How To Best Reinvent Yourself…

…by not reinventing anything.

Photo by Craig Chitima

For many years now, we’ve been hearing stories of reinvention. Companies reinvent themselves. Celebrities reinvent themselves. Naturally, we can’t be any less, so we reinvent ourselves too. All the time.

I think the concept is inevitably flawed. In its original sense, reinventing something means inventing something again without knowing that the invention already exists. However, we mostly use it in the sense of “renewal” or “evolution”. So what is wrong with evolving that we need to call it something else?

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: and what is so wrong about reinvention? To me, a reinvention denies the past. It feels as though we didn’t want anything to do with who we were before, as though we sought a blank canvas to start again. The vast majority of people who succeed in reinventing themselves, though, don’t start over. On the contrary, they build on solid foundations.

Abraham Lincoln lost at everything a politician could lose at before he won the presidency. Nevertheless, he didn’t reinvent himself into a presidential candidate, did he? He built on all his previous failed campaigns, on all his experience of failure, on all his connections.

If you were a soldier and decided to join a nomadic tribe in Amazonia, perhaps “reinvent”…