Mid-Career Crisis

Mastery is boring. It’s true. A baby takes its first steps, and everyone cheers. I do it all the time, and people only cheer if I trip.

In your career, you had your first baby steps. Then you started learning the ropes. You got better and better, until you hit a point of such incremental change (mastery) you get bored of your career. Your life starts to feel burnt out. You learned to walk, and now that you’re going, other questions arise during the boredom of mastery.

Where are we going? What impression am I leaving? How will I be remembered? Why is this still hard when I know exactly what I’m doing?

This is the quiet ache of the mid-career crisis. (Erik Erikson would have called this the crisis at seventh stage of psychological development, if you want extra reading.) It’s not the chaos of failing. It’s the dull hum of "still." Still working. Still succeeding. Still waking up wondering if this is it. And when excellence becomes expected, there's no applause. No milestone. Just... more.

Some people choose a new niche, consider leaving the industry altogether. The antidote isn’t always reinvention. Sometimes, it’s reinvigoration. Sometimes, it’s rediscovering the why underneath the how.

A karate instructor told me various ways he had combatted this. He went back to the beginning, relearning from white belt forward to see where he could improve his technique with a better understanding of the body mechanics. He studied in other disciplines, earning black belts there as well. He used that knowledge to grow his business more, but mostly to reinvigorate his interest.

But that doesn’t cover legacy. What are YOU leaving behind for the world? Your memory will be carried in the minds of the people you touch. Finding what those people yearn for and finding a way to help make it happen is called being a mentor, a benefactor, an advisor. Your legacy will be in how you impacted the legacy of others.

Because this milestone is about realizing the world is so much bigger than you or your business, but you and your business can make the world so much bigger. And that’s legacy.