Reinvent 4.0

[Steven]

Rebeccawas right on both occasions. For me, change was abrupt at first and then slow and tenuous. Encompassing both the personal and professional arenas of my life, it was an opportunity to reinvent myself entirely by leaving The Great Discontent, the magazine I co-founded with my ex-husband, and eventually merging my social-worker roots with the years I spent interviewing hundreds of creatives by training to become a creative coach.

There are two items of note in the definitions above. First, reinvention entails producing something new based on what already exists. It is not a total repudiation of what came before. In a recent phone conversation with my mentor I was reminded that even as I embark on new professional endeavors that will redefine my creative role, I am still me. You are still you wherever you go. Reinvention honors your past and all of the lessons, experiences, training, and expertise you bring with you while simultaneously looking forward to future possibilities.

Many of us have worked for companies that have mission statements, but how many of us have personal mission statements or even know how to write one? This is crucial to uncovering why you are making life-changing decisions. You can have one mission statement for your entire life, or you can form different statements for various areas of your life if you want to separate them out.

Remember your why and let your North Stars guide you. At some point, or several points, you will feel discouraged, question your new path, and wonder if you made the right choice. When this happens, revisit your North Stars and imagine how your life will feel once you have more of what you want. Reread your mission statement and remember why you are on a new path. Go back to both as often as you need.

Build change into your daily routine. What changes can you make in your day-to-day to have a calendar that reflects your priorities? What does your roadmap to change look like on a calendar? Think about it in terms of the day-to-day changes, monthly goals, and quarterly goals that will help you get closer to the life you want.

I did not seek out the journey of self-reinvention, but it found me anyway. Even as I left my marriage and the magazine I co-founded and set my sights on building my coaching business, my work has continued to transform, sometimes unexpectedly. The process has felt both sudden and slow, abrupt and drawn-out, but I have learned to embrace the dualities of reinvention. And, ultimately, I have realized that the person I am becoming is not someone foreign or completely new, but someone I recognize because she is who I wanted to become all along.

Tina Essmaker is a NYC-based coach, writer, and speaker who equips the creative community to move beyond inspiration into action. She is cofounder and former Editor in Chief of The Great Discontent magazine, for which she interviewed more than 250 creators. Her decade-long background in social work combined with her expertise in themes that dot the creative landscape are the foundation of her coaching practice working with individuals and teams across creative industries.

When engaging in research, I know its a good idea to read lots of papers and talk to others about what has been done before and what is currently being researched to avoid "reinventing the wheel". That is, to avoid researching/publishing a result that has already been discovered.

In fields where physical experiments are common, replication studies are necessary. But in theoretical/computational research, originality is key and duplication seems to be generally frowned upon. How common is it to inadvertently publish a finding that was already discovered? What do you when you happen to find yourself in this situation? Should you just scrap your work if your methods are too similar to someone else's?

If your work has already been published, post a reference to the prior art in your web page listing your publications. (You do have a web page listing your publications, don't you?) If possible, publish an addendum to your paper. Email anyone who has cited your paper already, giving them the earlier reference. When asked to review papers that cite your paper, include the earlier reference in your report. Become a walking advertisement for the earlier work.

If your work hasn't already been published, try to figure out which parts of your work have actually been done before. Some of your results will appear verbatim in the earlier work, so you can't take credit for them. Some of your results will be easy corollaries of the earlier work, so you still can't take credit for them. But perhaps some of your results will take the old work in a new nontrivial direction. Build on that.

Besides the excellent JeffE's answer, I would like to add one more point to the phenomena of reinventing a wheel. It touches more "research towards an already invented wheel", rather than "publishing a reinvented wheel".

You have a problem and need to crack it. Your problem is practical and novel, you know that. But in order to solve it you need to invent some machinery and you just do not know whether it already exists, or not - simply because you do not have a good feeling for all the subtle aspects and issues of your problem. In such a situation, it is often easier to steam ahead, learn as you go, invent something for your problem and then, when you already are familiar with all the quirks and dark corners of your problem, look around carefully to find out how's the thing you invented actually called. The odds are, it already exists in some form, most probably invented in a different niche for different purposes, but it happens to be very similar to your problem.

Of course the above does not work for everybody, because it can be a frustrating experience to find that somebody else already invented what you did too (usually already long ago and in a better quality than you). My angle on this is to be always proud of myself, because those early solutions tend to come from very smart people, so if I managed to independently come up with the same thing as they did, it's a reason to feel better.

At that moment, however, one should realize, his/her approach and angle to the whole issue is slightly different than that of the guys who invented it earlier. You simply came to the same junction from a different direction and you are heading elsewhere. At that point it's just great to proceed in your direction, because you can be almost sure, that your direction is original and unexplored territory - otherwise the earlier work would be cited and that's easy to find out.

The process I describe above also partially explains why inventions tend to be named after guys who arrived to the junction later. They simply had a perspective which took them farther in terms of social impact than was that of those who originally solved the problem. Often solutions get named after the guys who popularize them and make their applications bloom, not those who solved them originally.

In computers science it can be frustrating when people publish a summary of their methods, provide results, but no code so that others can apply this to other data sets. So you end up reinventing the wheel.

It happened to me once (in 40 years of doing research). I proved a very cute theorem in complex analysis by using tools from a (seemingly) totally unrelated area of math. (This connection between two unrelated research areas was the most interesting part of the paper.) I asked everybody I knew who might have known if the result was proven earlier - everybody told me that this is a new theorem. I posted the preprint but did not send it to a journal since I wanted to do a deeper literature search. It took me two years, but eventually I found that the result was indeed published (in German) in 1920 by some obscure German mathematician who proved it by a totally different method. I told everybody involved about the situation and moved on. Afterwards, people started to rediscover this theorem with different proofs. They also started to ask me to publish my proof since they found it useful for other purposes and eventually I did, of course, giving full credit to that German mathematician. The moral of this story, if there is any, is that sometimes reinventing the wheel can be useful.

I would assume, as you mentioned you are in theoretical/computational research, that there is some specific scenario you are referring to which may not be relevant to my field (Biomedical science) or others.

How common is it to inadvertently publish a finding that was already discovered? Very common in most fields, with the large number of journals and the "publish or perish" machine continuing to churn out hundreds of thousands of manuscripts more and more of the same is being published, and it won't be stopping anytime soon. So the chances that researchers produce the same or similar work/results is highly likely. The paper mills copying others' work to produce completely fabricated work is also highly likely.

What do you when you happen to find yourself in this situation? Should you just scrap your work if your methods are too similar to someone else's?NEVER EVER scrap your work! If you can't get it published in a high impact journal, publish in a reputable low impact journal, if you can't publish there put it up on arXiv or similar to get your work attributed to you ASAP.

If you have inadvertently, not intentionally rediscovered something that you missed in the current literature, amend your paper, better yet write another paper about how you think these parallel discoveries could have come about and compare and contrast, then reference both papers.

If you somehow were lucky enough to replicate or reproduce someone else's research or results independently, this is a great thing, possibly it means you are doing robust research, you should be proud.

I would also add that many many researchers do this deliberately for a living, they advertently copy others research, publish it as their own "original research" and then use it to build a career on. If you are looking for sustainability as an academic i.e. winning lots of grants it is a viable option as it can also be done transparently in biomedical research as many researchers can have similar research and the "original idea" is a bit ambiguous. Anyone copying others research to win grants can just say they are replicating others work if caught, or say "to our knowledge we are the first to discover this...", the old "get out of plagiarism free cards" !

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