If you look through your Facebook feed you see graduation celebrations from pre-Kindergarten to Master’s and Doctoral degrees. It is a time of celebration of a completion of some form of education. It is such a great time for a family when someone completes a degree or certification or designation.

No different for my family as this year we celebrate both of my nieces graduating this year from their respective educational institutions, I compare this celebration with the sheer resistance we seem to have at older ages when it comes to learning and being educated.

Over the last few months I have been working on a committee that is pursuing a “new” way of doing things and it is so interesting to me the number of learned folks, educated people, who are so resistant to learning of new ways of doing the same old things.

As I prepare to make a presentation to a board about this new way of doing the same ole thing I plan on referencing a quote from Eric Hoffer.

In times of change will you be a learner? Or do you fight change and eventually find your learned self fully equipped to for a world that no longer exists? I ask this sincerely to both you and me. As I age and become one of the “veterans” of an organization do I resist the change or am I working to be a constant learner?

If you want to be a leader and you want to succeed in the next phase of your life, the best advice I can give is what I have learned from the young people around me – there is a new world ahead and if we don’t continue to learn and be mentored by the young people we will find ourselves lost in the new world they are forming around us.