Facing Your Mid-Career Crisis : Should you cope or quit?

Harvard Business Review | Volume 97, Issue 2, Why Feedback Fails

Facing Your Mid-Career Crisis : Should you cope or quit?

Kieran Setiya

Setiya, Kieran. “Facing Your Mid-Career Crisis. Should You Cope or Quit?” Harvard Business Review, 2019, pp. 135–139.

Date: 03/05/18

Mid-Career Crisis is natural. Setiya identifies a few psychological reasons for mid-career crisis and strategies to find satisfaction in your current career - 

1. Regrets about the past - fixating on the idea that as we make decisions other possibilities are rejected and we our potential is limited. 

2. Making or feeling like failure, mistakes, or wrong turns. We should be looking at the big picture, not at individual projects/events. 

3. Pursue projects with existential value - the kind that make life worth living. Projects aim at completion, therefore the termination of a project marks the end of its existential worth. If we live in the present and look toward a bigger picture, we can eliminate the feeling of temporary satisfaction or dissatisfaction at the beginning and end of projects. 

4. Balance telic (aim at a terminal state) and antelic (without an end built in) activities. Example: the difference between putting your child to bed (telic) and parenting (antelic). Atelic activities are realized in the present. 

Key Quotes:

"The only way to avoid regret entirely is the care about just one thing, one metric to max out. But that would impoverish your life. Remind yourself that feeling you've missed out is the inevitable consequence of something good: the capacity to find worth in many walks of life."

Ameliortive Value - the value of solving a problem or answering a need, even when the need is one you'd rather not confront. Example: conflicts between colleagues, meet targets, putting out fires, etc.

Existential Value - the value of solving a problem or answering a need that makes life worth living, that make a meaningful impact. 

Questions of the reading?