Having a pilot can determine the course of your life, having the right can make or break it. A pilot is a person qualified and authorized to drive a vehicle: a plain, a car, a train and everything in the between. Now, if we think of ourselves as a vehicle, metaphorically, guided by a driver, who can change depending on the specific time and phase of our lives, we realize how crucial it is for us to have a capable driver, that will bring us from place A to place B.
I'll start this reflection with the basics, meaning what we mean when we use the term "social media." According to Kaplan and Haenlein's definition, "social media are a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content". With this definition, I want to focus on the internet and user-generated content because the combination of these two elements has created a world dominated by social media, allowing us to think we can do and say whatever we want.
I want to reflect on the concept of generational, individual, and family journey, which is linked to terms like success, widely associated with money, growth, work, and sacrifice. I believe we have several "destinations," places to reach at specific moments in our lives, because as human beings we are on a journey, in transition, constantly moving, as life is never static. It's like taking a train from point A to point B; both places represent a specific season or moment in our lives, and in those places we can learn something about ourselves, grow, meet people, and even outgrow them. Each stop on this journey symbolizes a phase of our lives, and we carry with us the impact of each place and the people we meet along the way.
Living in a VUCA world, we often find ourselves prisoners of things, people and situations. For context, VUCA is an acronym first used in 1987, to describe or reflect the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations. The U.S. Army War College began using this term to refer to how the world was perceived after the end of the Cold War. More frequent use of this acronym began in 2002 and subsequently gained traction in emerging ideas of strategic leadership, which is how I personally encountered this term, during my master’s program in Leadership for International Relations.
