People change

One of the things that I always find annoying in meetings is when people come up with the whole 'People don't change' statement.

In fact it's typified by this cartoon by Hugh McLeod:  I must have seen it so many times.

But people do change.  It was part of our video from earlier this year, and shown by the fact that people get married later, more people stay longer in education and so on.

Here's another illustration from this excellent article in the New York Times:

"We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s."

That's a pretty big change!