THE most impressive feature of Mr Bill Clinton's ascendance to the presidency is how, in his early years, he reinvented himself to save his political career.
Back in 1978, during his first two-year term as Governor of Arkansas, Mr Clinton was an arrogant, super-liberal, I-know-everything 32-year-old. Then he was booted out of office.
For the next two years he listened to people and thought about what went wrong. As a result, he reshaped himself into a much more sympathetic, less arrogant, more moderate, more compromising type of politician. You can praise or criticise this sort of reinvention, but you cannot argue with its effectiveness.
I wonder how many of us have the discipline or insight to reinvent ourselves when our careers confront a similar crisis.
If you are an executive who has stalled in middle-management because your personality rubs people the wrong way, can you reinvent yourself into a more likable person? If you are a lawyer bored with the law, can you make the mental leap required to become an entrepreneur? If you are a secretary yearning to be an executive, can you reposition yourself so your bosses grant your wish? Almost every great leap forward requires some form of self-examination and reinvention in which we identify our strengths, make sacrifices, seize opportunities and announce the change to the world.
On paper my career reads like a series of reinventions - from lawyer to sports agent to salesman to manager. But in my mind, these are merely skills I learned along the way to being an entrepreneur.