I believe I am lucky. I have always had the chance to meet a lot of new people, in Romania as well as abroad, adults, young people, children, people from various backgrounds, various industries, various social layers. I have had the chance to see a lot of things, to be exposed to many new concepts, different cultures; Sometimes I’ve learned, and sometimes I haven’t, like all of us. One way of seeing things that I have always had was based on my desire to never be a relic of the past, to not be stuck in the way I did things in previous years. It has been one of the battles of my life ever since I was very young.

I was a teacher for 6 years – every year I would prepare new materials for my classes; I did not recycle materials over the years. I have always been aware of the imminence of routine. Observing my older colleagues was a big advantage for me – I set (as I did many times in my life) the azimuth (this time by avoidance: I knew I did not want to become that; I did not want to do the same things every year). It was hard for me because I had to start over, again and again; it was hard for me because this continuous renewal required great effort, and I did not always succeed in what I did.

I was not the best teacher – I did not know how to do things, but I always put my students first – as well as I could in my early twenties.

Nowadays, I am trying to keep up with the times, every year, every month, every day – I forced myself to switch from Microsoft to Apple, from BB to iPhone, simply to learn new technology; I have learned to work with various social media platforms to keep up with the times I live in (beyond the usual platforms, I ‘surf’ Snapchat, Slack, I check musical.ly, just to see where the world is going). I have hired two very young colleagues to make myself cope with the permanent challenge.

I have always read a lot, learned, studied, gone to more courses than many other people. Everything to keep up with the times, but also to satisfy my curiosity.

It scares me when I hear someone younger than me saying they have nothing more to learn or that they tired of how much they have already learned; it scares me to sometimes see the level of superficiality; it scares me when I hear of faculties graduated only “to have a degree”, of people who think that at the age 25 they can teach life lessons (and that doesn’t mean you would be more entitled to do that at 45). I think it’s always good to have a personal innovation strategy. We need to reevaluate who we are, who we are not, what we can and cannot do, how the others see us and reset our ‘compass’.

And yet, sometimes I think it might be a relic of the old-fashioned way of doing things, despite all the efforts… surely, for some 20-30-year-old, I will be obsolete, no matter what…

What do you do to reinvent yourself?