I’ve always thought that there’s a deep comfort and sense of hope in a quote often attributed to George Eliot: “It is  never too late to be what you might have been”.

For anyone who watched True Detective last year you’ll have seen a moodier, darker and more intense side to Matthew McConaughey. Now of course he’s an actor and a key ability of actors is to wear different masks and adopt different personas. But McConaughey is coming from a different place. On CBS last year (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/matthew-mcconaughey-on-dallas-buyers-club/)  he said.

“I was going fine in my career. I was enjoying my career. My life started to feel more exciting than my career did… I said, I’m gonna have to stop doing what I’ve been doing. The first thing was saying no to the things that I was doing. I got together with my wife. We said, ‘Look, we’re financially okay. We’re gonna eat and pay the rent. It’s gonna be dry for a while. Don’t know how long.’ That was sort of scary. We didn’t know how long. I just wanted to spice it up. I wanted to shake things up for myself. I wanted to go down to do some roles that shook my floor, that made me uncomfortable.”

I like the idea of taking action to shake things up. That’s a good way to start the process of reinvention. We’re all a work in progress but most of us never consciously invented ourselves in the first place. As McConaughey put it…

“I un-branded, I think is the best way I could say it”.

Un-brand. Re-start. Re-invent. Or more accurately… Invent yourself. You probably never took a conscious decision to be who you are in the first place. As today unfolds, why settle for who you were yesterday? Start shaking things up. It’s time to take the action that will consciously Invent yourself for the first time. Who are you going to start being today?