Revenge of the Nerds – Are You Keeping Up With Technology?
I gave a talk last Sunday at Unity New Thought Centre in Burwood about 'Change', and began with a story about my husband Derek and I clashing over my battle with technology. Here's a brief excerpt from the talk:
'Derek and I share an office and for the most part, this works quite well. It certainly works for me having ‘Tech Support’ within touching and hearing distance… For me, technology is often tedious and frustrating and mysterious and irritating. Like you, I’ve learnt to use a computer and send emails and search things on the web, and I’ve made a Facebook page and done some social media and learnt how to make e-newsletters and slide presentations and use the content management system of the website and I’m developing webinars and online trainings… so you know, I’m having a go! But I often get frustrated by how much there is to learn and master, and the time it takes and the problems with it when it doesn’t work. I get frustrated because I can’t get on with my creative work because I’m tied up learning practical technical stuff.
'Well, it turned out that Derek was feeling annoyed witnessing me fight and struggle with it – hearing me sigh and exclaim and curse each time I struck a challenging technical issue because remember, his desk is just… over… there… and I tend to express myself very easily and quite loudly, while he is very quiet and moderate.
'What you resist persists, right? So there I was, fighting and resisting all this new technology and getting more and more het up in fruitless frustration since technology is not going away any time soon… Thinking about that, I had a bit of a light bulb moment as to how to explain how I was feeling to Derek. I said, “We are living in the era of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ when in order to succeed you have to master technology. But what if, in order to succeed, you had to be able to write novels? Huh?!"
'Derek heard me and was less critical after that, and I felt less resistant to technology; I came out of that conversation feeling more willing to ‘suck it up’, surrender, embrace the nerdy stuff… and while I do still sigh and exclaim at times, I think it’s a little less often.'
When I think about the nerdy people at school, I have to grin: they really are getting their own back! And somehow, we do have to just 'suck it up' because technology isn't going away any time soon and is a blessing in many ways. I have to remind myself of that on the days when I want to join the Amish...
You can watch the talk on Unity of Melbourne's website, and if you'd like me to present it to your own group, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 03 9018 9724.
Photo credit: avatar-1 via Visual hunt / CC BY-SA
I haven’t read any Stephen King books because I’m not into the thriller/horror/mystery genre, but I decided I wanted to read his On Writing, and I’m really enjoying it. The man values the literary arts more than I had expected. His turn of phrase is entertaining and delightful. I particularly love his humility in sharing an excerpt of his own work, unedited and then rewritten, for the reader to see how he goes about the process of refining his work.
Iris Detenhoff is the creator of The Moontime Diary. We met last November at Dr Demartini's Prophecy event and exchanged books. She loved The Mastery Club and The Hidden Order, and asked me to contribute a segment about the 10 Lessons to the 2017 Moontime Diary, which I did.
I received this email out of the blue from one of my Mastery Club 10 Lessons students, an 11 year old at Ainslie Parklands Primary School who participated in the program in 2015: