"Don't reinvent the wheel, just realign it"
About this Quote
In an era that fetishizes disruption, D'Angelo’s line is a quiet provocation: the smartest move isn’t always to invent, it’s to adjust. “Don’t reinvent the wheel” is the tired workplace proverb about efficiency, but the second clause snaps it into something more pointed. “Just realign it” implies the wheel already exists, it already rolls, and you’re still getting dragged because it’s wobbling. The problem isn’t a lack of novelty; it’s friction, drift, and neglect.
The intent is managerial but not cynical: aim your ambition at leverage. Realignment is unglamorous work - calibrating, tuning, correcting course - yet it’s where most progress actually happens. It’s also an implicit critique of innovation culture as a kind of performative masculinity: building a new wheel reads as heroic; admitting the old one is slightly off-center reads as mundane. D’Angelo flips the status hierarchy and treats maintenance as mastery.
Subtext: you’re not stuck because you’re missing genius; you’re stuck because your existing system is misconfigured. That lands in everything from personal habits (a routine that “should” work but doesn’t) to organizations that keep launching initiatives instead of fixing incentives, communication, or process. It’s the difference between pivoting and aligning: one is theater, the other is torque.
Contextually, this belongs to late-20th-century self-help and productivity rhetoric, where empowerment is framed less as reinvention of identity and more as smart iteration. The wheel stays; your relationship to it changes. That’s not conservative - it’s strategic.
The intent is managerial but not cynical: aim your ambition at leverage. Realignment is unglamorous work - calibrating, tuning, correcting course - yet it’s where most progress actually happens. It’s also an implicit critique of innovation culture as a kind of performative masculinity: building a new wheel reads as heroic; admitting the old one is slightly off-center reads as mundane. D’Angelo flips the status hierarchy and treats maintenance as mastery.
Subtext: you’re not stuck because you’re missing genius; you’re stuck because your existing system is misconfigured. That lands in everything from personal habits (a routine that “should” work but doesn’t) to organizations that keep launching initiatives instead of fixing incentives, communication, or process. It’s the difference between pivoting and aligning: one is theater, the other is torque.
Contextually, this belongs to late-20th-century self-help and productivity rhetoric, where empowerment is framed less as reinvention of identity and more as smart iteration. The wheel stays; your relationship to it changes. That’s not conservative - it’s strategic.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: SharePoint for Project Management (Dux Raymond Sy, 2008) modern compilationISBN: 9780596554057 · ID: qjgw9v_vOYgC
Evidence:
... Don't reinvent the wheel, just realign it. —Anthony J. D'Angelo, writer As project managers in the 21st century, when most of us have a BlackBerry smart- phone, drive with a GPS-enabled car, use TiVo to record our favorite shows, and ... |
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