I thought about embedding David Bowie's song "Changes" above. I'm not a huge Bowie fan, but it's a great song, and the lyrics fit well with my idea for this post. But this video above, of the Gen Z kids trying to dial a rotary dial phone, just sums the idea up so much better. If you're over 40, maybe 45, you likely remember rotary dial phones, and probably knew someone who had one. I'm 56, I spent years using them as a kid. This was how THE WORLD communicated when I was a kid. We don't live in that world anymore. We are all struggling with the changes being throw at us, to some degree. That's what this blog is all about.
When I had just finished 3rd grade, my dad got a new job, at company called Fate Root Heath, later called Plymouth Locomotive Works. He worked as a draftsman/engineer, in the office part of a factory in tiny Plymouth, Ohio. The company made custom locomotives, custom lift trucks, and ceramic extruding machines. For the 4 years he worked there, my dad designed locomotives, like this one. PLW was bought out, and went out of business in 1983. There are still a few Plymouth locomotives running in places 40 years later.
Our family moved to a big farm house on route 603, a couple of miles southwest of Shiloh, Ohio, which was a few miles from Plymouth. That was in the summer of 1975. Like all the houses I'd lived in up until then, we had a rotary dial phone on the kitchen wall, with a long cord, and a second one, like the one in the video above, in my parents' bedroom. Both phones shared the same line, which was how things were in those days. But not only that, our house, since it was way out in the country, shared a single phone line with houses at five other farms. It was called a party line. Even in 1975, that was rare, and only still being used in very rural areas.
That meant that when my mom wanted to call someone, she picked up our receiver, and had to make sure no one else, at any of the five other houses, was on the line. Really. It wasn't just my mom, dad, my younger sister, and I sharing a single phone line, it was five other whole families. Sometimes two of the older women would pick up, since we could all talk to the other five houses for free, and two of the older women would be gossiping or sharing recipes, and my mom would have to wait half an hour or more, until they hung up, to make her call.
Now, compare that to now, 2023, where there are 5-year-olds walking around with a super computer in their pocket that can call, text, take photos, and share photos and videos, with maybe 4 or 5 billion people on the planet. And they watch Peppa Pig videos, or whatever the cool 5-year-olds are watching these days. This is just one tiny example of the changes, just in telecommunications, in the lifetime of Generation X people, like myself.
I've been interested in thinking about the future since I was a little kid. I'm just old enough to remember watching the later Apollo space missions on TV, back when TV's had three main channels. The Space Race was on, the future looked bright, and most people thought there were all kinds of great achievements in our future. We were told that we'd all have flying cars, and be able to go to space, in the far off year 2000. Technically, flying cars do exist, but they're not practical or widespread. Sorry George Jetson. And, technically, we can go into space, for a few minutes, if we have a quarter million dollars, or more, to drop for the ride.
My point in this opening post is that our world has changed tremendously since I was a kid. The world has changed dramatically since today's young Gen Z kids were little kids. It keeps changing at a rapid pace. Life, work, school, shopping, and society, in general, are struggling to catch up to all these changes in technology and social norms.
Personally, I've always wanted to run my own business, but I was really shy in my younger years, and terrible at selling things, which are key factors in any business. The closest I've come to owning my own business is driving a taxi for 6 1/2 years, which is in the gray area between a job and a small business. But I've worked for many entrepreneurs and small business owners, and was always thinking up ways to make those businesses better. In addition, I've always been fascinated by where things are heading in the future. I finally realized that I'm an amateur futurist, by nature, many years after diving into the work of the late futurist Alvin Toffler, over 25 years ago.
I've been studying economic and market trends for over 30 years now, just as a personal interest, and have blogged about many of my ideas over the last 14 years, in bits and pieces. This blog aims to bring my thoughts of where things are headed in the future to the people who run microbusinesses (one person businesses), and small and medium sized businesses. Small businesses, in general, have gotten hammered over the past three and a half years, and thousands of them have closed down. We all know that. I believe that the actual future of the United States depends on building up a really strong base of small businesses in the coming years, and helping current businesses navigate these crazy times. Millions of jobs have been lost to new technology in the last 40-50 years, and millions more will be lost in coming years. The only way to the numbers work to put so many people in new jobs is by the creation of millions of new small businesses. In this blog, I'm going to dive into the economic trends, business trends, the changing business landscape, new opportunities, and any other ideas that may be helpful to micro, small, and medium sized businesses in today's world. Hang on, I think the 2020's are going to continue to be a bumpy ride, but they will also provide amazing opportunities as well.
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