I’m typing this on my iMac, and normally would load this into my blog using Safari. It turns that that may be a mistake. You see, Safari is my default browser. It came as the default browser on my iMac,, and my iMac before this one. I really don’t remember how many years I’ve been using Safari.

But, too many is the right answer.

Do you remember the old line “I don’t believe in change for change sake.” Well, that may be a mistake also.

I’m reading the first pages of Adam Grant’s now book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Sheryl Sandberg wrote the foreword). One of his opening stories is that some researchers made a startling discovery: people who use Firefox or Chrome as their browser are better at customer service, and better at many other business tasks. It took a while to figure out the why. But this is what they came up with. People who just accept whatever is the default are not explorers. They don’t look for the new. And the new is where it’s at!

And, maybe because they don’t look for the new, they get stuck, and resist the new.

And we are definitely in a “look for the new” world. From the book:

And that act of initiative (switching from the default browser), however tiny, is a window into what you do at work.
We live in an Internet Explorer world. Just as almost two thirds of the customer service reps used the default browser on their computers, many of us accept the defaults in our own lives.

You see, it’s not that Chrome is better than Safari. But, the person who looks past the default develops skills past the simple “scripts” handed to them — like the skill to look for, explore, discover the new. Like, looking for new ways to work with customers; looking for new ways to be more productive. Looking for the new is not a one-time experiment; it is way to approach work and life over-all.

Thus, his title: Originals. Originals are always looking for the new.

In other words, you don’t “change for the sake of change.” You “change for the sake of getting better at change.” And that is a skill worth developing.

I’m going to post this now — on Chrome. Wish me luck.