Self-Re-Invention: Innovation in Every Circumstance

I always had this notion in my life of striving for perfection. I wanted to do good: connect with people, do good work, make the world just a bit better place. I always thought there was a single way to do that. Learn to control my behavior, optimize my routine, find the perfect workflow, and I was trying to find it.

And… I succeeded, for a little while. I often found a nice way to do things. It always worked. Until it did not. And I always wondered what went wrong, and quickly went on to look for the new order in way to do things. Finding it, I have always thought: “Now I know the truth, now I know what I should have been doing all along!” Why did I not know the right way to do things from the beggining?

This pattern kept repeating in my life. And I always though: “Why do I not find the right way from the start?” But it seems that Eminem knew the truth all long:

“I had to go to that place, to get to this one.”

It always seems you have to do things one way, to learn that you should have been doing something else. You gotta keep learning. And there is no wrong. No that there are not bad choices, there are certainly many. Bad you do not know until you do that. And you cannot figure out what you have to do from the start, the only thing that you can do is try, and some things will stick, some will not.

So I will keep reinventing myself. My habits always stick half a year, sometimes two years. Sometimes moments come where I finally see what I should have seen from long time before, and I see what it all means. And those moments are hard earned by the moments where I did it all different way, which worked at that moment, but not anymore. And those moments pass, and new experiences come, and I change.

The Dutch have a slendid word for this: “houvast”, something to hold on to. It can be anything, it is your basis. Sometimes you are searching to what you can hold on to. And you always find, eventually, but it always goes aways. So that you can find the next thing, and that is beautiful.

I will try to embrace it. This blog. Has changed 3 times already. 3 platforms. And we keep going. Same me. 5 years older. We keep pushing. Same person. Different at every moment. Isn’t it quite poetic?

PS: Maybe the best answer is no answer. This is why I think that investment in index works so well. You do not know what will work, you just know something will work, and that is good enough.