstrate that, despite pleasurable memories, the best is still yet to come.

When musicians are called by an audience to perform an encore, a demand for more, it is surely a sign of success. Whether you choose an encore career out of need or want, in honoring and utilizing your skills and knowledge you are the one whose success is to be celebrated. Bravo!!

What’s your encore career story?  Please share your experience below.

Ageism can involve assumptions about, or preferential or discriminatory treatment of, someone based solely on their age. Although the word can apply to people of all ages, the negative stereotypes of aging speak to a sense of deterioration or impairment and, though not based in truth, often become part of our sub- or unconscious and accepted as fact. This kind of dismissiveness of anyone is unfortunate for everyone.

Some ageist attitudes include “jokes” or comments mocking those “over the hill” or asserting it’s impossible to find love or have an active sex life over 40. Or the phrase “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” despite there being centenarians who are learning computers or taking up a new language. Has a doctor ever brushed off your query about a medical issue with the attitude that it’s just part of growing older and, “well, you aren’t 20 anymore…”? Or told you, as a 40+ woman, that you should have a hysterectomy to remedy a problem without asking if you wanted any more (or any) children? Do you know anyone over 40 who was passed over for a job or promotion despite being the most qualified candidate? Certainly, some people will be more capable than others. But this is true no matter what a person’s age. If you take 20, or 100,000 people, whether they are 18 or 90, or any other age, each is an individual and will have unique needs and challenges which should be considered accordingly.

Though ageism happens on many levels, all too often when we hear about such discrimination it regards the workplace. Age-based professional bias still happens – a lot — despite the fact that there are federal and state laws meant to prohibit such discrimination. In 2014 alone, there were over 20,000 charges filed under The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA, eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/adea.cfm). The ADEA is a federal law created in 1967. It protects individuals ages 40 and older, making it unlawful, for example, for an employer “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s age.” (www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/adea.cfm; More workplace fairness information can be found on sites like www.workplacefairness.org).

In a Forbes.com article, “The Ugly Truth About Age Discrimination,”  Liz Ryan discusses how being older and having more experiential wisdom can work in your favor. She provides this tip regarding job interview preparation; “Here’s the flip side of the age-discrimination challenge: if you know what business pain you solve and can talk to hiring managers about that pain, they can’t afford to care how old you are.” Ryan further explains that “Job-seekers who use their interview air time to ask questions about the processes, the obstacles in a hiring manager’s way and the thorny problems they’ve seen before in similar situations vault themselves to a higher level of conversation than the ones who don’t.”

For those of you who know you have much to contribute, yet no longer want to work for another boss, the statistics are in your favor. In fact, as I talk about in my #1 Amazon best seller book, The Ageless Way, the 40+ market is perfect for a new encore entrepreneurial start-up, the opportunity to change ageism into Age-Friendly while making a profit. Rather than staying in repressive, stultifying positions with a silver ceiling looming, more and more workers (particularly women who have endured long-standing conflated ageism AND sexism) are standing in their own shoes and starting their own businesses, often as solopreneurs.

Regardless of where we are in our professional lives and whether we work for someone else, are our own boss, or do not currently work, we can all play a role in pushing the edge of the envelope. We can all work toward exposing and eradicating embedded fundamental ageism and make positive change happen by turning the aging paradigm inside out.

Those of you familiar with my work will recognize my clarion call to unite and create a new story of our AGE. Your story about who you are in the world can determine your choices and whether your journey will lead to action or inaction, stagnancy or movement toward greater fulfillment. And there’s no need to agonize over what that means or make the simple more difficult. If you trust in life’s dynamic process, it will all continue to unfold as you age, and learn, and keep refining that story.

