Brand You Survival Kit

Embrace Ambiguity

Mastery is great, but even that is not enough. You have to be able to change course without a bead of sweat, or remorse. All bets are off. Nobody knows what the hell he or she is doing. You can't just "deal with" constantly slipping and sliding circumstances; you actually need to thrive on that ambiguity. There is a fabulous book called Franklin and Winston, by Jon Meacham (Random House, 2003), and one of the many one-liners worth remembering is when Eleanor Roosevelt says, "Franklin just can't wait to get into the Oval Office every morning because he loves the game so much." If you watch The West Wing, or read the front page of The Washington Post, you know these Washington people get a kick out of the game. And you need to love your game.

Loyalty Ain't Dead

It's more important than ever, in fact. It's loyalty to peers in your industry and not to a hierarchy. You have to develop a Rolodex obsession, building and deliber-ately managing an ever-growing network of professional contacts. My wife, Susan Sargent, runs a home-furnishings business. She's planning to go from two retail stores to a half-dozen or so over the next number of years. To do this, she needs money. Susan is not a typical old-girl networker, but she has been working the networks in Boston, with angel investors and so on, which is a little unnatural for her, but that's the way you get engaged with these things. Some networks are dead ends, but if she pursues enough of them, she'll probably work her way into the right ones.

Appreciate New Technology

The hard truth is that lots of people simply aren't going to "get" new technologies. But you don't have to be an expert, just someone who recognizes how technology can suddenly turn a business upside-down. The stuff that's going to change the world? For the first five years, it's totally useless. The hype is insane. But then you wake up one morning and discover that a leading candidate for a major-party presidential nomination is some oddball from Vermont who figured out how to use the Web to start a movement. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the number-one test of a first-rate mind is its ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time while continuing to function. With technology, the answer is to be completely skeptical and totally naive in equal measure. The term that we need to invent is "dewy-eyed curmudgeon."

Never Be Satisfied

Reimagining Brand You is not a onetime thing. Picking up new skills on an as-needed basis used to be a reasonable strategy. Not anymore. You need to revolutionize your portfolio of skills every half-dozen years, if not more often. This is a minimum survival necessity. Uprooting may be painful, but to me, these are truly exciting times. Remember my mantra: distinct ... or extinct.