It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be.

For many months after graduating college, I was unhappy. I had no appetite for what the real world had to offer me and spent most of my time wishing I was back in a place where I could float between intellectually stimulating discussions covering a breadth of topics. If you followed my blog during this point in time, you probably remember that this funk made for a string of rather depressing posts. 

The problem is that I don't deal well with big change. I never have. And while I completely realize and accept that both "good" and "bad" change exist in this world, I only attach a negative connotation to the word. Things are changing. He has changed. Those phrases don't sound positive to me. The move from college was especially difficult because I didn't want the change. Things were good. There was no need for change.

As I've grappled with my distaste for change over the years, I've learned to take it in smaller steps. Bite-size, incremental change. Though it makes for a more myopic view, I find this much easier to digest. 

In psychology, the foot-in-the-door technique explains how people are more likely to go along with many smaller requests that push in the direction of some larger attitude or behavior change, rather than accepting the completely new attitude or behavior up front. For example, in a classic experiment where home owners were asked to put a large sign promoting safe driving on their front lawns, those who had been asked two weeks earlier to sign a petition to keep California beautiful were much more likely to comply with the invasive sign than those who had never been contacted before. 

A couple weeks ago, I found myself dealing with a college student whose apartment I wanted to sublet. After stringing me along for a couple days, she pulled a complete 180. On Tuesday evening, she asked me to come to her apartment to meet her apartment-mates and drop off a deposit. When I arrived, she told me that she in fact, she did not plan to move until January. I just stood there staring at her blankly, unable to comprehend why this information had been withheld from me until this sacred moment. Don't worry though. I'm going to figure this out. She offered. I'm going to be texting my parents a lot over the next couple days. It was at this moment, standing there in the doorway of this apartment that faces UC San Diego, that I realized Wow, I'm not a college student anymore. Nothing against them, but I'm just not one of them. 

Over the past couple years, without my even noticing it, I have adapted the way I approach people and situations to be more fitting for the corporate environment. I don't think there was anything wrong with the way I interacted with others before and I certainly haven't fundamentally changed at my core, but something needed to be different for this different phase of life. This college student had a more free-flowing attitude and mindset about this situation and though I probably would have had the same attitude just 18 months ago, now I was thinking on a more structured, concrete timeline. 

I recently finished reading Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography (Here, I'll say it for you: How does Ro always bring it back to Steve Jobs?). During one of his iconic walks, Jobs told Mike Markkula, a man who was like a father to him, that he wanted Apple to be an enduring company and asked how he could accomplish this goal. Markkula responded that it was all about reinvention. That companies that last know how to reinvent themselves. "You've got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis" (Isaacson 320). As with most passages in the book, this was a reflective passage for me. 

To me, "reinvention" is a wonderfully romantic spin on "change." Reinvention takes something that at some point, was beautiful, and makes it more so. It facilitates change by leveraging what we know to be comfortable. Most importantly, while "change" implies something wrong that must be fixed, "reinvention" allows you to take something that works just fine, and make it better. It allows for endurance. For the things that we love to last as time progresses. 

Go ahead and reinvent the wheel. And as long as nothing changes, as long as the wheel still rolls, our lives, our society, will continue to move forward.