How to gracefully age (in both your career and your life)

Black Clock on White Brick Background with text overlay How to Age Your Career Gracefully, Take Control Now by Rikki Goldenberg, Executive Leadership Coach, Career Coach, Career Aging

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Welcome to November! As fall sets in, here comes winter vibes, even while it’s oddly warm out, the sun is setting earlier (shakes fist at daylight savings)...

So we’re going to focus on death.

(The death of our careers.)

Although memento mori drives my friend Corey Wilks, it’s truthfully a hard thing to grasp. (Btw along with Justin Mulvaney, the three of us have something very exciting coming your way in early 2023, foreshadowing!)

If you had to google memento mori don’t worry, I did too.

A lot of folks come to me searching for happiness in their careers.

So today’s newsletter is all about it. Well, it’s actually about the fact that your career is going to die and what you can do about it. (So are we but that makes me nauseous so we’ll just hurry along, thank you!)

We’re turning to Arthur C. Brook’s “From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.”

Hop on in friends.

Biggest whoa moment

Your “second half” in your career is uncomfortably sooner than you anticipate. According to Benjamin Jones, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, “The most common age for great discovery is one’s late thirties.”

I still recall the other math major I knew (yes I was a math major, what?) who was so worried that if he didn’t solve something “big” this year, he wouldn’t ever solve anything in his entire career. He was 20.

According to Brooks, he’s not that wrong, but that doesn’t mean all is lost. Instead, consider the concept of fluid versus crystallized intelligence. Brooks argues that Fluid Intelligence (defined below, I’m not evil) is more common on the front half of your career, and Crystalized Intelligence (see below) is best suited for the second half. (If you’re trying to figure out if you’re on the cusp, Brooks notes generally 20 years into the practice of your career is when we should shift gears.)

Fluid Intelligence - the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems. Raw smarts.

Crystalized intelligence - the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past. It tends to increase as we age, and barely diminishes later in life. Wisdom.

Simply put, “When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom.”

So how can you jump off the fluid “new new new” into the crystalized “here’s what I know” vibes.

It won’t be easy.

You’re going to need to reduce your addiction to success.

Success addiction is one of those things that we feel early in our career.

Each year we want a promotion, a pay bump, a new way to be recognized for all that we are.

As we get further into our career, the promotions/bumps/recognition slow down. Suddenly, we have to craft our own definition of success, that’s not tied to the external validation of the outside world.

(If this is resonating and hitting a little too close to home I am open for new clients this month and we should 100% talk.)


Put it into practice now

It’s about to get really intense. Get ready. (Normally these are super actionable tips but today it’s gonna hit hard.)

Step 1: Write your eulogy. (Did you just gulp?) Yep. Write what you want folks to be saying at your funeral. How will they see you? What will they know about you? What will they mention?

Step 2: Note what is a “resume” or a “value” component. I.e. Did they mention that recent promotion at work? That you fly first class? That you were always available to get shit done at work on nights and weekends? Probably not. Instead, there’s a lot about who you are as a person. Maybe you’re kind, compassionate, funny, thoughtful, etc. Maybe you want more of those values mentioned that you didn’t even initially think of!

Step 3: Take all those values that you want folks to have recognized and share at your funeral, and sit with them. If you really exhibited them, on a daily, weekly, whatever basis… what would you take off your to-do list. For example, if you’re thoughtful, how can you be more thoughtful for the folks in your life that you care about? What would you shove to the backburner?

And there you have it.

Make the shift from the “more, more, more” mindset of never enough, into, well… what actually matters to you.

If that feels tough… let’s connect.

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