It's Time to Reinvent Yourself

Your legs are shackled, handcuffed behind your back, and a crane picks you up upside down and lowers you into a glass wall tank.

There's one minute to escape or drown.

How about you? Have you ever been in a spot where you felt there was no escape?

I can relate to Houdini's escapes because I felt at times my life was in a Water Torture Cell.

There's been no one like Houdini since and no one crazy enough to try.

Houdini turned 199 years old on March 24, 2023. He died at 52 years from Peritonitis.

He could escape anything except fate.

Even though his tricks were staged they required a lot of skill, fearlessness, and craziness.

I wasn't literally lowered into a glass cell, head first, and feet shackled. Holding my breath hoping I could get out.

My torture cell looked like the front lines of the American urban war. Homelessness, familial estrangement, poverty, violence, hate, unemployment, and a resounding feeling of hopelessness.

I had no assistant ready to break the glass.

Houdini's escapes are symbolic examples of reinvention.

Survival reinvention means how to start over again after suffering a traumatic loss.

I became a survival reinvention escape artist.

Escaping by changing the background is not escaping. It's moving your luggage from one location to another.

Escaping reality is checking out.

What is survival reinvention?

The action or process through which something changes so much seems new.

The reinvention idea applies to many situations from changing your business to survival.

A popular checklist for personal reinvention

*Challenge assumptions

*Reimagine your core competencies

*Develop an ambitious and inspiring dream

Good ideas but what if you lost everything? There is no solid ground to launch into the new?

The reinvention I'm talking about is the survival kind. Not the job change kind.

How to be a Chief Reinvention Officer of Life

Reinvention and change are part of the same energy. You can't have one without the other.

Change is never painful, only resistance to change is painful. Most of the time, when any change happens, the outcome will not turn out the way you want. By refusing to accept this change, we make it worse because we're fighting against it, against the flow of life. -Buddha

When disaster strikes there isn't always time to make plans. You must grab whatever you can and run.

During the Great 2008 Recession, I was choking upside down in the Water Torture Cell.

I lost a good-paying job and spent the next years unemployed. Subsequently, it led to ruin.

A storm blew the roof off my life.

I had no one and nowhere to turn.

Shit happens and the silver lining is I lived to tell the story.

I developed an ambitious and inspiring dream.

I liquidated what I had and expatriated to Bali.

Years later, I published what I learned about survival reinvention in two books "Guitarlo" and "Solo-10 Years in Bali."

Kirkus Reviews called it "The best reinvention story on the shelf."

SOLO - 10 Years in Bali

If I could compress my experience into a handy Zen checklist it would be as follows.

*When there's nowhere to go you have arrived

*The man who moved a mountain began carrying away small stones

*Quit clutching at your crotch

*Hide a key under your tongue

Houdini will always remain a source of inspiration. He was a great escape artist.

You can be too without getting too wet.