Reinvention Isn’t Necessarily a One-Time Event

The life you build may ask to be rebuilt. And, then it may ask again. The first time I changed direction, I thought I was done. I wasn’t.

I was 26, sharing a cubicle with three other people. One of them was in his fifties. He was easy to work with, patient with my questions, and knew the system we maintained better than anyone on the floor. I didn’t think much about it at the time. He was just the guy at the next desk.

It’s only looking back that I understand what I was looking at. He was doing, at 55, the same work I was doing at 26. And somewhere underneath the daily routine of tickets and systems and status meetings, a question started forming that I couldn’t yet name: is this what I’m signing up for?

I had done everything right by the standards I was raised with. Good grades, a good degree, a job at a Fortune 500 company straight out of college. By any outside measure, I was successful. But a year in, the challenges had worn off. Nothing was new. I was busy, and productive, and living for Friday like everyone else in that cubicle row.

I didn’t want to know one system for thirty years, nor did I want to live for Fridays. I wanted the bigger picture. I wanted to understand how an entire business worked, not just the corner of it I’d been assigned to maintain.

So I left. Eventually building my own business, doing web design and development for clients. For a while, that was exactly the antidote I needed. Every project started with a blank page and a conversation about what someone actually needed. I got to create something from nothing, again and again.

But businesses have their own version of the cubicle, and I found mine without meaning to. More than half my time drifted into maintaining what I’d already built for clients. Keeping websites running. Fixing what broke. It wasn’t bad work. But it wasn’t the work that made me feel alive, and I felt the drift before it could calcify into another thirty-year routine.

So I made a change. I hired people to handle the maintenance, and I moved back toward the creative work that had drawn me to this in the first place. Eventually, that shifted again. I started training others, because I wanted a more direct kind of impact than a finished website could give me.

Each time, the pattern was the same. I’d build something, settle into it, and then notice the settling had started to look like standing still. The question that first showed up in that cubicle never fully left. It just kept returning in a new setting.

Reinventing your life once doesn’t mean you’re finished. It means you’ve learned to recognize the signal. For me, the signal is boredom, the restlessness that creeps in before I even notice that routine has taken over.

These days, I ask that question more often and more honestly than I ever could inside a cubicle. Not “am I successful,” but “is this the direction I want to keep heading.” Some seasons the answer means building something new. Some seasons, like this one, it means choosing freedom over one more project.

The man in the cubicle wasn’t living wrong. He may have been exactly where he wanted to be. I wasn’t, and noticing the difference is what started everything that came after.

If this resonated, you might find Your Values, Your Season useful. It's a short workbook for identifying the values that matter most in the season you're actually in — built to be revisited each time something shifts, the way it inevitably will.