Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future by Dorie Clark

Dorie is a marketing strategy consultant, professional speaker, and frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and the World Economic Forum blog.

She has been recognized as a branding expert by the Associated Press, Fortune, and Inc. magazine and is quoted frequently in the media, including NPR, the BBC, and MSNBC.

She has been named to the Huffington Post’s “100 Must Follow on Twitter” list. She was also named one of Inc. magazine’s “100 Great Leadership Speakers for Your Next Conference,” and recognized in Forbes as one of “25 Professional Networking Experts to Watch in 2015.”

Dorie’s career has gone through a number of reinventions including being an award-winning journalist, a presidential campaign spokeswoman, a documentary filmmaker, and having taught marketing at a number of universities including Tufts University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina.

At the age of 18, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College, and two years later graduated from from Harvard Divinity School.

The Host’s Perspective:

The book has been out for a couple of years now and it’s just as relevant as when it first published. Maybe even more so.

One of my favorite concepts from the book is that in today’s world, reinventing you isn’t optional. In other words, you can either reinvent yourself proactively and have a lot of control over the trajectory of your career, or you can wait for it to happen to you and let the chips fall where they may.

Let me ask you a question – if you’re my age, are you doing the same job (or even profession) as when you first entered the work force? And let’s say you just entered the workforce – how much do you want to bet that your career is going to take a lot of twists and turns?

In “Reinventing You”, Dorie Clark helps you think about how you’d like to be seen in the world and then shows you how to develop a strategy to accomplish that. When I was 26 I decided I didn’t want to continue my career as an Army officer. I ultimately got out of the army and went back to school and everything turned out fine. But during that career transition I learned the hard way a lot of the lessons that are in this book. I wish I’d had this book then.

Listen to the interview: