I had a gig that I loved. Of all the various “straight” jobs I’ve had, I felt that this one was as close to being perfect as I’d ever find. I felt uniquely qualified to carry it out. Then, a governor was elected, a man with an angry spirit much like Mr. Trump’s. He knew nothing about workforce training and because he was stupid (but thought he knew more than anyone else), he cut the budget for training in Maine. He continued his assault on the state’s training infrastructure for eight years.

Once I found out the job I enjoyed and was good at was going away, I figured it was time to craft my personal brand. That’s how the JBE originated in 2012.

I considered a host of various templates and ways to message what I wanted to say. I made sure I included a blog as part of the new WordPress site I built and plugged into the world wide web. Ultimately, I settled on the idea of “reinvention” because in 2004 and 2005 that’s what’d I was doing—reinventing my way of doing things. By 2012, I’d gotten pretty good at it. Writing was an essential skill I utilized then and still do.

I read Alvin Toffler in high school and I came back to the noted futurist during my period of retooling. It was Toffler who “gave me” the tagline of “learn, unlearn, and relearn” as a means of understanding what learning was in the context of creating something brand new—again, that idea of reinvention.

Besides Toffler, there were others. I became a fan of the likes of Seth Godin, Daniel Pink, and of course, I was already a fan of Mark Baumer, perhaps my biggest cheerleader relative to the need to embrace new ideas and doing it with gusto and with a certain kind of fearlessness. Continue reading →