Life. Reinvention. Mischief?

~ I like good mischief; reinvention, to not ask “what if?”, but “why not me, why not now?”

We chase growth.

It’s corporate culture.
It’s wanting to sell for more than you paid.
It’s betting on the right horse(s) in the market. Even when the odds tell us not to venture into unfamiliar territory.

But every day, we read of great inventions or reinventions of the common things we’ve long taken for granted.

Not everyone will see a floppy disk in a dusty drawer and recall when that was the next new-thang. Less than a generation later, it’s Nvidia. It’s ChatGPT. Soon, they’ll be yesterday’s news, and something new will replace, update or reinvent them.

Then, markets will quake. Investors will mutter, “Damn, I should have invested in that when I first heard about it.”

Well, think about that for a moment: What if the next new-thang isn’t out there?

What if it’s you?

New customers, new markets, new strategies—innovation is baked into the business world.
We hunt. We tweak. We pivot. Every quarter. Every year.

But when it comes to ourselves, to our patterns, purpose, and personal evolution, we’re (this is just my opinion) mostly stale. Static.

Simply, and sometimes blindly, following the same well-worn paths of family members and colleagues as we shuffle from mid-life to late-mid-life to our modern society’s exit strategy, the parking lot of lonely isolation and irrelevance, called a retirement home.

We follow inherited roadmaps.

We default to norms.

Why?

What if reinvention wasn’t a response to crisis...

What if it was more deliberate? Just our quiet, private form of mischief?

Reinvention doesn’t have to mean escape.
It doesn’t have to mean crisis either.

No need to disappear into a wellness retreat or reappear with a motorcycle and a new tattoo. Reinvention, done right, is more subtle. More powerful.

In business, we don’t wait to be broken before we adapt. We act, iterate, and reinvent as a matter of course.

But in our personal lives?

Most of us stick to roles we didn’t choose, beliefs we never questioned, and traditions we never challenged.

What if we applied the same curiosity, the same restlessness, to ourselves?

What if the best new product isn’t a campaign or a strategy, but a ‘new and improved’ version of you? Updated, upgraded, untethered from someone else’s idea of who you’re supposed to be - how does that look to you?

What if mischief isn’t rebellion at all?

What if it’s simply imagination, finally turned inward?

Maybe the wisdom isn’t going to come from someone new on the scene—they’re too busy inventing tomorrow for everyone.

I want to invent tomorrow for me.
Me. Me. Me!

Proust is long dead, but his words are not:

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust

Maybe it’s not about being newer, better, or more original.
Maybe it’s about seeing the same raw materials—our lives, our work, our wants—with new eyes.

And those eyes?

They’re ours to open. Or not.