How to Avoid A Midlife Career Crisis.
Edition #120
The ContraMind Code
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
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Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
The Friendship Problem.
Why friendships have started to feel strikingly similar to admin
This article provides an interesting perspective on how friendships are transforming in this age of internet connectivity and social media.
Here are some key takeaways for you to think about:
‘Modern loneliness masks itself as hyper-connectivity.’
Friendships are, by their very nature, made of friction.
We are so burned out by our data-heavy, screen-based, supposedly friction-free lives that we no longer have the time or energy to engage in the kind of small, unfabulous, mundane, place-based friendships or acquaintance-ships that have nourished and sustained humans for literal centuries.
We’ve lost entire categories of social interaction that used to foster friendships, especially low-key ones. Our lives are bereft of ways to see people in the low-effort, regular, and repeating ways our brains were designed to connect through.
This over-reliance on tech for every aspect of our lives “opens us up to new vectors of anxiety.”
We are so burned out by the process of staying afloat in a globalized, connected world that we don’t have the energy for the kinds of in-person, easy interactions that might actually give us some energy and life force back.
Read the article here.
How Do I Avoid A Career Plateau At Midlife?
Muriel Maignan Wilkins is a CEO Advisor and Leadership Coach. She is also the host of the HBR Podcast, Coaching Real Leaders.
This is a very well-paced and insightful coaching conversation. The person in question is facing a midlife career challenge.
Muriel Wilkins asks the coachee some of the most interesting, probing, and thought-provoking questions about career aspirations, success, job role, career challenges, role transition over time that she has gone through, her family commitments, current life stage, etc.
Muriel brings out the insights brilliantly as the coachee discovers and finds deep-rooted answers to some of the nagging thoughts/questions going through her mind.
You can listen to the entire podcast on:
The Neuroscience Of Memory With Charan Ranganath.
Charan Ranganath is an affiliated faculty member of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience. He is also director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at UC Davis and is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Mind and Brain.
In this video, he talks to the Royal Institution, an independent charity that connects people of all ages and backgrounds with science.
Charan Ranganath talks about:
How does memory work?
The difference between Episodic and Semantic memory.
How does memory retrieval happen, and what cues does it take to help us remember things?
What will be the effect of AI on our memory.
Why forcing your brain to struggle is good for enhancing memory: Error-driven learning is critical for enhancing memory.
Networks in the brain and how it interacts with each other.
The correlation between memory and creativity.
You can watch the entire conversation by clicking the above video.
How to Avoid A Midlife Career Crisis.
Thinking about a midlife career crisis, one needs to look at the reasons and root causes. So many people in their mid-40s and early 50s go through this phase. When most people work, they think primarily about jobs and not their careers. The questions that they ask themselves or often asked are:
Did a day-one company on campus hire you? This often becomes a success marker.
Is this best job-on-offer basis the compensation package that has been offered?
What are the perks offered in the job—foreign travel, reimbursements, club memberships, vacations, etc.?
How often are you getting promoted and given new designations or positions?
Are your increments and compensation rapidly keeping pace with time?
Does the job give you enough freedom and flexibility?
All these seem good when you start young, and that’s when you tend to ‘Confuse Recognition with Improved Capability’ in your job. Indeed, recognition and fair compensation are all important, but you rarely get compensated or recognised for capability or competency growth. You get compensated and recognised for the work you have been assigned and how best you accomplish them. That’s the job you have been assigned to get done.
However, a career is about ‘carefully cultivating either linear or non-linear growth over time in competency or capability’. As you age, this becomes more critical as ‘synergy takes precedence over energy’.
What this really means is that:
There needs to be synergy between what you want to do and what you do.
There needs to be synergy with your work, which aligns with your strengths.
There needs to be synergy between your expertise and action because they produce incredible energy that can never be matched by someone relatively younger than you.
When you have such a synergy, you stay relevant and updated, and you can overcome dated knowledge and experience.
If energy took your career to a pivotal point when you were middle-aged, synergy would help it take higher as you age.
Therefore, when you are relatively young at work, search for synergy between your strengths, interests, and the work that you do. It is always said, ‘ Take the first job, which can help you get the second job’. This may not be the best-paying job, may not be the best firm in the industry, or maybe a far more demanding job than others, but the work you do or the exposure that it gives you takes you far longer than the top company or job that the rest of the people normally take-up.
When you take a view of a career over a 30-year working lens and not thro’ a narrow focus of a job that you have, you prepare yourself:
To continuously pivot and learn.
To honestly and frequently assess your skills/capability gap and address them.
To separate what your company might need now vs what your profession might need in the future.
Towards what you like to pursue over time vs what you are asked to do over the short term.
To stay away from short-term career/job lures and focus patiently on building deep core competencies that can help stay competitive over the long term. When your skills become uncompetitive with your compensation and capabilities, companies and the market will be the first ones to dump you! Remember that.
You can avoid midlife career crises when you stay true to your core.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
Today, friendships have transformed into loneliness despite hyper-connectivity.
Understand the power and difference between episodic and semantic memory.
Careers can find relevance and purpose over time only when you fuse ‘fluid intelligence’ with ‘crystallized intelligence.’
Synergy needs to take precedence over energy early in your career, that is when midlife crises can be avoided.