1. How to re-invent, re-launch
and re-brand yourself
Photo courtesy of graffitiartphotography.com

2. There is risk, there is naiveté and there is ignorance. Risk is about having
the balls to do something most people would not.Naiveté is French for a
lack of experience, wisdom or judgment. It means innocence. Ignorance
means that you know you don’t know, yet you choose not to learn or
figure it out. Some might call this stupidity.
A good entrepreneur, artist or anyone who creates things needs a little of all three, especially if you want to reinvent
yourself.
Guy Kawasaki tells a great story of how the thriving ice harvesters of the 19th century were put out of business by
the companies that invented mechanical icemakers. It was no longer necessary to cut ice from lakes and ship it
because companies could make it in any city during any season. Then, the company that invented the refrigerator
put these manufacturing companies out of business. If it was convenient to make ice at a factory, imagine how
much better (and cheaper) it was to create cold storage and make ice in every home.
It’s hard to see your imminent demise when you are in the middle of winning the game and that was the businesses
before the refrigerator. That was potentially me. I was scared. But I wasn’t afraid. I decided not to allow my fear to
paralyze me anymore. Instead, it was to motivate me.
I didn’t want to look back and think, “I could have been the guy who invented the refrigerator, but I was scared so I
just kept harvesting ice.”
My future depended on a complete reboot. A reinvention. A rebranding.
It doesn’t matter your age, your financial position or where you are in your career, you can re-invent yourself, re-brand
yourself and re-launch you! You’re an unbelievably powerful and adaptable animal, but others, your ego and your
lizard brain want to hold you back.
Below is what I did to reinvent and rebrand myself. These aren’t steps (so don’t get intimidated!), these are individual
ways and exercises to help you rethink your life so that you can rebrand and re-launch You 2.0. I have tried all of
these and have seen the benefits but I didn’t do all of them at the same time; some I’ve only done once and others I
do every single day. Some will stick, some won’t. Rebranding doesn’t happen overnight. You need to learn to manage
your time and focus on the end goal. Most importantly remember that in the absence of clarity you need to take
action.
Craig Morantz
gotomarketguy
@morerants

3. Here are the 24 ways I reinvented myself
Acceptance for who you are and where you are at is essential. Accept that it could take you years to
reinvent yourself. It has taken me three years so far and I estimate I have another two to go. Uncovering your
strengths is part of reinventing yourself but it isn’t something that can be done overnight, it often takes years of
introspection. Accepting that it will take time and just trusting in the process is step number one.
It is said that we are shaped and influenced greatly by the five people we spend the most time with. I sat down and
really thought about this, who did I want to shape my coming years? Who did I respect for how they lead their lives?
I decided on five guys because it has always been easy for me to be close to and vulnerable with women, it wasn’t
easy for me to be that way with men.
It became clear to me six months in how important having the unconditional love of a man is to influencing the
reinvention of myself. My five know who they are and why. Sometimes we meet formally one on one and we always
try to make the next lunch or dinner date before we leave the current one. But most of all, I just pick up the phone and
call them to be influenced and affected by their energy and kind hearts. Every interaction impacts who I am.
Identify who your five biggest supporters are and commit to spending more time with each of them individually,
understanding that the more time you spend with them the more you become a little piece of who they are. Choose
people who will have impact but make sure you can also have impact on them, it should be a symbiotic relationship.
Write down the 10 things that make you happiest. Start today and do this every week. Recovering where we lose
power instead of trying to find new super powers will build a strong foundation. There will be days you won’t be
happy with your journey of reinvention and you’ll question yourself and that is why this list is so important.
Here are the 10 things that make me happiest (in no particular order):
I am happiest when…
• I am in nature, especially in forested areas
• I am snowboarding
• I am leading groups of people in innovative businesses, helping them be better
• I am being creative, specifically marketing design and execution
• I am spending time with Winslowe, my daughter
• I am on or near the water, especially under water scuba diving
• I am watching high quality movies
• I am listening to music
• I am participating in adventure travel
• I am cooking
• I am doing yoga and exercising
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According to one of the longest running studies, the Grant Study, from
Harvard, the key to happiness is truly cherishing close relationships. It’s
focusing on the relationships you form with the people closest to you
and the experiences with them rather than on material possessions.

4. According to a study by a father-son team at Stanford University, “people who strive for something significant,
whether it’s learning a new craft or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or
aspirations.”
