Re-invention

One of the great gifts of being a professional in technology is the gift of re-invention.  What was true of me yesterday does not have to be true of me tomorrow.  As I was looking for opportunities to do something new, I made a purposeful decision to not focus on what I had been doing, but instead looked at what I could be doing.  I have done many things in my career ( running network cable, installing point of sale equipment, managing a helpdesk, and a laundry list of other things, the latest of which is focused on software development ), but one thing has always been true.  I have always liked picking something out that I had no idea how to do, and figuring out how to do it.

If you are a history teacher, or a dentist, or a contractor, your opportunity to re-invent yourself probably comes by changing careers.  Or, you probably get better and better at it, and move up, and possibly do great things with it, but you don’t get to say “Today I’m a dentist, but tomorrow I will be an eye doctor” without going back to school for a long time.

I love that yesterday I could be at Symantec, a huge company focused on building huge products with one piece of technology, and today I can be focused almost exclusively on mobile applications with a completely different set of skills, languages, and domain expertise required.

I suppose there is some amount of inefficiency in this approach.  I could just keep working on and doing the same things.  But I have learned enough to know it’s just not my bag.