Читать книгу Work Disrupted - Jeff Schwartz - Страница 9

The pause, the uncertainty, the need to adapt remind us that our lives are stories of disruption, adaptability, and survival. I was born the year after the first satellite launched from Earth (Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957), watched the first men walking on the moon when I was 11 (the United States in 1969), and witnessed the first commercial space launches to the International Space Station in 2020. My career has extended across stock market crashes, Y2K, 9/11, the Great Recession, and pandemics (H1NI, Ebola, and Covid-19). And, yes, technology. I wrote my college papers on electric typewriters, before welcoming tablets with the processing power of supercomputers. I've worked as a researcher, teacher, banker, government agency program director, consultant, writer, and professor. I've lived in the United States, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Russia, Belgium, India, and Israel. I realize that I've been learning lessons in adaptability throughout my career. I've shifted my expectations and adjusted to what was occurring, not what I'd imagined would come next.

My daughters received similar lessons in adaptability when Covid-19 upended their routines. My daughter Rachel, 28, a graduate MBA student at Emory University in Atlanta, shifted to virtual learning for the second half of the semester, along with 1.6 billion other college students around the world, and then she took a virtual summer internship. My younger daughter, Bizzie, 25, was three weeks into training as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar, when she, along with 7,000 volunteers and trainees around the world, evacuated back to the United States. This was the first time since its founding in 1961 that the entire U.S. Peace Corps returned home. I watched my daughters accept the shifts and grow more resilient.