Eliminate and forget goals like, “own my own business by the age of 29” or, “run a 3-hour marathon” because
these are results. Instead, create a list of 10 non-negotiables. So, if you would like to finish a marathon in record
time, focus on daily non-negotiables like how often you will run, how much sleep you will get, what you will not eat
and completely forget the end result. Here are mine:
• 8 hours of sleep, in bed at 10, up by 6:30
• Meditate every day
• Tell someone everyday they are important and special to me
• I refuse to beat myself up and I ask myself ‘useful or not useful?’ when a negative thought comes into my mind
• No more than six alcoholic drinks a week, no more than two in a given day
• Frequent hydration; minimum eight glasses of water a day
• Two 15 minute breaks per day, doing nothing, no reading, no tasks, walk, sit, do nothing
• Four out of five meals I eat must be super clean
If you focus on daily non-negotiables the big stuff comes naturally. It’s great to set out what you want the results to
look like, but focus on the small, easy things you can do every single day. Stop focusing on the end and start focusing
on today. The power of achieving small goals can motivate you to do more. So daily or weekly rules that are easy,
actually contribute to you doing more. There’s little room for failure, therefore you do not get discouraged.
Stop watching reality TV. It’s worse than a high carb, high sugar diet. It’s toxic. It probably causes cancer. You might
as well eat a dozen donuts instead; it would be better for you. A survey of 19,000 people found that people who
watch reality TV shows are more neurotic and have lower self-esteem and people who watch any other genre of
TV. Reality TV thrives on judgment. You’re able to look into another person’s life, see their intimate moments and
judge both their life and your own. Why are you peering into other people’s lives when you should be focusing on your
own? This one might seem trivial, but I think it’s one of the most important.
Give up something that really hurts. Really screw with your ego here. Maybe it’s giving up staying up late. Don’t
listen to the voice telling you this is stupid. Maybe it is sugar, give it up. Maybe it is porn, give it up, even if it’s hard.
Maybe it’s beer. The point here is to strengthen your discipline. The discipline muscle is weak for most of us. You will
hear monsters in your head telling you it’s ok to cheat, ‘this is stupid’ it will tell you. That voice is the weak muscle.
I gave up the Internet every morning, everyday for three months. That hurt. It wasn’t so much that I would wake up
on the wrong side of the bed, it’s that I would wake up totally upside down. A huge scary monster would shake me
awake and breathe the worst, steamy morning breath into my face. I would run to my phone, to my email, to some
type of stimulus that would make the monster go away. But it did not make the monster go away; it just pushed
them away temporarily. Fuck you monster!
Fighting monsters and trolls is tough work, but if you are going to make shit happen it’s a fight worth fighting. Giving
up the Internet from the time I got up to noon was hard work, but it helped me accomplish so much. Most of all, it
helped me strengthen the muscle of discipline.
Save enough money for one year of expenses. This not only helps you prepare for the future, but also helps you
learn where you’re being wasteful and frivolous.
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5. Commit to buying no new clothes, vacations and shiny objects for a year. It should hurt a little. This is called
sacrifice and sacrifice is part of reinvention. I believe strongly in this one. It should feel uncomfortable and should
piss you off a bit when you see others going on vacation or your friend with a cool new jacket. This is good pain,
worthy pain. Sacrifice is a teacher that sits at the center of reinvention. You’ll start to see the true value in the things
you already own.
Write down how you want to spend your days, without regard to money. If you could do exactly what you wanted
every single day, what would that life look like? Don’t get hung up on whether or not it’s realistic, that’s not the point.
This isn’t going to be about living your life on a beach and never having to work. It’s about getting in touch with what
really makes you happy.
This exercise should only take five to ten minutes. For each item on the list identify with the feeling, the emotion;
that’s what we are after. I am not a believer in figuring out how you can get paid to do what you really love. That is
awesome if it works out that way, but reality doesn’t always deliver this dream. I’d love to teach yoga and live on an
island in Muskoka, north of Toronto. There are a lot of things, reality driven, that make that not possible. I have a four
year old; I have an aging mother I need to stay close to, etc. It’s really tempting to spend your efforts trying to get paid
for what you are most passionate about but instead, this exercise should help you focus in on the emotions you are
after.
