When I was last in NYC one afternoon, we stumbled upon a taping of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

Dozens of 1960s cars and buses were being offloaded and lined up along the sidestreet to await being needed for a scene to be shot that night.

And there it was: a 1961 Chrysler, much like my father had, with the same interior I remembered and … drumroll … a console with pushbutton power transmission!

Much like Jane Jetson’s cooking dinner by pushing a few buttons, the driver’s mundane task of shifting gears from park to drive or to reverse had been converted to pushbuttons.

Did this last? No, obviously, but it was innovative.  Memorable (at least to me). Yes, today cars can drive themselves, even parallel park with no human intervention. I think that’s a bit scary myself.

Metaphorically, pushing buttons to make complex tasks easier is always an improvement, more efficient. And don’t you want to be recalled, or searched on LinkedIn, when there’s a task that you can jump in to improve, make more efficient, less costly, better than the other professional can do on their own? Don’t you want to be memorable and called upon?

I say, be a classic, strive to be memorable, offering improvements to old–and new–challenges, with the best tools and efficient techniques you can bring to the proverbial table. You know exactly which buttons to push to steer the project forward from neutral.

Always forward.