Reinvention is never comfortable. Staying stuck is worse
Sunday musings: At every stage of my life, from getting arrested as a teenager to being told I was not a real writer, I thought I was failing. But here is what I learned about reinvention.
At 15, I found myself sitting in the back of a police car, scared and angry, wondering how I ended up there. At 16, it happened again. Arrested.
Staring down the barrel of a life that felt predestined, a story written by circumstances, not by me. At the time, I thought I was doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes. I thought failure was all there was.
By 24, I had clawed my way into advertising. shiny offices, smart people, the kind of job I once thought would make me “successful.”
But the truth? I felt empty. I wanted to write, to tell stories that mattered. So I left. No safety net. No backup plan. Just the naïve belief that if I chased journalism hard enough, I could make it.
At 25, I was laid off for the first time. Watching my ex-CEO mumble through their rehearsed script, I remember thinking, “Maybe they are right. Maybe I don’t belong here.”
At 26, someone confirmed it. “You are not a real writer,” they said, eyes full of pity. “You don’t have a degree.” It crushed me.
But deep down, I knew the piece of paper was not the problem. I just had not found my voice yet.
Years later, at 33, I found myself on camera for the first time. The same guy who was told he was not a writer… now writing, creating, producing, sharing my own stories.
Reinventing myself not because I wanted to, but because life gave me no other choice. That is the thing about reinvention is never comfortable. It feels like failure until it does not.
I used to think success meant staying the course. One job, one industry, one path. But the world does not work like that anymore. Reinvention is not a luxury. It is a survival skill.
Look around. We built cars because horses couldn’t keep up. We created Spotify because CDs were too expensive. We invented Google because flipping through encyclopedias took too damn long.
Problems do not disappear. They evolve. And the people who survive? They evolve faster.
The rules society hands us like going to school, getting a degree, work until you retire, were designed for a world that does not exist anymore.
What happens when the rules change mid-game? What happens when the ladder everyone told you to climb breaks beneath your feet?
The old playbook is dead. It says freelancers should chase clients. The new playbook? Creators attract them. The old way tells you to buy ads.
The new way? Build a personal brand that makes millions with a single post. This was unthinkable 10 years ago. Now, it’s the norm.
I had to reinvent myself. Again and again. But you? You can do it before you have to.
You can stop waiting for permission. You can stop playing a game you never agreed to.
Because reinvention is not failure. It is freedom.
See you next Sunday.
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