Daily Inspiration: “It’s not yesterday’s success that matters – it’s how you reinvent it for tomorrow that counts!”

“It’s not yesterday’s success that matters – it’s how you reinvent it for tomorrow that counts!” Futurist Jim Carroll

I have lanyards! Name badges! Conference passes! Hundreds of them!

And they’re going out the door into the trash a little project that involves a little bit of home office cleanup.

It’s kind of amazing what you can collect when you’re too busy having fun. In my case, I’ve kept most of the conference badges where I’ve been a keynote speaker, reaching right back to 1991. My wife has been involved in a long and lonely struggle to manage them – hiding them, stuffing them in drawers, putting them in boxes, knowing that one day I would want to take a look back.

I did that yesterday – and what a bit of time travel it was!

In no particular order, here’s but a tiny sprinkling of just a few from the early years that caught my attention. Technology for lawyers! The Bottom Line accounting conference! Comdex in Atlanta (I was speaking about the powerful opportunity behind the idea of e-mail!) The CBTA – the Canadian Business Telecom Alliance, now defunct, which was once a powerful industry organization representing telephone companies. In a few other cases, I’m there as an author at a booksellers booth, or as a reporter with respect to one of my many news columns over the years.

But here’s the thing – other than a fun little trip down memory lane, all of this is quite irrelevant in terms of what might come next when it comes to our future opportunity. We all like to live in our past glories and bathe in the memory of our previous success – but the world around us will always change at a furious pace.

And so it’s our ability to take that previous success – the skills we have mastered,  the lessons we learned, the insight we developed – and turn it into our next gig, our next opportunity, our next hill to conquer – that really matters.