Disrupters by Patti Fletcher

Author:Patti Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781613083802
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
Published: 2017-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Reinvent Yourself. Again.

Don’t just take the fork in the road; take the hard one.

When I went to college, I chose one far away from home where I knew absolutely no one. Even more important, no one knew me.

I grew up spending a lot of time with my father’s side of the family, a large Irish-Catholic family where cousins, aunts, and uncles numbered well into the double digits. Regardless of my personality, ambitions, or flaws, I already had a lifetime of expectations that came simply from being born. I wanted to start fresh, in an environment with few assumptions about who or what I was supposed to be.

It sucked.

I did, however, eventually make some great friends (some lifelong). It taught me how to survive and adapt in a situation where I had exactly nothing going for me. Most important, it taught me the value of going where no one knows your name so that you are free to reinvent yourself instead of having to be the person others see you as.

I’ve kept this habit as I’ve gotten older. I am forever landing in situations where I am in way over my head, where I know almost no one or nothing, and where I have to figure it out as I go along (the old joke of building the airplane while flying it) while striving to create a better version of myself.

I started my professional career at SAP in my 20s and stayed there for years, but eventually decided to leave for IBM, where I could start fresh with a new challenge. I left IBM to lead a large-scale marketing transformation at an information services firm, an industry I knew nothing about, before taking on my own business and returning to work with SAP. I came back into the SAP ecosystem in a completely different capacity. Like so many professionals before me, I found it easier to leave and come back than to stay on the same track.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was following in the footsteps of the successful women we’re profiling here. Perhaps the most important thing you can do to rapidly succeed in business as a woman is to continually take the jobs, roles, responsibilities, and projects that scare the hell out of you.

“The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.”

—Steven Pressfield

As I said in my dissertation, “increased self-confidence came from continual personal development.” Our overachievers continually pushed themselves out of their comfort zones and into areas where they had little demonstrable competence—only a demonstrable capability to perform.

To list just some of their areas of expertise:

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