Reinventing yourself – part 4

Reinvention is a continuous process – not an endpoint

I may not have made the point clear enough in my earlier posts, because Steven Fassman made this reasonable comment in response to my earlier post:

I am working on reinventing my life right now and I’ve found that I have achieved many of the goals that I set for myself in high school.

Achieving your goals can be a terrible thing. You’ve used up a great amount of passion and energy to reach them and then you have nothing left.

What he says is absolutely true if you have only one goal in life. When you achieve it, the game is over for you.

The solution is to have a continuum of goals reaching out into the future. As long as you have goals, you will have something to live for. The man without goals is already dead, and it’s just a matter of time until he realizes it and keels over.

Reinvention is another way of describing a self-directed transformation in response to changes in circumstance. I was talking with a reader named Kate  who has been following this series of posts with interest because she is working on transforming herself and her life again. She made the point that I may say reinvention, but she sees it as transformation.

She is one of the most vital and interesting people I know and I am sure that it springs from her desire to continue transforming herself.

Whether you call it transformation or reinvention, you give yourself a new lease on life when you reevaluate your goals and lay out new ones when it is appropriate.

The first step, of course, is to recognize that goals are not cast in stone. They were appropriate for the time that you made them, but they may not be valid at the present time as a result of events that have taken place.

Reinvention is a way to align your goals and your actions so that life is more worthwhile and more satisfying. If your new goals include helping others, you will find that they are easier to achieve. I have covered the reasons for this elsewhere, but it should be obvious that goals which take others into account will find more agreement than those goals which seek to suppress or harm others.

I appreciate the feedback I am receiving. Let me know if you are having trouble reinventing yourself. Maybe I can suggest some ways for you to get started.

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