“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.”

Jessie Potter

That was the advice of Jessie Potter, an educator and counselor on family relationships and human sexuality. The context of his quote was about sex and love. He was asserting that change is needed in the American way of growing up, falling in love, raising a family, and growing old.

Similar statements have been attributed to a number of people, from Henry Ford to Tony Robbins and even to Albert Einstein, who also expressed a similar sentiment when he said:

“The world as we have created it is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Albert Einstein is also broadly credited with saying that:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”

And Russian author Leo Tolstoy said:

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

All four of these quotes are about change. Changing the way you think, the way you act, and what you do. Because change is progress and failure to change is stagnation.

I promised myself I wasn’t going to go political in this post, but oh well. Conservatives generally don’t like change. They prefer to keep things the way they are — or the way they were, you know, like they used to be (“Make America Great Again”).

They don’t particularly like societal changes. They don’t embrace changing demographics. They deny climate change. They want the U.S. Constitution to be interpreted just as it was written around 230 years ago, as if time has stood still since 1787.

But change is as inevitable as the sunrise and the tides. And remember, if we fail to change, we stagnate.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt.