(The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my newest book, You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies about Work, Life, and Love)
If there’s anything constant in life, it’s change.
Just consider how commonplace cauliflower, podcasting, and Amazon Prime have become—and how quickly it’s happened.
Growing up, no one ever talked about cauliflower, let alone wanted to eat the tasteless and smelly thing.
Yet recently, you’ve probably tried (or heard of) cauliflower rice, cauliflower pizza crust, cauliflower buffalo wings, or cauliflower tots. And if you haven’t, your friends have. Now just to give you a sense of its meteoric rise, in a short span of three years, Green Giant has gone from harvesting five to thirty acres of cauliflower each week. That’s 100,000 heads of cauliflower every single day! And they are just one of the many companies that have hopped on the cauliflower bandwagon.
A similar thing has happened with podcasting.
When I started listening to podcasts in 2008, it was a multistep process that required a computer. Today, however, with the ubiquity of smartphones, listening to podcasts has become so commonplace and normal that the question has shifted from “Have you heard of podcasts?” to “Which podcasts do you listen to?” In fact, in the last five years, close to half of all Americans and Canadians tuned into their first podcast episode.
And let’s not forget the explosive growth of Amazon Prime.
Now that more than half of all American households are subscribing members, isn’t it odd to meet someone who doesn’t have it? It’s definitely become the exception, rather than the norm.
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