How to navigate the five-career crossroads: persevere, pivot or punt?
Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA
President and CEO, Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, another lousy golfer, terrible cook, friction fixer
Remember when you were 18 and everyone kept asking about what you were going to do next?
There is a shelf at Carissa Moore’s home in Honolulu where she keeps her journals. She has carried blank pages around the globe since she was a little girl, scribbling her thoughts and worries and goals as she became one of the best surfers in the world.
She still does it.
At the other end of the spectrum was the mid-life crisis and all those raised eyebrows when you drove up in the Maserati with that person on your arm or you are showing your BFFs your new sleeve tat.
Now, add two other life stage crises: the quarter-life crisis and the encore career/retirement/side gig decision. Doctors, it seems, have been grappling with these life stages a lot lately. So have their spouses and partners.
These are liminal moments in life-thresholds between one physical or emotional state and the next.
Career inflection points are moments of potential change and transition that often evoke feelings of ambivalence: the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotions about something.
Back in the day, for boomers like myself, life was about the three boxes-education, job and retirement. Then, the world of work and society changed, and the boundaries blurred. Sequential became concomitantnt, doing all three at the same time rather than one after the other. Now, some think the whole idea of work-life balance is the wrong approach. Like happiness, you are better off letting it find you.
COVID has forced us to reset how we think about work-life balance.
As people confront this challenge, they come up against a set of fundamental human needs that collectively define how we experience the meaning of our existence. One professor calls them the five pillars of meaning:
Belonging. Humans are social animals, and for most people, meaning is anchored in affectionate interpersonal relationships. Each interaction we have, be it of joy, disgust, anger, or sadness, allows us to learn more about who we are and what we want. When we are supported by others through such experiences and challenges, we cope much more effectively with them. All too often, however, people are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges. Paul’s story makes clear that he did not make much of an “investment” in this critical part of his life.
Purpose. To thrive, people need a direction and goals to look forward to; people who lack a clear sense of purpose find little meaning in whatever they’re doing. As people approach the end of a phase in their lives, they begin to suffer from a lack of future-looking purpose. Although Paul clearly had purpose at some point (he had created many companies), that purpose was disappearing as he approached the end of his active career — how many more companies could he feasibly create?
Competence. People derive much of their identity from what they do — how they use and master their unique talents. A sense of competence provides confidence in people’s ability to meet the challenges that lie ahead of them. High levels of competence often involve being “in the zone,” completely and utterly immersed in whatever we’re doing. It was in part Paul’s talents in financial matters, which he enjoyed putting to use, that had helped him find meaning during his career.
Control. People are readier to find meaning in their choices if they believe they took them freely — that the choices really were theirs to make. At the time I met Paul, he had started wondering whether he had chosen to get married because he really wanted to or because everybody at his age was already married. This sense of having someone else’s meaning imposed on his was also something that he experienced in his choice of career — business, as I’ve already noted, had been his second option.
Transcendence. As an old Greek proverb notes, “society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” We find our most profound meaning when we move beyond self-interest and self-fulfillment to make room within ourselves for other people to whom we are not personally close — when we connect ourselves purposefully to our community and society at large. It was clear that transcendence had never been part of Paul’s make-up; he had been too obsessed with the success of the companies he had founded
If you are lumper instead of a splitter, you can call them mastery, independence and purpose.
Crisis 1: What should I do when I grow up?
Here is an example: Hi Dr. Arlen, I'm a 2nd year medical student who is currently running a start-up. I am finding difficulty balancing both but my dilemma is that I don't want be working as a physician full-time, so I was hoping I could get some advice on how I could carve a path to become a physician entrepreneur.
This question started with those in medical practice. Now it has become an issue with younger and younger students considering medicine, starting in premed. Medical students are wondering:
Crisis 2: How did I wind up in this quarter life crisis?
Signs you are having a quarter life crisis
According to The Guardian, the quarter-life crisis affects 86% of millennials, who report being bogged down by insecurities, disappointments, loneliness, and depression. Millennials, it’s less of a question of if you will experience a quarter-life crisis than it is a question of when. Here's how to cope.
How to reimagine the second half of your career. Research shows that happiness bottoms out for people in their mid to late 40s. We might struggle with mid-career slumps, caring for both children and aging parents, and existential questions about whether everything has turned out as we’d planned. But Chip Conley says we can approach this phase of our personal and professional lives with a different perspective. He’s a former hospitality industry CEO and founder of the Modern Elder Academy, and he explains how to reframe our thinking about middle age, find new energy, and become more fulfilled and successful people at work and home. Conley wrote the book Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age.
Crisis 3: What do I do to resolve my mid-career crisis?
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According to recent research, less than 50% of decisions made in mid-career were rated as successful. People are most susceptible to making decisions that lead to less-than-successful outcomes between the ages of 40 and 48, according to respondent assessments. The people reporting less-than-successful outcomes strongly agreed with such statements as:
4: Should I retire, rewire, or inspire
These decisions come down to answering two questions: Do I have to keep working? Do I want to keep working because it brings me satisfaction?
5. How my industry works and how I get paid has changed.
Suddenly, because of industry competition or regulatory or legal actions, somebody moved your cheese. The most recent examples are migration from fee for service to value-based reimbursement for medical services, private equity buying medical practices, real estate broker commission structures, and the sharing economy.
Facing these stages takes money. That's why every medical student should be taught personal financial planning and debt management.
You should be constantly asking yourself 1) What (am I doing), Where (am I doing it and How (am I doing what I am doing?).
This article covers the key: how we see, and talk about, the shape and trajectory of our careers. Companies have an unprecedented opportunity to proactively craft new norms, structures, and policies that could positively shape work for decades to come.
In her book, Aristotle's Way, classicist Edith Hall explains that, to Aristotle, being true to yourself means asking whether you have realized your potential at each of the four crossroads. She goes on to explain that Aristotle used the twin ideas of potentiality and realization of that potential in practice. Age 49 was the magic number when you have learned enough of life's lessons to figure it out, which, interestingly, is the approximate bottom of the happiness curve. Having mentors or making employees feel appreciated is another way to help them reach their potential.
Professionals across the career spectrum have moments where they fear they’re already obsolete, or becoming so. Different than the occasional bout of self-doubt, fearing obsolescence means we fundamentally question our professional significance. When we over-indulge the fear, it creates cognitive distortions of ourselves, others, and our environment that can bring us to the worst versions of ourselves. Whether you’re early in your career and facing a lifetime of technological and economic disruption, or later in your career and questioning your future relevance to the world, feelings of obsolescence don’t have to mire you in fear or futility. The question isn’t how to avoid these feelings, but rather how to spot evidence you’re having them and address them in healthy, honest ways.
As people live longer, healthier lives, the traditional 40-year career will become outdated. Here comes the 60 year career,
But that’s going to require a new mind-set—and a lot more planning.
Periodically reassess your career satisfaction and decide whether to pivot, persevere or punt. If you are unhappy, find an exit ramp. You need a personal strategic plan.
The ability to see unexpected and unwanted change from a place of hope rather than fear, and as an opportunity to learn and grow rather than to resist or deny, is called a Flux Mindset.
Like they say, life is not one thing after another. It's the same thing over and over again. I'll see you at the other side of the happiness U curve.
Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship
President and CEO, Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, another lousy golfer, terrible cook, friction fixer
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