What Next? Fifty Year Careers.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past.Edition 235.

Image by Sebdunedin using Midjourney

If we are lucky enough to live long lives, we all will age.

In 1900 life expectancy was 46 years.

Today in most countries the average life expectancy is around 78 years and with advances in technology this could soon be closer to 90 years.

Careers that lasted 30 years now could last 50 or even 60 years.

If one retires from a full-time job or primary career at 60 one still may have 30 years ahead of them which is why today many institutions and firms are rethinking careers and helping guide next acts.

Recently I had Seth Green who is the Dean at the University of Chicago Graham School on What Next? the podcast. The Graham School is a cognitive boot camp for continuing learning wherever you are in the world. The University of Chicago has also recently launched the Leadership in Society Initiative and the Imagine Pathways program for executives exploring their next chapter.

Seth Green’s insights and perspectives are not just for people in their fifties and sixties but for those in their twenties and thirties. Everybody who listens to my forty minute conversation will come away thinking very differently about their future and their careers.

After all, as Ann Dillard says ….how we spend our time is how we spend our lives.

Here are just a few of the discussion points to give you a flavor of the conversation.

1. Aging is a “prejudice against our future selves”. Avoiding thinking about or thinking negatively about aging or our future selves is a form of self-discrimination.

2. Many of us will “fail” retirement. A lot of retirement planning is about making sure one has the financial means to retire and how to remain healthy but that is not enough. Most people who can stop working soon find themselves without purpose or meaning or even identity since work is so central to identity, community, purpose and growth. The question of “Why am I waking up in the morning?” is rarely answered day after day after day with “To play golf” or “To travel”.

3. AI, Time and the rapidly declining half-life of Knowledge: Just as careers are getting longer the half-life of knowledge is declining faster and faster. Even if we are 30 our skills may lead to a forced retirement at 35 or 40 unless we upgrade and reinvent our skills.

The chart above is how AI has impacted the demand for software engineers. Remember how we were told to learn code and Mandarin was the future? Well AI enables software engineers to be far more productive than ever before and in many cases, replaces most of their tasks. And if you have the latest Samsung phone it does real time translation between languages.

Without continuous learning we are all becoming rapidly obsolete. Transformation no longer waits for retirement but is happening to us all the time.

4. To anticipate the future and to understand meaning we can learn from the past including when previous technology shifts happened.

Big ideas and approaches and insights are not only what we invent today but what have stood the test of time and trial. Too many of us believe we are discovering answers for the first time when they have been discovered and explained many times before.

Find what endures to endure.

Connect to what was to ensure one can connect to what will be.

It is important to learn what is important before it is too late.

5. Extrinsic Vs Intrinsic Purpose: In the first parts of our careers, we are driven by extrinsic goals such as money, fame, power, honing craft and seeking promotions. But later in our career or our second careers these extrinsic goals once achieved do not pull and tug or motivate as much as before and we need to know what drives us, what makes us happy and what is meaning. While the first mountain was driven by extrinsic purpose in later career one is driven by intrinsic meaning. Most successful people in their first careers find ways to discover their meaning and inner compass and align their careers to it and so easily make the shift to the second mountain.

What brought us and made us happy at the apex of our first careers are unlikely to carry over to our next act. How can we take what we are today and the best of yesterday but reinvent ourselves for the future? Often by revisiting vision, mission and purpose.

6. Cult vs Culture: If one does not know what one believes in and which way our compass points we can easily be magnetized in the direction of the crowd, the trend and to which ever our firm bends. Too many companies who believe “this is the way” and “our way or the highway” are not really cultures but cults.

7. Learning to travel lightly: Too many successful people cannot let go of the trappings of their first careers later in life. The retinue of handlers, the first-class flights, the genuflecting of minions and being the center of attention.

Seth shares the case of a legendary marketing professor and dean, Harry Davis who at the end of his deanship had to move to a smaller office and could only take a section of his library. He decided to leave behind all the marketing books even though he had built his career in the craft of marketing and only take the leadership books because that is what his career was going to be.

One must learn to travel lightly and let go parts of the luggage of the past every new stage of a career.

8. Do not live in other people’s minds: Too often we select careers and jobs because of what other people think vs what we are good at or find meaning in. We live in other people’s minds and give them the remote control of our lives.

9. The numbers that matter are not the numbers one thinks matter: For the lucky and privileged the size of the 401K beyond a certain point matter less and less. Adding resources has significantly declining returns. What matters are the numbers in the medical chart (health), the numbers of friends, the numbers of healthy relationships and the number of people one has helped. If one knew early on when we rightly focus on financial goals and building wealth that there were far more important goals, we would manage our careers and relationships differently earlier in our careers.

10. We should not price ourselves out of our dreams: Too many people find themselves doing a job they do not truly enjoy or love, much longer than they need to because the job creates the ability to fund a certain lifestyle. One’s lifestyle is rarely the dream. Funding the lifestyle often prices us out of the careers and vocations that truly resonate with us, but we now cannot afford to pursue.

Listen to Seth and dozens of the world’s most amazing leaders on What Next? This week we have Kass and Michael Lazerow who sold their company to Salesforce for 850 million dollars and are investors in companies like Liquid Death talk about the coming era of Entrepreneur, other recent episodes include Andrew Essex now of TCS and formerly a leader at Tribeca and the founding CEO of Droga 5 on AI and creativity and Peter Naylor of Snap, Netflix and NBC pedigree speak of the future of sports and much more. Wide ranging topics, global perspectives, amazingly distinguished and diverse guests sharing their best thinking and distilled insights on what next to help us all grow and transform…

For more about how to understand and navigate the future of work check out Rethinkingwork.io