How to Achieve Remarkable Success in Your Mid-Career Crisis

Elliot Jaques coined the phrase “midlife crisis” in 1965. This psychoanalyst pointed to the dramatic shifts in the creative lives of artists from Michelangelo to Gauguin, who felt unfulfilled by their earlier work. You may be living this yourself.

Research confirms that middle age for many is the most challenging time of life. In 2008, economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald found that life satisfaction takes the form of a gently curving U. Their 2017 analysis of data from 1.3 million randomly sampled people from 51 countries confirmed their earlier results.

Throughout a life: People report high degrees of joy in their late teens and early 20s. However, as the years roll by, people become increasingly miserable, hitting a low point in their life satisfaction in their early 50s. Happiness rebounds from there into old age and retirement. Thus the U-shape curve.

Below is a plot of the age-happiness curves from the seven large surveys on the topic:

Mid-career crisis

Job satisfaction may suffer during mid-career due to the narrowing of options or doing the “same-old” routine. This routine includes the fact that your projects are completed and replaced with similar projects. You see people that you have trained climbing past you on the corporate ladder. So, you experience the inevitable frustration and regret.

“Even when outcomes are rosy, regret of a certain sort is appropriate.” — Kieran Setiya, MIT

The Warning Signs

The mid-career dip in curve coincides with professional fatigue, a shortfall in motivation or deteriorating health because of stress. Before you can decide how to find new challenges to jump-start your enthusiasm to pull yourself out of a mid-career crisis, you need to acknowledge that you are in one. Here are six signs:

You feel frustrated and unmotivated

Years of doing the same things are taking a toll. You drag yourself to the office every day because you need a stable job. You wonder where your passion has gone. Focussing on a task is hard. Moreover, you find yourself spending extra time on social media or taking frequent breaks.

You are stagnating

If you perform your tasks mechanically, without engagement or passion. You cannot remember the last time you learnt anything new on the job. So, your performance is deteriorating, and your career is stagnating. Your boss does not value your services as much anymore, and you feel that you have been passed over for promotions.

You are thinking about a career change

You cannot picture yourself continuing in your current position in the long term and are eager to get out. Disillusioned with your job, you are thinking of changing careers. You feel exhausted and bored. The only thing that is holding you back from making a move are the risks related to a career switch at this stage in your professional life.

You focus on the negatives

Your occasional water-cooler complaint session is now an all-day affair. The negative aspects at work leave a lasting impact on you, and you tend to dismiss the positives easily. You complain about your job or organization to anyone who will listen. You indulge in needless gossip about your bosses and co-workers. There is an aura of pessimism around you that may be affecting your co-worker’s morale.

You have behaviour problems

Snapping at colleagues over minor issues is a sign that your troubled mind affects your interpersonal skills at work. You are not just easily irritated in office. The stress and frustration are taking a toll on your relationships outside work as well.

You neglect your health

Exercise is no longer a priority for you. Your unhappiness is a frequent source of stress. You may have started to seek comfort in binge drinking or eating.

Your malaise at mid-career is a sign that you need to alter what you are doing or to change how you do it. Disruption can be a good thing. However, it is not always workable. By dealing with your frustration and regret, you can thrive even if you stay right where you are.

The challenge of accepting what you cannot change

As your life goes on, some possibilities fade, other options are constrained, and past decisions limit you. Even if you underestimate how much you can still do, you cannot evade the fact that every choice results in the elimination of alternatives. It is often in mid-career that you acknowledge the life you will never live and the pain of missing out.

The odds are that the pattern of your past career is complex. Most mid-career professionals have had a full range of jobs. When you look back at your life, you think about the roads not taken. Sometimes this reflection is with relief, but at other times it is with regret.

A sense of loss about paths not taken

Even when things go well, the value gained by different choices is not the same. So, you feel a sense of loss of what might have been.

Worthwhile activities are meaningful in diverse ways. Career regret exists as there were so many choices you made along the way. Did you pursue the path of least resistance or did you follow your passion? Typically deciding on a career path narrows your options. Who picked your college major, you, or your parents? Was the choice base on an understanding of your personal preferences — your behavioural DNA?

