That’s the working title of the book I’m working on. The evolutionary part begins with The Age of Gutenberg and moves forward until now, the revolutionary part, and what will likely be called The Internet Age, or something very similar, by historians who will write about it and its effects. Both the evolution and the revolution have everything to do with “re-inventing yourself and your business and telling your story.” One of the things I want to do in this book, or maybe they would be better served in a follow up, is to tell the stories of people who have gone through the process of re-invention. I’ve gone through them, twice, and I’m working on the third. One of the people I hope to feature is Rebel Brown. Mark Schaefer commented on one of her posts about this yesterday. She is documenting her transformation on her blog and it’s wonderful to be able to follow her thought processes as she does so. It’s also incredibly generous of her to share all of that with us.
She wrote a post the other day titled “Is Life Fair?”. It grew out of a tweet where she shared this quote, “Life isn’t fair. Get used to it. Bill Gates”, noting that it seemed a bit cynical. She got more feedback than she had perhaps bargained for, a lot of it agreeing with Bill’s take on things. And with everything going on around us, I wonder if that’s really all that surprising? Her blog post about this asks some great questions about life and fair, questions you have, perhaps, asked yourself.
I sent her a tweet late Sunday afternoon after thinking about what she wrote. It quoted a passage from one of my favorite writers and thinkers, John Fowles. “In the whole, nothing is unjust. It may, to this or that individual, be unfortunate.” To me, that’s always been one of those universal truths. When we struggle as individuals, we might want to blame our God, our boss, our co-workers, our spouse, our kids, our neighbors – you get the idea I’m sure. And that’s fine, maybe that’s even human nature. But it doesn’t mean that “life is unfair” or as Fowles says, “unjust.” It just means that you, as an individual, are in the middle of unfortunate times, not unfair ones. There’s a huge difference between unfortunate and unfair.
Yesterday, she wrote, as promised in the Is Life Fair post, about her beliefs on fairness, We Are Responsible. She is, I think, so right. We make the choices, the decisions. She talks about her own tough times, unfair moments if you’re in that camp, as being the result of her own subconscious beliefs, driving her towards what would be called unfair, if you didn’t have the courage to take the responsibility for those beliefs. Be sure to read it if you haven’t already clicked over there and back.
Now what, you might be asking yourself, does any of that have to do with re-inventing yourself, your business, your story, and The Evolution of the Revolution? Everything! Because the revolution that is occurring all around us, the one that’s causing financial upheaval, job loss, home loss, health insurance loss, pain, suffering and all of the rest, is not because “life is unfair.” The institutions that are crumbling around us, because of a shift in distribution models, models that have driven our lives for hundreds of years, are not doing so because life is unfair. If you can just recognize and come to terms with this revolution, shift your thinking, just a bit, as Rebel did hers, you can re-invent yourself and hopefully you’ll prosper, almost certainly you’ll be happy. And maybe then you won’t have to worry about fair or unfair.
