off would people be? It’s near midlife that this question often begins to
loom large. At around this time, in both work and life, we feel we have
more to give (and less to lose), and we’re especially keen to share our
knowledge and skills with the next generation.
When my students talk about the evolution
of self-esteem in their
careers, the progression often goes something like this:
Phase 1: I’m not important
Phase 2: I’m important
Phase 3: I want to contribute to something important
I’ve noticed that the sooner they get to phase 3, the more impact they
have and the more happiness they experience. It’s left me thinking about
happiness less as a goal and more as a by-product of mastery and meaning.
“Those only are happy,” philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “who have
their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the
happiness of others,
on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or
pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at
something else, they find happiness by the way.”
Careers, relationships, and communities are examples of what scientists
call open systems—they’re constantly in flux because they’re not closed off
from the environments around them. We know that open systems are
governed by at least two key principles: there are always multiple paths to
the same end (equifinality), and the same starting point can be a path to
many different ends (multifinality). We should be careful to avoid getting
too attached to a particular route or even a particular destination. There isn’t
one definition of success or one track to happiness.
My cousin Ryan finally wound up rethinking his career arc.
Five years
into his neurosurgery residency, he did his own version of a career checkup
and decided to scratch his entrepreneurial itch. He cofounded a fast-
growing, venture-backed startup called Nomad Health, which creates a
marketplace to match clinicians with medical facilities. He also advised
several medical device startups, filed medical device patents, and is now
working on multiple startups to improve health care. Looking back, he still
regrets that he foreclosed so early on an identity as a neurosurgeon and
escalated his commitment to that career.
At
work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want to
learn and contribute over the next year or two, and stay open to what might
come next. To adapt an analogy from E. L. Doctorow, writing out a plan for
your life “is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your
headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
WE
DON
’
T
HAVE
TO
UPEND
our entire paths to rethink some of our plans. Some
people are perfectly content with their fields of work but dissatisfied with
their current roles. Others may be too risk averse to make a geographic
move for a job or a partner. And many don’t have the luxury of making a
pivot: being economically dependent on a job or emotionally attached to an
extended family can limit the options available. Whether or not we have the
opportunity or appetite
for major changes in our lives, it’s still possible to
make smaller adjustments that breathe new meaning into our days.
My colleagues Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton find that in every
line of work, there are people who become active architects of their own
jobs. They rethink their roles through job crafting—changing their daily
actions to better fit their values, interests, and skills. One of the places Amy
and Jane studied job crafting was in the University of Michigan health-care
system.
If you visited a certain floor of the hospital, it wouldn’t be long before
cancer patients told you how grateful they were for Candice Walker. Her
mission was not only to protect their fragile immune systems—it was also
to care for their fragile emotions. She called
the chemotherapy center the
House of Hope.
Candice was often the first one to console families when their loved
ones went through treatment; she showed up with bagels and coffee. She
would make patients laugh by telling stories about her cats drinking her
milk or showing them that she had accidentally put on one brown sock and
one blue sock. One day she saw a patient on the floor of an elevator
writhing in pain, and the staff members nearby weren’t sure what to do.
Candice immediately took charge, rushed the woman into a wheelchair, and
took her up in the elevator for urgent treatment. The patient later called her
“my savior.”
Candice Walker wasn’t a doctor or a nurse. She wasn’t a social worker,
either. She was a custodian. Her official job was to keep the cancer center
clean.
Candice and her fellow custodians were
all hired to do the same job,
but some of them ended up rethinking their roles. One cleaner on a long-
term intensive care unit took it upon herself to regularly rearrange the
paintings on the walls, hoping that a change of scenery might spark some
awareness among patients in comas. When asked about it, she said, “No,
it’s not part of my job, but it’s part of me.”
Our identities are open systems, and so are our lives. We don’t have to
stay tethered to old images of where we want to go or who we want to be.
The simplest way to start rethinking our options is to question what we do
daily.
It takes humility to reconsider
our past commitments, doubt to question
our present decisions, and curiosity to reimagine our future plans. What we
discover along the way can free us from the shackles of our familiar
surroundings and our former selves. Rethinking liberates us to do more than
update our knowledge and opinions—it’s a tool for leading a more fulfilling
life.
