One day this winter, I was driving to the ski hill with my son, Ben, and his friends Colin and Jason, listening to a 1973 Led Zeppelin concert at Madison Square Garden. These 16 year olds play the guitar, download tabs from the Net, and listen to a lot of music-almost exclusively the rock of the 1960s and early '70s I was raised on.

Ben began listening to Robert Johnson, king of the delta blues, after he heard Cream's version of "Crossroads," the way I discovered Leadbelly and Mississippi Fred MacDowell at that age. When I was a teenager, young British rockers were consumed with the blues as they invented a new form of music. Britain was recovering from the war, and these lads tended to be from the lower classes. As was the case with blacks in the United States, you could make a career in music without the right family name or education.

Driving along the highway, I thought about 1973. I was in college in Massachusetts. It was the era of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and riots in the streets-but also a time of exploding creativity. My thoughts drifted back to seeing the Grateful Dead in Connecticut, the Mahavishnu Orchestra in New Hampshire, Hot Tuna in New York, Stevie Wonder in a skating rink.

Some of those bands the kids know about, some they don't. Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton are idols. They've started listening to The Doors, but they don't know about The Band, Ronnie Hawkins' sidemen before they joined Bob Dylan when he went electric, then went off on their own.

This reminded me that I read some of Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles, at a bookstore the other day. In a magazine interview, Dylan said that years of memories came back when he was writing it; for example, he remembered watching a bird on a woodpile while he was visiting the poet Archibald MacLeish decades ago.

Like most enduring artists, Dylan reinvents himself from time to time. He finds a groove, explores it, then moves on to explore another, leaving his fans always one step behind. This evolution, conscious or not, is an important attribute of true talent in any field, including business. Consider the twists and turns of the United States' Ted Turner or Canada's Gerald Schwartz or Atlantic Canada's Harry Steele.

Evolution is a process of integration. You can't unleash your true potential until you begin to integrate everything: your body, mind, spirit, and all of your experiences. When you're born, you're as integrated as you are going to get, and it's all fragmentation from there.

At a seminar entitled Self-Managing Leadership led by Brian Bacon in Halifax last fall, we did an exercise where we plotted our happiness, or life satisfaction, on a graph. The data points were all over the place, but a general trend line became apparent. The trend on the graphs I saw was a slow decline in satisfaction from about the age of 20 until about 50. At this age, people tend to go through a major crisis. If they're lucky, they come out of it and reinvent themselves. They evolve.

We all have roles to play: family roles, work roles, civic roles, leader roles, server roles. It gets complicated, and eventually we may forget who we are, forget our real interests and strengths. Often there is a crisis: a health problem, a breakup or divorce, a career or business setback. Trying to play too many roles, we get tangled in a web of our own making. Programs such as Bacon's help us relocate our internal compass.

Then comes a new clarity-the kind you had when you were younger, when you knew what you wanted and what you didn't want, what worked for you and what didn't. Except now you have a wealth of experience and many new skills. It's a slow process at first. You spend time reflecting on your life, and life brings you some new guides and mentors. You set new priorities. You may get your health back, re-establish family relations, find a new partner, refocus your career, save your business or let it go. As Bacon puts it, the new focus includes a "not-to-do list," including avoiding people who drain your energy. You say no to some opportunities so you can focus on others.
You take responsibility for your life and don't blame others for what hasn't worked out. This allows you to live more in the present. It's the only place where you can use that underrated facility: freedom of choice. That's what Thomas Jefferson and his motley crew were hoping for-not alignment or groupthink, but the ability to make individual choices and rise or fall because of them.

The 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence risked being hanged for treason by the English crown. It was a crossroads in the history of the West. Their courage led eventually to the formation of a new republic that went on to become a model for the world.

It was an evolution of government based on the rights of the individual that sparked a surge in creativity that is the true genius of America. Whether as individuals or in groups, this sense of responsibility (the ability to respond) is what leads to the next advance, and the one after that.