Change. Doing something different.
Learning. Mastering a new area. Building new knowledge and skills.
Progress. Moving forward. Usually has the sense of an envisioned destination towards which the movement is being made.
Improve. Become better.
Better. More desirable, satisfactory, or effective.

What’s that old saying about “the only things constant in life”? Death is one. Taxes is the second. Change is often appended as the third (although I’m sure we could add Chuck Norris jokes there somewhere). The first two are on the negative side of the scale; things we’d rather avoid, or minimise. So why is change there too? Is it equally negative or to be avoided? It would seem weird to put something delightful along with two more negative items.

But then again, when I look at the list of words at the top of this post, perhaps the word and its connotations are negative. There’s a sense of different in the word “change,” but no sense of goal directedness or a better destination. At worse it is just different, and thus annoying, disruptive, and unsettling to the way we live, work and contribute.

And yet few of us don’t want the other four items on the list. To learn to become more. To make progress towards goals and dreams. To improve the way we work and live, and thus the contribution we make to the world and our loved ones. To get better today than we were yesterday. To do better work, to become capable of adding more value to others, and to increase our ability to be and do.

Change? No thanks. I’d rather make progress, improve and get better (which the astute reader will immediately recognise as all requiring change – but change as a process of enablement, not a destination to pursue).