Second Act

Careers with more stages and more transitions are more complicated to assess than the old three-part model, where specialist skills were more easily identifiable and measurable.

We go through many transitions: getting married, having or not having children, changing jobs, menopause, mental health problems, moving to a new area, redundancy, retirement. These can all be opportunities for change. They won’t be exclusively good or bad experiences for everyone. But they can change the way your motivation is expressed. The same

Many life choices are Vampire Problems. They are, as Paul says, decisions about ‘experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source than the experience itself’.35 The

a five-part model where the work phase starts with a phase of exploration and where periods of work (involving challenge and growth) are then punctuated with periods of transition.18

Transformation is often a messy process even if it starts with a simple and self-defining realization or decision. For many of us, the changes we are considering will be significantly less significant than becoming a nun, and offer more opportunities to sample.

As we have seen in this chapter, chance favours the prepared mind and Thatcher was always preparing. ‘Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted’59 was one of her favourite sayings.

In order to be good at something, you must ‘give yourself to the learning process’.

Today we move around more, but great work still comes disproportionately from a few hotspots: the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the New Yorker, Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Xerox Parc.9

It was the Second World War that made Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower late bloomers. If these two men had died aged fifty, they would be almost unknown today: one a local politician, the other a mid-ranking army officer of little consequence.