The Self Must be Invented and Recreated

“The self must be invented and recreated.” I read these words nearly nine years ago in the foreword to Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude and they have resonated with me to this day because of how perfectly they apply to leading in a rapidly and perpetually evolving tech environment.

Back in 2011, the pace of tech innovation was just gaining real steam. Open source projects matured in both quantity and quality and provided free foundational building blocks to dev teams. The cloud, virtual machines, and distributed computing drove the cost of compute down, effectively eliminating a major barrier to entry for small firms. And the proliferation of APIs provided access to even more capabilities, allowing developers to be hyper focused on building innovative offerings.

While the pace was quickening, the window to prove and scale an offering was still about 3-5 years. Today it’s more like 18 months. Technologies are also commoditizing today at an astonishing rate relative to ten years ago. Previously, a novel innovation held onto premium pricing for years, but today you see even the most innovative technologies commoditized often within months. This is arguably what happened most recently with artificial intelligence APIs like speech-to-text, which were commoditized in just 18 months.

Looking back at the early 2010s, you can see how source code (SaaS apps) exploded when the infrastructure, tools, and skills reached a certain maturity point. Today we’re approaching a similar inflection point, only this time it’ll be a data explosion using AI to automate and augment work. The AI hype has been loud and it’s taken years for the required infrastructure, tools, and skills to mature, but we’re about there now. Just look at the AI Open Source landscape as proof! DataOps/MLOps will be to AI what DevOps was to app development and operations. Kubernetes and microservices further decompose apps and allow them to run anywhere that’s best, thus accelerating innovation and providing choice. And major vendors such as IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon AWS provide the necessary tools and runtime environments to productize models in a fair and unbiased way.

If you buy this rough characterization of the tech environment that I’ve painted, then you’ll likely also agree that successful leaders over the past ten years largely have been those that learn fast, stay curious, and balance a strategic mindset with an execution one. As the pace of technology kicked into overdrive, it was the leaders that mastered inventing and recreating themselves that overwhelmingly succeeded.

With AI on the verge of exploding, now’s the time to define or refine how you invent and recreate yourself so you can capitalize on what will be a new period of rapid innovation and growth driven by AI.

I started developing my process for constantly inventing and recreating myself nine years ago and have been refining it ever since. Challenging myself to constantly change has been hard. It's required continually defining a sense of purpose, even if only tenuous, of who I'm becoming. However since I never actually become my vision, I've had to develop mechanisms for dealing with the uncomfortableness constant change brings. Fuel had to also be added to an already existing love for learning, but then guardrails needed to be built to focus on the right things. Finally, an infrastructure needed to be built for capturing and consuming information efficiently, including fighting a near ceaseless battle between analogue and digital methods.

Over a series of two blog posts, I will share my process as a point of reference. It isn’t the way, it’s simply a way. But my hope is that, if nothing else, it’s a valuable perspective.

My first post addresses the imperative for developing a hybrid mind. The second post outlines how to build an infrastructure for maximizing information throughput and capturing ideas.