Change is the most important single factor affecting every part of your life. The sooner and the better you learn to cope with change and turn it to your advantage, the more successful, effective, and happy you will be in everything you do.

Today, we are experiencing change at a rate never before imagined in history. Anything on the market today is already obsolete. It is already being replaced by something that is newer, better, or cheaper. In the Industrial Age products had a life of several years or more. Today, in the Information Age, products have a life of several months.

As soon as a company comes out with a successful product or service, it will be copied almost immediately by another company that will bring it to the market and attempt to sell it by cutting cost, increasing the service, or both.

What does this mean to you? It means that every product, process, idea, or service that you are engaged in today is in the process of being replaced by someone, somewhere, doing it better, faster, or cheaper.

In the Industrial age people could graduate from college and expect to get a good job, and as long as they performed the work well could expect to keep their job until they retired. In the Information Age of today a college graduate can expect to have as many as fourteen different jobs before he or she reaches retirement.

It is no longer the responsibility of an employer or the government to provide you with security, healthcare, or retirement. It is up to you. Everything that affects the business world affects you as well. Every innovation, discovery, and paradigm shift in modern business is as applicable to you as a person as it is to a multibillion dollar corporation. The men and women who get ahead and are successful in the 21st century will be those who are continually looking around for ideas and insights that they can use to be faster, more flexible, and more effective in their work on a day-to-day basis.

Just as successful service companies are close to their customers, you must be the kind of person who gets along extremely well with your customers both inside and outside of your company. Customer intimacy at the corporate level means that you are positive, sensitive, service-oriented, easy to get along with, and continuously helpful to the people in your work life.

You must become a market leader. To do this in the 21st century, you must dedicate yourself to becoming very good at what you do, doing it in an excellent fashion, and maintaining high-quality relationships with the people around you. This combination will help you master, rather than becoming a victim of our changing world.

You can dramatically improve the quality of your life by thinking through what your core values are and then committing yourself to live consistently by those values, no matter what the external circumstances may be.

Your can determine what your core values are by asking yourself some important questions: What kind of reputation do you have in your marketplace? What kind of reputation would you like to have sometime in the future? What is your philosophy and what are your beliefs? Write out the answers to these questions and put them into a personal mission statement. A mission statement is a future-tense description of the kind of person that you would ideally like to be in three to five years.

These core values and the mission statements should become the operating principles for everything you do. For example, if people, excellence, and integrity are your core values, then you should commit all your resources to living consistently with them.

Here are five things you can do that will help you take charge of your career while you