A recent blog posting by marketer Seth Godin caught my attention, and I’d like to share it with you in its entirety:

Most existing systems (organizations, cities, careers, governments) are resilient to external shocks. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t still be here. Earthquakes, edicts, and emergencies come and they go, but the systems remain.

And yet, it’s the emergencies we pay attention to.

No single event demolished the music business. It was a series of slow changes over the course of two decades, all the way back to the CD.

Smoking killed far more people than terrorists ever did. It’s just not as dramatic.

No single technology destroyed the business model for newspapers. Sure, Craigslist hastened their demise, but the writing has been on the wall for a decade or more.

Your career won’t be made or broken on the back of one interview, one meeting, one sales call. Sure, it might help (or hurt), but the sudden impact of one event isn’t sufficient to change everything forever.

The slow changes in the media landscape are accelerating and virtually every pre-digital system is in danger. The slow changes in the marketing landscape are in their second decade and these changes will have their effects on every business and cause as well.

Cultural shifts create long-term evolutionary changes. Cultural shifts, changes in habits, technologies that slowly make a product or a system obsolete are the ones that change our lives. Watch for shifts in systems and processes and expectations. That’s what makes change, not big events.

Don’t worry about what happened yesterday (or five minutes ago). Focus on what happened 10 years ago and think about what you can do that will make a huge impact in six months.

The breaking news mindset isn’t just annoying; it may be distracting you from what really matters. As the world gets faster, it turns out that the glacial changes of years and decades are becoming more important, not less.

Living in Nashville, the references to publishing and music (the number two and number three businesses, respectively) caught my attention. There are also parallels to the insurance business. No single event will destroy the distribution system known as independent agents. Yet it seems undeniable that slow changes over the last number of years are dramatically changing how agencies need to interact with clients and prospects.

As Godin suggests, “Watch for shifts in systems and processes and expectations. That’s what makes change, not big events.”