As Julie Andrews sang in The Sound of Music, “Let’s start at the very beginning — A very good place to start…” Words will always be at the root of your story, whether right now or in the future. Starting today, pay close attention to the words you use to describe yourself and others, consciously changing them, if needed. For example, whether thinking about shifting something in your professional or personal life, just replace the cultural stereotype of “It’s too late for you. You’re not credible unless you are young and beguiling!” by confirming your personal awareness that “My experience, my talents and intelligence, and my unique perspective, make the timing perfect for me to act now. I know how to focus on what really matters. All great visionaries have wrinkles.” Hopefully, though this will be only the first step of many, taking it will ensure that the next step will be that much easier.

What ageism have you experienced or witnessed in life? Was it ignored or addressed? Please share your stories in the comments below.

Warren Buffet’s article in Fortune could not be more spot on about why women and men should both care about gender equality in business.

No manager operates his or her plants at 80% efficiency when steps could be taken that would increase output. And no CEO wants male employees to be underutilized when improved training or working conditions would boost productivity. So take it one step further: If obvious benefits flow from helping the male component of the workforce achieve its potential, why in the world wouldn’t you want to include its counterpart?

Fellow males, get onboard. The closer that America comes to fully employing the talents of all its citizens, the greater its output of goods and services will be. We’ve seen what can be accomplished when we use 50% of our human capacity. If you visualize what 100% can do, you’ll join me as an unbridled optimist about America’s future.

Add to this the evidence that women in leadership and on boards increase profitability and gender equality is clearly a no-brainer.

So why on earth do we still have such a wide gender gap in the workforce, not only in pay but in numbers of women in leadership, in politics, in male-dominated fields, such as STEM?

Part of this is the time it takes for systems to change, even when the majority is on board with making the change. But an even larger part is that these systems don’t exist in a vacuum. They are part of a larger culture in which women are still objectified and considered less than.

Women are still blamed for being raped. Politicians continue to assault women’s rights to their own bodies and even to their own right to live. Sexism and misogyny are so ingrained in our patriarchal culture that even women raised to believe in their own equality and worth can’t escape the self-doubt that stems from an endless barrage of cultural messages telling them otherwise.

So even when we get our own businesses shipshape, operating at 100%, those businesses still float in the larger sea of our culture, where the waters are rough and women are still too often afraid to make waves.

We need to fight for and implement practices that equalize the workplace, especially in our own businesses, but let’s not kid ourselves that our work stops there. We need to fight for equality in politics, in our communities, in the very language we use when we talk about women, about ourselves.

We need nothing short of a sea change.

In what ways do you act in your life and work to change our culture for women?

By now, you’ve probably heard of and perhaps read Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. In her book as in countless articles, women are advised to do this or do that to close the various gender inequalities in the workplace—in promotions (particularly to executive and board positions), in pay, and in treatment.

There is no short supply of advice for women to close the various gender gaps, but what about advice for men? For organizations themselves? That women are overwhelmingly the ones responsible for fixing the inequalities that disadvantage them is itself an inequality.

Organizations and the men in them need to take more responsibility for changing the obstacles only women face in the workplace, especially when they themselves are the obstacles. I’ve written before about the McKinsey & Company report on how men and companies perpetuate gender inequalities even with programs in place to address them. Working on changing the culture and one’s mindset is an important step more men, particularly those in leadership, need to take.

In other words, it’s high time women expect their male colleagues and their organizations to do some leaning in toward them. The alternative? What more and more women, particularly those 40+, are doing every day—lean out.

Start your own business, aligned with your values and designed to fulfill your own definition of success, whether that be building a legacy, having time to pursue multiple interests and strengthen relationships, making the money you need to live the life you want while making a difference in the world—or all of the above and more.

Not only do we have the power to create the workplace we want to work in, we have an opportunity to do so in ways that provide a model to the world of the change we want to see in mainstream corporate America, academia, and government.

Women have already begun this modeling, demonstrating a faster rate of growth in their businesses than men as well as showing that having women on boards leads to higher profits.

Ideally, we need more of both—men leaning in and women leaning out. The business world is changing. We can shape the direction of that change by collaborating and by creating the change we want to see.