Apologize to five people you have hurt in the past, whether it was yesterday or 20 years ago. This is an amazingly
powerful step in your reinvention because it is empowering and exhilarating all at once. Create a list in the order of
smallest apology to most difficult and get going. The first one, even if it’s an apology for something that seems small,
will be the hardest. You’ll get better as you go and the words will come more easily. Get out of your own head and into
your body and start making things happen. You’ll be amazed at the release you get from a simple apology.
Commit to not going on personal social media or using your personal email for half of each day. Don’t worry, the
world will wait for you. I completely eliminated the Internet after 9 p.m. I am Internet free from 9 p.m. overnight to 10
a.m. the next day. I can tell you that this has been a major part of the reinvention and rebranding of myself.
If you don’t think you can do it I am here to tell you without question that you can. Just 15 years ago we all were
doing it. For people who currently depend on you answering emails before noon just tell them to call you or wait until
the afternoon. This is 10 times easier than you think and it is a 10 times multiplier in rebranding yourself.
If removing the Internet, email and social media won’t work for you for whatever reason then think of something that
takes up a large amount of time – watching TV, staring at Instagram, etc. For me it was social media and email, but
that might be productive for some people. It should be something that is not productive to the end goal of reinventing
yourself, something you can do with out. What I want you to consider is what action do you need to take in order to
turn down the noise.
Stop beating yourself up. You are killing yourself. Literally. Your nervous system rules your immune system. In the
past I was extremely hard on myself. It was a tool I used to make shit happen.
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I get to ride my bike to work and I can’t believe how good that makes me
feel, it’s literally euphoric. If I could, one thing I would spend my days
doing is riding my bike through all the neighbourhoods around the world,
from Buenos Aires to Tashkent.

6. In reality, being hard on myself has been a crutch, a way to keep me from achieving something bigger. It’s been a
way of covering up my fears of having an impact on the world around me. It’s like building a house made of mud in
Seattle. It’s an achievement, but a time sensitive one that eventually falls apart. When I was about to congratulate
myself for an accomplishment, a little troll would crawl out of my ear and whisper, “you are not good enough, you
should be embarrassed, you’re a fraud.” Somehow I had convinced myself this was the better motivator to make shit
happen. In reality I’ve got so much to accomplish and so do you! I’m actually poised to knock it out of the park and so
are you! The troll is there, in a weird way, to protect us, from doing something different. Trolls hate different, even if it’s
better. Beating myself up is no longer a tool I use and neither should you!
Write down your top 10 life goals/results. Here are mine, they are written on my mirror so I see them morning and
night.
• Successfully married
• Raise thoughtful and caring children
• Build my dream cottage in Northern Ontario
• Scuba-dive the top 25 dive sites in the world, two diving trips a year
• Complete 1000 hours of yoga teacher training
• Two snowboard trips per
• Eliminate homelessness in Toronto
• Have enough savings to not have to work after I am 60
• Be happy, every day
Assess your unique ability. What is it that you do best that creates the most amount of energy and happiness while
you are doing it? Another way to ask this is, what do people consistently tell you they value about you? Here are two
tools to help you assess your unique ability: Kolbe and Strength Finders.
My unique abilities are:
• I create company cultures that breed engagement, empowerment and creativity through leadership and coaching
• I am a connector, when someone needs a problem solved I am able to find someone to help them
• I have a killer instinct of understanding customer behaviour and their pain points
• I am able to create extraordinary customer experiences, whether in the B2B or B2C space
• I create and implement unique go-to-market strategies that can be tracked and measured
Start using the Five Minute Journal. All it takes is five minutes every day: three minutes in the morning, two minutes
at the end of the day. There is no greater way to reinvent yourself than focusing on what you are grateful for. This
journal helps you do that in just five minutes a day. It’s a game changer.
Come up with an inventory of your skills. Schedule time in your calendar to complete this one. This list should be at
least 20 items deep. Mine is around 50. It should also be growing all the time, so dig deep here. It could be that you
are highly organized, you have a deep understanding of accounting, you can code websites, you’re an amazing cook,
you follow through like no one else. These are skills that you’re above average at. Keep the list going, every time you
think of another one; add it to the growing list.
I love using Wunderlist or Evernote for tasks like this. The list is always there on my phone or computer backing up
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This is an important exercise and it may take weeks or months to narrow
down. It will be a huge help in your rebranding and re-launch of You 2.0.

7. to the cloud so I never lose it and I’m able to update instantly, wherever I am, when I have a thought. This list will help
you stay focused on opportunities where your key skill set can be applied. Most importantly it helps you start saying
no to things you shouldn’t be doing. You have a deep, rich inventory of skills so get it in writing.