You may feel little doubt when two companies offer you similar positions, and you take the one with the larger salary. However, it is reasonable to experience loss when you choose a career in engineering over one in music, even if you are sure you made the right call.

Your second guessing need not imply that anything is wrong. Even when outcomes are rosy, regret is appropriate and not something you should wish away. You unconsciously assess the opportunity costs of options not taken, as you value many actions. You may still experience regret if you had pursued a career in music instead of engineering, though its focus would be different.

Avoiding regret

To avoid regret entirely, you would only care about one thing. However, that would impoverish your life. When you feel that you have missed out, remind yourself that it is the inevitable consequence of something good: the ability to find worth in many occupations.

I advocate two mindsets for you to develop. These mindsets will help to turn your feeling of regret into something that motivates you. Mindset is not about picking up some pointers here and there. It is about seeing things through a new lens.

When you evolve to a growth mindset, you switch from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework. Your commitment is to grow, and growth takes plenty of time, effort, and mutual support.

A darkhorse mindset is useful in guiding you to a life of purpose, authenticity, and achievement, regardless of your progress in your career.

The four critical elements to find fulfilment are:

• Know your micro-motives and superpowers — you need to understand your behavioural DNA
• Be open to opportunities to find fulfillment
• Develop your talent stack to capitalize on the available opportunities
• Do not set a destination — use gradient assent — capitalize on the opportunities

Being fixed on a destination rather than a direction is problematic from two points. The specific target may disappear before you get there. You may get there and be disappointed. With gradient assent you are learning, growing, and continuously discovering what provides you fulfillment, meaning and purpose.

Mistakes, Misfortunes, Failures

There is another kind of regret. You experience it when things do not go well. Everyone makes a few wrong turns in their career, and some have more than others. At midlife, you may reflect regretfully on what might have been. You may have given up on your passion for taking a corporate role. A decade into your career, you may find your work disappointingly dull. What haunts you is not so much wondering how to change tracks now but wishing you could change the past. How can you make peace with that decision?

It would be best for you to distinguish between what you should have done at the time and what you chose instead. For example, if you make a foolish investment, but it happens to turn a profit, you need not to regret doing something you should not have.

However, even when there is no surprise, the feelings you should have after the fact may shift. When you mourn the loss of your passion, think of all the things you have gained following your current path — the fulfillment you glean from relationships, friendships, projects, and the activities you pursued.

“If our lives are good, you have…reason to be glad you have had them rather than lives that would have been even better but too thoroughly different.” — Robert Adams

You live in details, not abstractions

You have a vision of life unlived. Contrast the notion that you might have had a more successful career if you had picked a different path with the concrete ways in which your actual job is good. In the analysis include the interactions and achievements you would not have experienced in another life. It is the specifics that you count against the abstraction of what might have been that matter.

Through the lens of regret, you tend to survey your life as if you were outside it. This approach can be muted by the attention you pay to the people, relationships, and activities you value and that depend on the career you chose.

Boredom in the Present

Accepting what you cannot change is only part of the problem you face on the way down the U curve. For some, the source of dissatisfaction at mid-career is not regretting about the past but a sense of futility in the present. The view of doing one thing after another until you finally retired is self-defeating.

A worthwhile activity may seem empty unless you link it to a higher purpose. Consider the parable about the three bricklayers. A traveller came upon three people working.  The traveller asked the first man what he was doing, and the man said he was laying bricks. He asked the second person the same question, and she said she was putting up a wall. When he got to the third person and asked him what he was doing, he said he was building a cathedral.

The workers were all doing the same thing. However, the first worker had a job, the second person had a career, and the third individual had a calling.

The ongoing improvement process provides value in solving a problem or answering a need. However, you may not jump to take it on, as you know you may need to mediate battles between colleagues, deal with unexpected problems in the rollout of a product and ensure that you follow regulations. Much work is like this.

Although it is necessary, the improvement brings limited satisfaction. If the best you can do is fix mistakes, meet targets, or prevent things from going wrong, you have no vision of what is positively good. Why bother to work so hard? Given that 85 percent of employees are disengaged and will not eagerly take on these challenges, you will stand out.

