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On Saturday night, I saw a billboard in San Francisco for the Longines brand of men’s watches. The endorsing celebrity on this billboard was Andre Agassi. The accompanying slogan?

“Elegance is an attitude.”

I couldn’t help but stop and think about how incongruous this seemed at first glance. Not so long ago (well, I suppose it’s over a decade now), Agassi was the face of the Canon Rebel line of high-end consumer cameras. Television ads for the Rebel took advantage of Agassi’s well-known image as something of an iconoclast to promote the Rebel brand. Agassi was unkempt, unbridled, unpredictable. Now his is a face meant to exemplify elegance?

The truth is that Agassi is indeed a paragon of elegance, and he has become one of the true elder statesmen of the tennis world, despite his beginnings as a relentless challenger to convention in a community deeply bound by tradition. The transformation of the marketing thus appears to parallel a transformation of the man.

What makes such transformations possible? I have long believed that there are certain things in a person which are fundamental to his character, and I have often classified attributes like Agassi’s storied rebelliousness among the group of traits that are ultimately inalterable. People may change in superficial ways, I will say, but there is a level below which they will always be the person they were born to be. (The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment is perhaps the most visible example of our implicit conviction in this idea that our essence somehow transcends the ebbs and flows of everyday life. I am an INTJ, and I tend to believe that I always will be.)

Stories like Agassi’s, however, make it difficult for me to hold fast to this view, especially as similar examples arise in every sector of our society. The vagaries of his life, as he wandered from victory to ignominy to victory again and to fatherhood, seem to have changed him in ways that really matter, at least to the extent that we as distant observers can judge this. Meanwhile, I would be fooling myself if I claimed that the changes I have undergone as I have matured into adulthood are purely superficial. It seems that I have generally underestimated, as perhaps many others do, the impact that the arcs of our lives have on the content of our characters. While Agassi’s transformation may be unusually extreme — many would say that he has done a 180 — the truth it demonstrates is nevertheless incontrovertible: we are not who we are, so much as who we become.

Perhaps this is why the rhetoric of change has such a powerful grip on our collective imagination, whether in science or in art or in politics. Knowing on some level that change is inevitable for us, we seek to understand it, to harness it; we yearn to be its master and not its slave. Indeed, our society’s iconoclasts — an Agassi in every town, in every discipline — are our vanguards in this quest: in pushing the boundaries all around us, they also will us to push our own boundaries within, to become masters of ourselves. And as they, like Agassi, settle into the maturity which is inevitable for those who have embraced change and made it work for them, their successors become the new standard-bearers for our ambitions and march the flag of our dreams yet forward.

So the question becomes: are you following that flag, or are you carrying it? Is change happening to you, or does it belong to you? Are you merely being, or are you becoming?