In 1965, Toronto-born psychotherapist Elliott Jaques published a paper for the first time delineating a mid-life crisis that often hit at age 35 to 40. It was a researcher’s gold mine, something he could devote years to elaborating in further studies, but he never wrote on the topic again. Instead, he abandoned psychotherapy for work as what he called a “management scientist,” developing theories on the importance of hierarchy in organizations and how to get it right.
Earlier this month, Jim Collins, who operates a “management laboratory” in Boulder, Colo. and is known for a string of books he has authored or co-authored on organizations, including the bestsellers Built to Last and Good to Great, released a new book after a decade of study focused instead on life and careers.
In it, he echoed and expanded on Mr. Jaques revelation, noting that each of us in our career will hit a cliff: A significant event, not necessarily at mid-life, that alters the trajectory of life and forces choices about what is next. “The big cliffs can radically change a life, requiring people to reconstitute their lives and re-envision the years to come,” he writes in What to Make of a Life.
Perhaps this immediately brings to mind your own cliff. If not, be prepared. He believes the odds of not experiencing a cliff is close to zero. “Cliffs are us,” he says.
Alan Page and Carl Eller, defensive linemen for the Minnesota Vikings, among the 34 lives he delved into at length, hit an expected cliff when they became too old to maintain their standard of play and retired. For Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, it came after achieving their goal of a constitutional amendment allowing women in the U.S. to vote.
Led Zeppelin star performers Robert Plant and Jimmy Page hit a cliff when their drummer John Bonham died and they decided not to continue with the band. Katharine Graham and Georgia Frontiere hit the cliff after their husband’s deaths, when each took the helm of the family-owned enterprise, for Ms. Graham The Washington Post and Ms. Frontiere the Los Angeles Rams football franchise.
Cliffs, Mr. Collins notes, can be personal or professional. They can come after success or failure, graduation or retirement. They can be planned or shockingly unexpected. But they are all around us.
Many years after they occur, it can seem the post-cliff transformation was quick and seamless. But in fact, when you hit a cliff, what he found is you then are engulfed by fog, a phase of intense uncertainty and lack of clarity about the best path forward.
“When in the fog, you can feel confused or disoriented or unsteady or reeling – or maybe all of these. You might be expending a lot of energy in the fog, but it can feel more like wandering and stumbling than purposeful strides toward a clear destination,” he writes.
We get out of the fog through small, incremental exploratory steps he calls “simplex stepping.” We are trying to find something to pursue that meshes with our abilities and interests. He calls that part of our inner self “encodings” – durable capacities of a person’s intrinsic construction that lie within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life.
In our early years, we try to get those encodings and our initial career aligned as perfectly as possible (often after a period of fog). After the post-cliff fog, the same alignment must happen.
The encodings needed for success, however, may not be the same at this stage. Take Alan Page, who after retirement from football went on to become a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court.
“Each of us likely has a vast and spectacular constellation of encodings within, more than we will ever be able to discover in a single lifetime. You don’t create encodings; you discover them. You don’t add encodings from without; you find them from within,” Mr. Collins says.
The mid-life crisis tends to be viewed widely as a time of despair or decline. But that’s not what Mr. Jaques initially found. His study of 310 famed painters, composers, poets, writers and sculptors throughout history showed that some faded after that life point but many soared, creating their best work late in life.
Mr. Collins, whose organizational studies involved matched pairs of companies with similar backgrounds and competitive situations, chose in this research to compare 17 pairs of people whose life was similar until they hit the cliff. After, some went on to greater career achievements and some didn’t. Some stayed with a similar pursuit and others embraced new ventures.
Mr. Collins says it is vital we feed the “inner fire” – what drives us – throughout our life, including the later years. His prime model is Meryl Streep, who well beyond the age of 40, when roles for female actors can dry up, has extended out into new, challenging roles but also returned back to characters familiar from her past, winning more Oscars after age 40 than any actor, male or female, in history across their entire career. “Our younger selves need not tower over our older selves,” he stresses.
Extending out in our own lives can reveal previously hidden encodings. Circling back to previous activities or paths can also be reinvigorating. Both can happen, he says, if later in life we choose responsibilities. It’s a time when we are supposed to finally be free. But Toni Morrison, one of the individuals he studied, has said, “Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilities; it’s choosing the ones you want.”
Cannonballs (from Jim Collins)
- Instead of viewing money as the principal goal and output of their efforts, the people in this study saw money as an input to fuel their work – to do what they were encoded for. Mr. Collins calls this flipping the arrow on money.
- Mr. Collins used to believe people needed to find their thing in life by age 30. He now believes they can find it well past age 30 and still have an exceptionally meaningful life.
- He used to believe that self-actualization meant discovering the one thing you are made for and committing to pursue it with excellence. He now believes that a single person can achieve self-actualized success in multiple radically different things across the long arc of a single life.
- A lesson on leadership he took away from this research is there can’t be a universal recipe for leadership as we are all encoded differently: “Each of us is a different ‘leadership artist’ because each of us is encoded differently.”
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.