Mark was a survivor. Until he was fired in 2012, six months shy of his fiftieth birthday, he’d done everything right: He’d risen through the ranks of the book publishing industry, from editorial assistant to associate editor to senior editor, then gone into management as an editor in chief. But as ebooks and Amazon destabilized the industry and waves of consolidation contracted available jobs, Mark (whose name has been changed) admits today that he hadn’t “paid attention to the writing on the wall.” He confesses that he’d spent the 18 months prior to being fired living in denial as his team was reorganized. “Despite that,” he says, “I clung to my job rather than starting to think about how to leave. At that point, I couldn’t conceive of a life outside the confines of corporate publishing, of not being at the center of the club I’d been a part of—and a star in—since the age of 21.”
Mark’s story is a cautionary tale for us all. In my experience, Mark’s kind of wishful thinking—that things will sort themselves out on their own—rarely works out. Not taking action has costs that can be as consequential as taking risks; it’s simply less natural to calculate and pay attention to the “what-ifs” of inaction. In today’s marketplace, where jobs and job categories are being invented and becoming obsolete at an accelerating rate, I’d argue that the riskiest move one can make is to assume that their industry or job is secure. Just ask former employees of Country wide, British Petroleum, or Newsweek if you doubt me.
Research I conducted in 2012, 2013, and 2014 with the global advertising agency J. Walter Thompson for my book Risk/Reward: Why Intelligent Leaps and Daring Choices Are the Best Career Moves You Can Make suggests that anxiety about our job futures weighs on us heavily these days. More than half of the respondents to our surveys, from people all over the United States, in a wide range of ages, in positions ranging from janitors to CEOs, were thinking of changing not just their jobs but their careers. Think about that. Half of all Americans long to do something dramatically different with their working lives from what they are currently doing.
But it’s hard to jettison a career that’s been decades in the making in the pursuit of something new. There’s an enormous gap between dreaming about doing something different, particularly if one has spent years building skills and rising through the ranks, and actually making a change. It’s terrifying to think about not using one’s hard-earned law degree and letting go of years invested in the law firm partner track in order to write for television, as an acquaintance of mine has done. Most people dream but fail to act.
What stops us? There are all sorts of complicated financial and behavioral barriers to risk-taking—loss and risk aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, poor planning—but basically it boils down to the fact that as human beings, we are wired to resist giving up the known for the unknown. None of us tolerates ambiguity well, particularly when the losses and gains underpin our livelihoods or the projected long-term happiness of our families. Psychologically, particularly during tough economic times, people feel compelled to hold on to an unsatisfactory job rather than gamble on something with uncertain odds, even if it might be better in the long run. And we all have different levels of innate risk tolerance that inform our calculus for evaluating probable gains and losses. How can we turn self-defeating inaction into sensible action? Two ways to mitigate the risk of trying on a new career are to build a robust network and to break a big, hairy problem into small, actionable steps.
Build Vibrant Networks
In Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, Herminia Ibarra, an organizational behavior professor at London Business School, writes that people’s existing “contacts [don’t] help them reinvent themselves . . . the networks we rely on in a stable job are rarely the ones that lead us to something new and different.” Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter discovered that the contacts most helpful to people looking for new jobs were neither their closest friends nor new acquaintances but rather people with whom they had relatively weak ties that had been forged and maintained over several years. In addition, the more different their contacts’ occupations were from their own jobs, the more likely people were to successfully make a major career change. There’s a reason, when we’re interested in making a 45- or 90-degree career shift, why most jobs suggested by headhunters tend not to feel right. The majority of people we know in one line of work can only imagine us continuing to do the same thing. Meeting more people who are employed in a wide range of professions strengthens our ability to imagine ourselves doing something different. That makes a career change feel more achievable and less risky.
Take Small Steps Toward Big Goals
Perhaps the biggest impediment to change in our working lives is the sense that any significant change has to be all or nothing. I either quit my miserable job or just suck it up and grind along. I’ve got to make a comprehensive business plan before I test whether my English muffin/croissant hybrid and baked-goods truck can generate enough income for me to live. I’m good at structuring logical arguments so I should quit sales and become a lawyer. Big challenges feel too risky to navigate, so we stay put. Instead, we need to break problems into small actions. A more moderate approach to considering a shift to a law career would be to test-drive the profession by becoming a paralegal before assuming the expensive three-year commitment of getting a law degree. The amateur cook with a killer recipe could approach a local bakery with his novel product to see if they’d be willing to sell it. This would result in getting market feedback before crafting a business plan for a new venture. The person in the miserable job could volunteer weekends at an organization they think might make them happier. This would help them learn what the work is really like from the inside before chucking it all on a dream that may be a fantasy. Armed with real-world data, each of those hypothetical career changers would have more clarity about what to do next. The trick is to start with the immediately, manageably doable and do.
We need to continue to find new challenges and set goals—and then acquire the skills to meet those challenges and achieve those goals. Committing to goals also provides structure and meaning to our lives that leads to more overall happiness, says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside. She quotes the writer G. K. Chesterton in this regard: “There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner.”
Real life, by necessity, is improvisational and interactive, crafted incrementally through our responses to the particular circumstances at this moment in time, and the next, and then the next. As author Tom Peters wrote, “I have said and mean with all my heart I’ve only learned one thing ‘for sure’ in 48 years: WTTMSW. Whoever tries the most stuff wins.”