When I first moved to Sacramento fifteen years ago, The Downtown Plaza was still thriving. As the 2000s went on, neighboring cities like Roseville developed massive swaths of land, drawing attention away from Downtown. It slowly receded into dishevelment and many businesses closed. In the 2010s, new businesses opened up Downtown, and this year marked the groundbreaking of a new arena Downtown for our NBA team, the Kings.
Over the course of fifteen years, this area went from boom to bust and is solidly on the road back to boom.
Nothing is permanent. Everything changes.
My fiance, Amy grew up in Elk Grove, just to the south of Sacramento. She tells me that when she was a kid, this was all country and fields. Today the city has a population of 150,000 and fields that have sat empty for years are going to be developed. She misses the days when the town was still small, but everything changes. Nothing’s permanent.
Ten years ago, mobile phones were fairly common. But many of us still didn’t have internet on our phones. Today, most people in the US and across the globe access the internet on their phone more than they do their “regular” computer. Nothing stays the same.
The friends you have in high school and college aren’t always the same friends you have when you’re 35, 40, or 50. Very few things stay the same. Impermanence is the only aspect of life that doesn’t change.
“You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in over you. All entities move and nothing stays still.”
— Heraclitus
All things change, including your business. Your customers change, and their expectations change as the world around them transforms. Technology changes, and the bar is continually raised for what a website provides — how it looks, how it works, how it feels to those who navigate it.
No web project is ever really finished. I have a lengthy checklist of things to add to this site, and things to take away. The longer you are in business — the more you interact with your customers — the more intently you listen to them, the more you learn about what direction you should be headed.
As business owners, we get better at interpreting information from the world and people around us. We take this information and decide how to use it to better serve customers.
We test, we measure. We evolve. We learn from things we read. We learn from things we experience. We take these things and add them to our knowledge. We make decisions and move forward, and the process of learning continues.
The web moves at a very rapid pace. It is a vast and mighty river that touches the lives of almost everyone on Earth. Every day, we step into that river, knowing that today will be different from yesterday, and different from the days to follow.
Nothing’s permanent, but our mindset for learning should always be present.
