According to the U-bend theory of happiness, adults start out happy, with the freedom, excitement and expectations of youth; then as they approach their mid-forties they slide, in Tom Lehrer’s phrase, down the razor blade of life; and finally, as they age, their happiness improves and keeps on improving.

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.

A combination of endurance, learning, ideas, energy and decisiveness was how a woman whom few people expected anything of, with no senior Cabinet experience and a very small support base, became a great world leader, out of nowhere, aged fifty.

bohemian

When faced with big changes, whether Vampire Problems or not, we are more cautious once we have some experience. We know what failure is like – we don’t want to go through it again. This is also known as the ‘hot stove effect’, named after a Mark Twain observation:

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.

She couldn’t force what that change would be like, though, and often when we decide we want to be different, we don’t know what that new reality will be like. We have to take a leap of faith.

Networks coordinate information. As the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, ‘Creativity cannot bring forth anything new unless it can enlist the support of peers.’

Doing something you are comparatively less good at in the short run might not seem like the best idea, but it can be. Not knowing what sort of practice will pay off is one of the biggest challenges we face when making these decisions.