It’s an idea that’s ignited. And it’s time to call it what it is: A movement. Reinvention is happening on a global scale and it’s picking up momentum.
Reinvention is about being open to culture shifting ideas. It is about creating these ideas and being exposed to these ideas, and putting them into practice. Reinvention wants to create a new operating system for daily life.
There are as many reasons to reinvent oneself, one’s career, one’s place in the world, the company one works for, the country one lives in, as there are people on Earth.
Call it change, shift, transformation, or just make up your own word for what your and your friends and neighbors are going through.
If you’re adapting, swerving, rolling into a whole new stage in life, welcome to the movement.
Reinvention isn’t about following social norms, accepted values, or business as usual.
The movement is on the Internet, but it isn’t bound by the Internet. It’s being transmitted by free and curious and inventive minds, all over the planet, from pole-to-pole. It’s being communicated in all kinds of ways. It’s in the bio-region you live in, your state, your city, and your neighborhood.
The Reinvention movement has just as much to do with face-to-face interactions as it does with the culture of digital connectivity.
People with the most open minds have been the first to catch on, dig in, and map out their own space in the immense changes going on — not just in social media life on the Internet, but in life really lived, in face-to-face interactions. Sure the web is ubiquitous and as portable as a pocket-sized phone, but everyone is best served by remembering these communication devices are tools, and our minds are the real transformation transmission devices.
In a time when more information is available to more people than at any point in history, it’s time to step back and assess what an overload of digital data does to human minds at different life stages.
While digital connectivity is a huge component of the reinvention process, it isn’t everything the soothsayers in Silicon Valley would like us to think it is. There’s an added complexity in our lives brought about by the reinvention process, as much as by any digital tool in our lives.
However much transparency is the new model of social media, everything still first happens as an idea within the minds of an individual or a group. Reinvention knows this and is spreading the word. Word of mouth is as powerful as it always was.
There’s a multilayered essence to human beings many of the leading social digital pioneers just aren’t getting. Even in the act of trying to transform language to bend to a wrongly imagined social future, they’re misunderstanding how people see through the manipulation of meaning, and will just ignore the false meaning and invent their own language instead.
Language matters in the world of reinvention. Don’t blindly accept a tech company reinventing the English language for you. In societies, poets and novelists have been assigned the job of reinventing and reigniting language, not high-tech CEOs. The same holds true for politicians. Don’t just go along with the program when a politician tries to reinvent the language. Dig deeper, and explore the actual intent behind the reinvented phrase.
Sometimes reinvention is about first unplugging, standing still, traveling, reversing direction entirely, changing behavior, choosing to break out of a comfortable illusion embedded in a daily routine, picking a career path you’ve been dreaming of for years, but no one in your circle of friends or family would ever suspect you had any interest in.
Thoughts and images are being transmitted at a pace unimaginable by our ancestors. Ideas cause civilizations to leap ahead. For whatever reason, the digital world came along and is tangible and interactive, and shaping billions of lives and minds. Attention is the stuff of the social web, and where attention is being spent is how people are being tracked on the new Internet. Paying attention to how digital and social and tech is shaping your mind is an essential imaginary app to plug into your existence.
Find more connections. Understand more thoroughly. Ask challenging questions. Pay attention to how your digital life is altering your perspective on how the world operates. Use digital communication devices, but don’t be used by them.
Reinvention can be about using momentum to build a world for everyone’s mutual growth and livability. Finding one’s own path to reinvention is truly what’s happening, and it’s an interesting time to be here and experience this shift, this change, this global transformation.
