What I Learned About Reinvention from Madonna
And how we need this to thrive with accelerating technology
Madonna is the artist who constantly reinvents herself. She started off “Like A Virgin” and a “Material Girl” then changed to a “Bad Girl”. Then, she became “Evita” and we didn’t cry for her, despite not being Argentina. She had “A Ray Of Light” and plead her “Confessions on the Dance Floor.” She had “4 Minutes”, claimed “I’m Addicted”, and eventually became Madame X.
During this time, the music industry completely changed from LPs, to cassettes, to CDs, to Napster, to Torrent, to streaming.
She continues to thrive despite these monumental changes. She hasn’t pigeonholed herself into a style. The pop treadmill keeps moving and she morphs right along with it.
This is why we need to all learn from Madonna.
In his recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Harari talks about the need for reinvention for all of us as we encounter new technologies that will be dramatically change how we interact with the world around us. Over the coming decades, each of us will need to undergo several reinventions if we are to prevent getting swept away by the accelerating change of technology hurtling towards the Singularity.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were things that seemed to have always existed and would never go away. Horse drawn carriage assemblers, coachmen, horse breeders, and manure cleaners, and many more were left behind when millennium-long industries were evaporated within a two-decade span.
However, the pile of industries that evaporated last century pales in comparison to the mass extinction (and rebirth) of industries that is occurring today. The result is that new forms of work that we never thought about, even ten years ago, are coming about and we will be faced with whether we adopt these new forms of work or try to resist them.
We might not know what lies ahead except that it will be impactful and a deep departure from what we do now. That’s why we need to be ready for reinvention. We need to be ready to take up roles that we didn’t think we’d ever hold. We also need to be ready to learn, even if only to have a crude understanding of emerging technologies.
GPT3, blockchain, and quantum entanglement are things we need to have a cursory understanding of just like the dial-up modem, web browser, and CVV were things we needed to know about in the late 1990s. Every five years, for the next ten, then every two years for the ten after that, then every year in the following decade, there will appear a new set of groundbreaking technologies.
We’ll need to figure out how to incorporate these technologies into our work and redefine ourselves. We may still need to hold a core set of beliefs about ourselves that hold true throughout the changes but how we apply those beliefs to our livelihood needs to be flexible. Putting it altogether, Madonna said it best:
Just like a muse to me, you are a mystery
Just like a dream, you are not what you seem
