Your Path: Changing Your Career Path
Do you want to know something creepy and morbid? I enjoy reading the obituaries in the newspaper. I know, you think I’m a weirdo right now, but hear me out. They’re like mini-biographies of unsung heroes in their own family lineage. And I figure, if someone has taken the time to write up how wonderful someone was, I can surely take the time to read it.
The best ones have all the nitty gritty details – where the person was born, what high school they went to, who they married and how they met, a listing of all their favorite hobbies and greatest accomplishments – everything. And there are truly some amazing people hiding in plain sight in our own communities. People you and I have never heard of until they’re gone. They’ve fought wars. They’ve volunteered countless and thankless hours to causes that make the world better. They single-handedly raised their children.
All heroes in their own stories.
Can you imagine someone trying to boil down your entire existence into words that fit on a section of newspaper the size of your hand? That’s pretty sobering if you ask me.
I once told a good boss of mine that I hoped no one would ever write in my obituary that I was a good accountant. (Yes, I was an accounting manager at the time. Yes, he looked at me funny.) And not because that wasn’t true, but because when you boiled down my life, that wasn’t what I wanted to be known for. Here Lies Erica Goode…Beloved Bean Counter
As it is, most obituaries list the person’s career or company in one, maybe two, sentences max. The other 95% of the remembrance is reserved for the names of those who will miss them or who have gone before them, as well as the areas of their lives they loved far more than their 9-to-5 job (and let’s be honest, when’s the last time someone in America actually worked 9-to-5).
It’s ironic because, assuming you work 40 hours a week with 2 weeks of true vacation per year (you know, the kind of vacation where you don’t actually bring your work with you) until you’re 62.5 years old, we will spend around 80,000 hours of our lives in these careers. Are you clocking closer to a 50-hour work week? Then you’re looking at upwards of 100,000 hours of career time in your life. When you look at it that way, gosh, I sure hope you enjoy what you’re doing.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t come across too many people who are just over-the-moon with how they’re spending their 9-to-5. Yes, of course there are some! Kudos to them. But for the vast majority of us, we signed up for a career path at 18 when we graduated high school or picked a college major which might have been 10, 15, or 20 years ago. Now we find ourselves questioning that decision years later. Maybe it wasn’t a bad choice. Maybe we just grew up and learned more about ourselves and the world.
Whether we’re in our 20s or 50s, we look up from our company-issued, laminated office desk and try to remember the passion our 20-year-old self had for the job we chose. When is it “too late” to change directions? Is it ever “too late”?
Years ago, I worked with a guy named Brandon*. We were both in our mid-20s and middle managers in finance at a big corporate powerhouse. Once during an honest, closed-door conversation about the future of our careers, he rolled his eyes and huffed something like, “Am I just supposed to sit here, keep doing this, and become CFO one day?” My response was, “Ugh…yeah?” He was a wicked smart guy with a promising future and, at the time in my eager 20s, I thought climbing to the top of the corporate ladder at a Fortune 500 company seemed like a pretty good plan. I mean, what could possibly be wrong with becoming a renowned CFO one day?
Brandon clearly thought otherwise…that was the last year we worked together. If my social media stalking serves me well, I believe my Chicago-suburbanite friend now lives in Hong Kong with his wife and kid and is in the midst of developing his second start-up company.
When Brandon and I worked together, he was on a path that he knew he didn’t want to be on. What I realize now is that Brandon had a clear understanding of what I refer to as “the foresight of hindsight”.
I know that’s a mouthful and sounds like an oxymoron. Let me break it down.
Foresight is the ability to anticipate for the future (i.e. We’re probably going to get hungry in an hour, so we should order a pizza soon).
And hindsight is the ability to clearly review past events (i.e. That anchovy and horseradish pizza was a bad choice).
So, the “foresight of hindsight” is the ability to plan for the future based on how you think your future self will feel about that plan in hindsight. I know, cue the head-exploding emoji, but there’s some logic there.
My coworker Brandon clearly believed that, had he stayed on the career path he was on, he would have been disappointed in hindsight when he was older. So…he changed the path he was on.
For me, my big “foresight of hindsight” moment was when I decided that I wanted to take a couple years away from my corporate life so that I could fully focus on my babies and husband during that time. I believed that my 50-year-old self would, one-day, regret running around like a maniac dragging my kids constantly between day care, school, and home. I imagined my future self would say something like “I would trade my salary for more time with my kids and a little bit of sanity!” I thought the Erica-of-the-future would think giving up money and corporate-career steam would be worth what I would get in return.
So that’s exactly what I did. I made the choice that I thought my older self would have wished I had made. I literally traded my salary for time and sanity. I made a choice with “the foresight of hindsight”.
Now, big life choices sound easier said than done, yes. You can’t just decide tomorrow you want to pick up and move to Hong Kong. You can’t just decide tomorrow you’re going to up and quit your job (at least, I wouldn’t recommend that). And I would be fooling you if I made either of those sound like the snap of your fingers. No doubt, both of the examples above required sacrifice in exchange for the desired outcome.
But you have to start somewhere.
Making a big life change takes planning and a lot of forethought. But isn’t it worth it in exchange for happiness and fulfillment during 100,000 hours of your life?
*names have been changed to protect the path-changers
Did you enjoy this post? Check out the rest of the “Your Path” Series:
Your Path: The Path Your Free Time Takes
