Transitions (40th Anniversary Edition): Making Sense of Life's Changes

important transitions that is likely to take place in a person’s work life sometime after the age of forty: the transition from being motivated by the chance to demonstrate competence to being motivated by the chance to find personal meaning in the work and its results. It is the shift from the question of how to the question of why. The work world

the transition always starts with an ending.

The next phase of your life is taking shape. This is an opportunity to do something different with your life, something that expresses you in some significant way. This is a chance to begin a new chapter.

The transition process requires not only that we bring a chapter of our lives to conclusion but also that we discover whatever we need to learn for the next step. We

but the real need is for a genuine sort of aloneness in which inner signals can make themselves heard.

Take this opportunity to discover what you really want. What do you want, anyway?

his true adult education, to discover who he is and what life is all about. What is the secret of the “I” with which he has been on such intimate terms all these years, yet which remains a stranger? What lurks behind the world’s façade, animating it, ordering it—to what end?7

This in an important shift during life’s second half, which is not the same as our retirement because it is a transition into something, not just a transition from something. Whether

Changes that are so deep and far-reaching are unlikely to disappear with time.