Assess what you could do to create passive income. We all could do something. Even if it is babysitting, ski
instructor, painting houses. Create a list of things you could do to make money if you lost your job or business
tomorrow. The act of completing this task creates confidence and right now, as you start to reinvent and rebrand
yourself you need confidence.
Commit to creating the strongest and most powerful network you can. Your network is your net worth. My network
saved my life and it can save your life and help you reinvent yourself.
I hate networking, building a strong network is about creating connections. I focus on creating strong connections
from the point of view of ‘how can I be of value to someone else’. I am not asking you to go to more events and
cocktail parties. I want you to create a powerful network that is built on strong connections, a very different notion.
The end value of your network is not just your connections, but your connections’ connections.
Three things you can do to get this going is; pick five people you want to meet and determine how you can help
them, that is your intro. Try it with me. Second, pick five people who you know and have helped you in the past, send
them a message of gratitude (preferably by snail mail). Finally create a weekly calendar item, only one hour per week,
where you reach out and connect with people via email, never asking for anything, just building relationships. It will
all flow from there, I promise. Building, maintaining and expanding of my network was and remains essential in the
reinvention of myself. All problems can be solved with the right network. Read more about your network is your net
worth here and here.
Start meditating, don’t worry about what meditating is. You don’t need to close your eyes if you don’t want to, you
don’t need to transcend. Do what ever feels right, but do it, twice a day for 10 minutes. Your future depends on it.
Even if you just sit still for 10 minutes twice a day that is meditating.
Order 100 note cards that you can use to send notes of gratitude on a consistent basis. Do you need me to tell you
where to order them from? Is that why you are about to just skip ahead to the next step?
Here are 5 places you can order them from:
Vista Print
Moo.com
Shutterfly
Papyrus
Zazzle
Did you like my eBook? Why not send me a thank you card? (And not one of those crappy e-cards.)
That all sounds great to me! All from a simple thank you note.
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Showing gratitude has been linked to a number of benefits including,
stronger immune systems and lower blood pressure, higher levels of
positive emotions, more joy optimism and happiness, acting with more
generosity and compassion and feeling less lonely and isolated.

8. Delete the Facebook app from your phone and install stay focused on your desk top. If you do not have the app on
your phone you can quickly check this one off. You don’t need to check Facebook 45 times a day. It’s fatiguing. I can’t
tell you how powerful this one step has been in increasing my focus and helping me reinvent myself. I promise that
you will feel better when you start focusing on yourself instead of what everyone on Facebook is doing. (Hint: it’s not
accomplishing their goals and reinventing themselves.)
Eliminate the pain in your life. The only way to fulfill a worthwhile purpose for your life is to focus on what is
causing you pain, and then make a decision to never experience that pain again. Doesn’t sound so easy does it?
Here is the list I came up with for myself:
• I was not kind and giving to others
• I got caught up with caring what people thought of me
• I thought about my poor relationship with my brothers
• I would tell myself I should be at a different place in my entrepreneurial career
• I would tell myself I should be at a different place in my personal life, (married with 2.3 kids, white picket fence, etc.)
• I over committed myself, forcing myself to produce mediocre work
• I worked on projects that were not aligned with my unique ability and my inventory of skills.
Find an accountability partner: someone who can hold you accountable and is willing to be held accountable. It’s
a simple, 15-minute weekly meeting that focuses on next steps or actions you need to take to move your top three
priorities forward. If you do not complete your actions one week you owe the other person $100. You can make it a
donation to a charity or you can make it a payment to someone you really do not like which creates an even greater
motivator to complete your three actions.
It’s easy to let ourselves down but having an accountability partner helps drive performance and keeps the
momentum going. Don’t over complicate this one, as it can be extremely powerful. I meet with my accountability
partner every Sunday on line at 1:15 p.m. He’s often in Europe working but we are still each held accountable for our
goals and next steps.
You are now making the world tilt towards you, so take yourself out for dinner as a way to launch your new
beginning. It’s great to celebrate and who better to celebrate than the new you, the reinvented you, the rebranded
you. Enjoy!
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It can be hard, but you’re not creating a new you because it is easy, you
are reinventing yourself because you need to in order to survive. You can
get this started in just 15 minutes and sometimes you just need to get
things started and the momentum will take over. So, book 15 minutes to
do this.