We’re at a perilous moment in time, when so many of us are searching for a “new normal” after the past few tumultuous years, and looking for more meaning in our lives and careers, reprioritizing our lives. We need a guidebook to get there.
That’s why I wrote NEXT! The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work. I wanted to answer the question so many of us are asking now: what’s next? And how do I get there?
The book is the culmination of hundreds of interviews, both with people who had made major transitions and with experts who study the process of change, from management gurus to neuroscientists.
The people I spoke to traveled astonishingly varied paths. Some switched careers, others had life-changing “aha” moments, others were trying to pivot after devastating failures or terrible traumas. I spoke with well-known names like novelist James Patterson (former ad executive) and legendary Fed chair Alan Greenspan (former professional jazz clarinetist), as well as others who you may not know who had equally remarkable pivots. There’s the trial lawyer turned TikTok cooking phenom, the economist who became a cattle farmer, and the telephone repairman turned women’s shoe designer. There’s the “Budget Fashionista” blogger who now advises Black-owned startups, and the mom who quit the corporate world to raise her kids—then re-emerged as a non-profit CEO and mayor.
Yet I found that they all had a similar trajectory in reinventing lives and careers. Even those who had the most seemingly extreme makeovers followed a surprisingly similar trajectory. I call it the Reinvention Roadmap, and it progresses through four identifiable stages: Search-Struggle-Stop-Solution.
Broadly speaking, each pivot begins with a search to gather information. Surprisingly, the search is often unintentional: for those who switch careers, for example, it may simply start as a hobby or side hustle or even a random interest that you have no idea will ultimately lead you to an unexpected new role.
Then comes the second stage: an uncomfortable, sometimes miserable, middle period of struggle when you’re disconnecting from your previous identity but haven’t figured out the new one. The struggle often doesn’t end until you reach the third stage, the stop—whether you choose a break (like quitting a job) or one is forced on you (like getting laid off – or a pandemic!). The stop pulls you out of your routine, allowing all of your previous ideas and experiences to coalesce. Only then do you come out the other side with the final stage, the solution, completing the pivot to the new identity.
Perhaps it’s human nature, but we have an unfortunate tendency to focus on just the first and last steps of reinvention, conveniently ignoring the messy struggle in the middle. We get caught up in the Cinderella myth, the idea that these transformations are sudden, abrupt and seamless: Mark Zuckerberg goes from college kid to tech billionaire. Boom! Vera Wang from figure skater to bridal designer. Julia Child from World War II intelligence official to cooking doyenne.
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