Some time ago,  Mark Coxon wrote a compelling editorial entitled “Stay in Your Box” and other Bad Ideas.

Mark did his usual great job, and compelled me to want to build on his thesis: that it’s imperative to challenge yourself with taking on new directions. Looking back, the cognitive framework that makes the most sense of the haphazard and sometimes chaotic progression of my career to date has been plunging unprepared into one deep end of the pool after another. Sometimes those plunges into cold, deep, unfamiliar water was voluntary, but more often than not it was sudden and without warning.

And it wasn’t always fun, at least initially.

First, there was moving from sporting goods into consumer electronics, when the extent of my AV knowledge was quite literally that I could tell a TV from a VCR with hardly any hints. Not long after that there was being trained and promoted up to assistant store manager, only to find myself in the store manager’s position three days later, which I had NOT yet been trained for.

When I moved from retail to CE to AV integration that was an enormous plunge into a much larger, more complex world. As I explained it to one of my former mentors after a couple of months on the job: “I went from being the guy at A&B Sound who knew everything (in my own mind, at least), to the guy at Systems Inc who knows nothing!”

Just as big a plunge was changing channels again and moving from AV into mobile; again, a giant category all its own, about which, when I started, I knew virtually nothing at all.

The two traits that allowed me to thrive and grow along the way were, as Mark said in his column, attitude and aptitude. Enthusiasm, a keen mind and a willingness to learn will help you get to the next level, even if the next level is both up and over there, away from where you are now.

The biggest risk of staying in your safe little box is that it’s not really all that safe.

Eventually you’ll find that your box keeps getting smaller and smaller, and all the technology you’re used to working with no longer exists.

That’s a point that I regularly make in my discussions with my customers. I ask them to reminisce about what their best-sellers were five, ten, and fifteen years ago.

Their experiences parallel my own, and probably yours too. Most of the product categories that I made a living on in the late ’90s to early ’00s either don’t exist anymore or they’re only barely recognizable in their current form, and the industry has moved on.

Think about it, if none of us ever grew out of our box we’d all still be installing volume control knobs. (Well, in my case I’d still be waxing skis and mounting bindings, but you get the point.)

It’s easy to be afraid of how much you don’t know, which is precisely why you have to commit to learning new things. You can admit to being intimidated by a steep learning curve, but remember: Just like a roller coaster, the steeper the curve, the more speed you’ll pick up, and the faster and farther you’ll go.