Be a generalist – it’s easier to swap career in middle age
There’s a good reason why founders of major start-ups are 45 and a half, says Anna Maxted
Many of us dream about changing career in midlife but reason ourselves out of it on the basis that we can’t throw all that time and effort away, and that we’d be clueless in another vocation, anyhow – not to mention about 20 years behind everyone else.
But bestselling author David Epstein says we’re likely to thrive for the very reasons we fear we’ll fail. In Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World, Epstein studied the world’s most successful people – scientists, musicians, athletes. He found that if we want to become accomplished in almost any field, spending years dabbling in other pursuits is crucial.
Tiger Woods’s exclusive focus on golf from age zero is constantly referenced as the only way to excel. Actually, Epstein finds that the vast majority of elite athletes have what researchers call “a sampling period, where they learn broad skills” and “delay specialising”.
This research, explains Epstein, who is based in New York, “pertains to every stage of life, from the development of children in maths… to mid-career professionals in need of a change”.
Monomaniacal focus may work in the worlds of chess, golf and firefighting but, Epstein explains, these areas involve repeated patterns and learning from the experiences they produce. Trouble is, most of the world is random and requires conceptual reasoning power. And Epstein shows it’s often the outsider who can most easily spot problems, largely because “specialists get such a narrow view that they lose perspective”.
Over-specialising creates a danger of “cognitive entrenchment”, where everyone is deep in their own trench of expertise, unable to see into the next one. Range is littered with examples of latecomers beating the experts at their own game: 36-yearold Epstein cites the authors of a Harvard study on winding career
paths, called The Dark Horse Project, who interviewed fulfilled, successful types who had found their métier circuitously.
They noted that almost every interviewee insisted that people should not be advised to follow their lead, seeing their paths as proof that they had “got off-track… but got lucky at the end”.
Their most common trait was short-term planning; an approach based on the here and now, and an “I’m going to try this, and maybe in
‘We think of career zigzagging as wasting time – but we should reverse that mentality’
a year I’ll change because I’ll find something better” ethos, Epstein says.
“It’s called self-regulatory learning, where they proactively experiment and they keep zigzagging,” he explains. “Usually we think of that as wasting time. I think we should try to revise that mentality.”
He interviews Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School, who says: “We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. The idea that we will have the same abilities over time is not compatible with what the psychological research shows.”
He quotes a recent Gallup survey of 200,000 workers in 150 countries – 85 per cent were “not engaged” with their work or “actively disengaged”.
Meandering into a “best fit” career won’t only benefit your wellbeing, then, but your prospects and your bank account. “‘Match quality’ is the phrase economists use to describe that degree of fit between an individual’s interests and abilities and the work they end up doing. Research shows it to be incredibly important for someone’s long-term motivation, and their performance,” Epstein explains.
So why are we often so hesitant to switch? Partly because we’re conditioned to think you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Yet the average age of the founder of a blockbuster start-up is 45-and-a-half – a concept at odds with the breathlessly told Mark Zuckerbergstyle fairy tale. “They will probably have picked up more self-awareness than the average wunderkind and those traits are good for leadership,” says Epstein.
Another reason we might stick with a career we’ve fallen out of love with is the “sunk cost fallacy”, where people think: “I might as well keep going or it’s a waste.”
Changing career midlife is dramatised as risky but Ibarra says most transitions are cautious: people begin with a class or two, then realise: “This is more than a hobby for me.”
Those who reach a point of feeling the need to change, Epstein says, “would be better off once they did”.