If it’s good enough for the flu, it’s good enough for you

Career reinvention involves thinking outside of what you’re used to delivering.

Lovingly saying goodbye to the work you’ve done in the past, even if you’ve been doing it quite well.

Remember, originality always demands a willingness to experiment. And the good news is, if you’re someone who is on the lookout for the next digital advancement to express your artistic vision and make a contribution to the world, then all those reinvention opportunities will consistently show up on your radar.

A question that’s useful to hold in your awareness is:

How can you leverage modern technology to take something you’re already doing well now, and elevate to still another level?

Prolific was born out of questions just like that one. Because at age forty, after twenty plus years of professional experience, it had become abundantly clear that my leading superpower was helping people overcome their blocks at every stage of the creative process.

And since selling my time was no longer a sustainable or scalable business model for me, it made sense to invent something that gave the world a solution it’d never seen before.

In my case, it was the world’s first personal creativity management system. Upon sharing the concept with a few close confidants, everyone echoed similar remarks.

Scott, this is the most obvious next thing for you to be doing. It’s the clear vehicle for your next reinvention.

Now, the startup philosophers and venture capital veterans would refer to this moment as product founder fit. Meaning, I was equipped to tackle this problem at the time, I had the resources to build it, and the likelihood of me seeing it through was through the roof.

Man, do you have any idea how profoundly motivating that is? Who needs an alarm clock when you have that?

The fire under your ass is so hot, it could crack a window across the street.

Point being, we can’t allow the circumstances of our lives to destroy our ability to reinvent ourselves. Matter of fact, the key is to reinvent yourself before the inevitable decline occurs.

That’s what the flu does. Did you know that something as gross and deadly as a viral infection reinvents itself too? Yep. Learned that during my stint as a copywriter at an ad agency whose largest client was the state department of health.

Turns out, the flu has an amazing ability to rapidly evolve and render older vaccines useless against it. Read the research from the centers for disease control. Unlike other diseases that have been eradicated over the years, every year, a new influenza vaccine is composed and distributed, and every year, the flu virus evolves its immunity to it, and continues to hurt and kill tons of people.

It’s kind of a morbid example in the pandemic, but hell, if reinvention is good enough for the flu, it’s good enough for you.

Now that’s what you call a quality public service announcement.

What are you interested in accomplishing that requires you to reinvent yourself to accomplish?