You may know that you want to start a business, for example, but you’re unsure of what kind of business exactly. You may only vaguely know that you want to do something purposeful, but you aren’t sure if this means volunteering or work or some combination, or what exactly you would be doing.

If you have not yet decided on what you want to be when you grow up :), consider the opportunities inherent in our most precious resource—time.

For all the time-saving technology we gain each year, we somehow seem to have less and less time available to us. Busy working parents don’t have as much time to volunteer in schools or spend as much time with their children as they’d like. Even kids don’t have as much time for free play with all their activities, sports, and school-related commitments. In an increasingly urban society, some kids have the time for free play but no safe spaces to do so, and their parents don’t have time to take them to safe spaces.

Many areas of traditional volunteer work, such as visiting with the sick and infirm, feeding the homeless, helping care for animals in shelters, and so forth, are lacking in volunteers because people simply do not have the time.

One answer, of course, is to simply step up and be a volunteer. But consider looking at this from a different perspective. How can you or your business save people time in ways that specifically allow them to have more meaningful time? With their children? Their parents? Volunteering themselves?

If you run (or plan to run) a business with employees, this could be a part of how you set up your workforce, using job sharing, flexible hours, work-at-home days, and so forth to enable your employees to balance their lives. Or your business could be the meaningful work that you (with or without employees) want the time to do.

If you are still with a company, planning your own eventual exit, now is the time to research and develop alternate scenarios that could serve you, your colleagues, and the business, such as a consultant relationship or part-time substitute situation that enables everyone to take Meaning Days along with the traditional vacation time and sick time.

Any business that brings extended families and communities together to help each other out and save time is bound to hit a ready market. What if busy parents only worried about cooking dinner once or twice a week? How about a service that brings young kids to meet with parents over lunch near or at their work?

How about a program for companies to buy into that sends groups of employees to volunteer with their families in the name of the company?

The possibilities are endless—as are the potential profits—when you consider what is truly meaningful to you and to others. Contrary to the trope about the later years of life, time really is on our side.

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Many of us are waiting. We’re playing it safe, not taking any risks, putting off our next big steps, the transformations we long to make in our lives and work, until the winds of global economic change die down. We’ve locked the doors, boarded up the windows, and headed down into the basement.

But the problem is that boarded-up windows not only keep the winds from coming in, they keep us from seeing out—we close off our perspective, our ability to see the big picture. The problem is that sometimes playing it safe and sticking with the status quo is the most unsafe choice we can make.

When we finally venture out from our basements and tentatively open our doors, we are likely to see a different world out there, one created and reshaped by the people who didn’t hide away, who instead realized that the only way to survive was to start planning the rebuilding process before the structure collapsed, not after.

We are likely to find that the place we held in the old world, that we so desperately tried to protect, no longer exists. And because we weren’t part of creating the new world, we also weren’t part of creating and ensuring our place in it.

Now I’m not suggesting that you just abandon everything and throw yourself out into the storm. If you are an executive or business owner, you need to start preparing to lead change by figuring out exactly what that means and how you can stay ahead of the curve of change without abandoning what already works in your organization.

If you are not financially ready to start that new business you’ve been longing to start, quitting your job today isn’t the answer. But as I’ve said before, the choice isn’t either/or. It isn’t either you stay at an unfulfilling job or you risk everything and start your business. The choice is both/and.

Stay at the job while you take concrete steps toward starting your business, going beyond just dreaming about it. Commit to taking action every day to build it, and taking into account the bigger world picture as you do: The world is undergoing an epochal shift. Build your business based on what the world needs and will need, based on likely trends as well as the changes you want to see in the world. If you build your future assuming it will look like the past, your business will be obsolete before you even open its doors. In fact, the business of the future might not even have doors, not the way we’ve always thought of them anyway.

Waiting on the world to change is the riskiest move we could ever make—not because it won’t, but because it will.