Change

What Matters Most………….                  Commentary by Jim High

My two Grandmothers taught me a lot about change.  Oh, they didn’t say “Now pay attention, this will be a change.”  In fact, while they were alive I didn’t realize the changes that they had experienced.  Grandmother High was born in 1874 before the invention of the automobile.  As I think back now, I never heard her talk about those days.  But I do clearly remember sitting with her in front of the TV in 1968 as our astronauts circled the moon on Christmas Eve night.  In one life time she experienced going from no automobiles to space travel.  She died at 94 before Neal Armstrong stepped out on to the surface of the moon becoming the first person to leave earth and walk on another object in the Universe.

Grandmother High never flew in an airplane.  But, my Grandmother Boggan did once in her life.  She was born in 1890 before the Wright Brothers took the first flight at Kitty Hawk, NC.   In 1974 our state insurance association organized a trip to visit Lloyd’s of London.  I decided to take my Mother and Grandmother, since like me neither of them had been to London.  I don’t think Grandmother Boggan had ever been outside of the State of Tennessee, except to Tupelo to visit us.

I will never forget the experience of standing with her in front of Buckingham Palace on a bright sunny day to watch the changing of the guard.  She was like a little girl at Christmas time.  She said that she never in her wildest dreams would have expected to be standing on that spot.  I imagine she never expected to live until she was 12 days from being 100 either. 

Two very full lifetimes full of constant change.  Without meaning to they taught me to always accept change, to not be afraid of it, and to always take advantage of it.  Now that I am getting old enough to look back on my own life, I can easily see the advantage of this lesson, so perfectly exemplified in the lives of my two Grandmothers.

When I started my insurance career we had no fax machine, no cell phones, and no computers.  We did have a copying machine of a sort.  You put a piece of pink tissue like paper over your document and ran both through the machine.  Then you put the pink tissue on another kind of special paper and ran it back through the machine and the image was transferred.  We didn’t make many copies; it was just too much trouble.  Our calculator was a manual contraption where you put in one number, and then pressed a lever the number of times that equaled the other number.  It’s too complicated to explain further, you had to see it in operation to really understand how it worked.

So I bought two electric calculators the first month they were available.  Each one cost over $500 and my competitors in the insurance business around the state thought I had lost my mind.  We got a fax machine and a Xerox copier, and I was the second agent in the state to convert my bookkeeping to computers.  We had to send everything off to be processed, in Texas I think, but we got back meaningful computer generated reports and monthly statement.  Immediate acceptance of these changes and modernizations helped my business to grow and made life easier for my employees.

What matters most is to understand that change is you friend, not your enemy.  Change is going to happen whether you accept and embrace it or not.  You are so much better off if you find a way to incorporate change into all areas of your life.  This is the most valuable lesson I learned from my Grandmothers, and they didn’t even know they were teaching me.  And there is a lesson in that also. Someone is always watching and learning from what you are doing right now.