Evolve your view of telic and atelic activities

Kieran Setiya, a philosophy professor at MIT and the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide shares some useful insights regarding our view of events. The key is to distinguish between the telic and the atelic activities in which you participate.

Projects are telic activities. They aim at a future state — completion. When you reach the goal, it brings a moment of satisfaction. However, after that, it is on to the next project. Satisfaction is always in the future or the past. The present feels empty. This sense contributes to a feeling of emptiness at mid-career when you think narrowly.

What is worse, when a project has meaning for you, not only is your fulfillment deferred, but engagement in the project may destroy its essence. In pursuing a project, you either fail or succeed and thereby end its power to provide fulfillment.

Activities without a built-in end are atelic. For example, growing the business is an atelic activity, whereas a sales call is a telic activity.

When you undertake atelic activities, you do not exhaust them. These activities do not evoke the emptiness of projects, for which fulfillment is always in the future or the past. You fully realize atelic activities in the present.

At work, you engage in both telic and atelic activities. Many telic work activities have significant atelic aspects:

• when you are working on that deal, you are furthering your company’s growth strategy
• when you are hosting that conference, you are engaging industry stakeholders
• when you are laying bricks, you are building a cathedral

The project or the process

So, you have a choice to focus on a fixed activity or an ongoing one. When you adjust your orientation to become less project-driven, you defeat the sense of emptiness in the present, without changing what you do or how efficiently you do it.

Make time available for feel-good activities

Another reason for a mid-career crisis is that you spend too much of your time avoiding bad results and, putting out fires instead of pursuing projects with purpose—the kind that makes life worth living. Be available for feel-good activities either in the office—for instance, by starting a pet project you have been putting off for years—or outside it. Revive a favourite hobby or take up a new one. You may see this advice as mundane, but it has depth. Hobbies are less critical than your job. However, activities you value help to offset the ones that you do not value. It would help if you made room for such pleasures in your life.

Build Your Unique Talent Stack

“The key difference between checkers and chess is that in checkers the pieces all move the same way, whereas in chess all the pieces move differently. …Discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on it.”—Marcus Buckingham

Your talent stack is your career capital. You have superpowers use them rather than a false idea of what you need to do to succeed. Find your pathway to career success and satisfaction by leveraging your superpowers. Your unique talent stack enables you to thrive in a changing world. Finding your superpowers requires you to look at your behavioural DNA. This discovery is the key to a satisfying long-term productive career.

Are you going to be a multipotentialite or a specialist? Our assessment helps you discover your power skills and let you know those roles where your power skills align with top performers in a given function. Then you add the technical skills needed for the position.

Career satisfaction is a journey of discovery to find fulfilment. When you know your internal wiring, you no longer see yourself as different, you will see yourself as being unique. You will enjoy your career journey where ever it takes you.

Concluding Thoughts

Determine if your mid-career crisis is a signal to change course, or to change how you think and feel about your career. You may be unsatisfied professionally because:

• the position is not a good fit for your talent stack
• your interests have shifted
• the prospects for promotion are poor

Your dissatisfaction may turn on problems of regret, or the self-subversion of projects. Finding a new job will not address these issues.

The responsibility for preventing a mid-career crisis lies with both you and your employer. So, organizations should think of career development by offering mentoring programmes and expanding or redesigning job descriptions to generate new prospects for one's professional growth and personal creativity. However, do not wait for your organization to solve the problem.

Work through the above strategies to figure out which is the case. Are these strategies enough for you to resolve the limitations of your career? If not, then seriously consider switching tracks. Transform your outlook on life and business — find your ikigai before making a big move. Mid-career is not too late: your mid-career crisis can be a spur to radical, vitalizing change.

However, even if you make the big move, you should not forget the tactics that got you through your malaise and revived your enjoyment of work. Recognize that missing out is unavoidable and do not try to wish it away. Understand that attachment acts as a counterweight to regret. Make room for activities with existential worth. Moreover, value the big picture of what you are contributing to, not just the project or the product.