Career Planning

When
Get Your You Realize
Dream You’ll
Job Never
by Stewart D. Friedman
April 01, 2015

I once had dreams of becoming like Bruce Springsteen. Now, at

age 62, I write about him, go to his shows, sing along to his songs
in my car, teach my children about his significance, use his works
in my Wharton classes, and even serve as a Guest DJ on E Street
Radio. But despite my earlier wishes to live a successful musical
performer’s life, it’s not going to happen. I’m not Springsteen, and
never will be.

And that’s OK.

We often say to children, “You can be whatever you want to be.”
But, at some point along the path to adulthood, you come to
accept that maybe you’re really not going to be a professional
basketball player, or an astronaut, or the president, or a rock star.
Maybe you just don’t have the aptitude, or the drive, or the skills
to make your fantasy mesh with your reality. Part of reaching
maturity means coming to know ourselves – our strengths and
our limitations – figuring out how our gifts can realistically
flourish in the world.

Middle age is often when we have to confront the realities of our

career aspirations. By this time, childhood fantasies of becoming
a princess or president may have long been put to rest. But you
probably still wish for success, recognition, or promotions in your
current endeavors. And while these aspirations might seem more
attainable than youthful dreams, sometimes they’re simply not,
for whatever reason. Maybe you long to be CEO, but you’re just not
suited to a management position. Maybe you always dreamed of
starting your own company, but you’re risk-averse. Maybe you
lack the education, experience, skills, motivation, or resources
that it would take to fulfill your earlier career dreams.

Whatever the reason, when you’re finally facing the reality that
you may never become CEO, or succeed your direct supervisor, or
lead your team, or get that big promotion, what do you do?

First, as in dealing with any loss, understand there may be denial

– and it may last for some time. You might want to hold on to the
hope you’ll get there someday, but that hope won’t necessarily
help you obtain the longed-for goal. There may be anger, justified
or not. People often blame their superiors for being ignorant, for
showing favoritism, for being sexist, racist, or classist. While these
may all be accurate assessments of the work environment, the
anger, like the denial, also isn’t likely to move you toward that
promotion – or toward acceptance.
Oftentimes, there’s sadness, and even depression. Thus the cliché
of the mid-life crisis, replete with an affair and a sports car;
something to both deny reality and cheer you up in the face of
fading aspirations, while helping you instead feel something akin
to the power of youth flowing through your veins. But ultimately,
you need to accept the situation as it is.

To lead the life you want, you must have a vision that’s useful: a
compelling image of an achievable future. Once you’ve found
some resolution in your mind’s view of your real prospects, the
next step on your journey can commence. The essential task is to
find meaning and a sense of purpose – to take control over what
you actually can do.

This is what I try to help my students and clients to do: Discover

what’s truly most important in their lives. To do this, you need to
account for and take pleasure in your accomplishments to date —
at work and elsewhere. Experiment with how you can best use
your talents and passions to create value for yourself and others.
Own the responsibility to take steps, however small, toward
realizing your current vision of the leader you want to become,
and the world you can create — at work, at home, and in your
community.

Sometimes life simply deals us a

YOU AND YOUR TEAM
bad hand. Psychologists have
Mid-Career Crisis researched ways to cope with the
When you’re feeling stuck. slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune. We need what Suzanne
Kobasa and Salvatore Maddi call
hardiness, what Angela Duckworth and colleagues call grit, what
Carol Dweck and others call a growth mindset, and what The
American Psychological Association refers to as resilience.
Whatever you call this stick-to-it-iveness, it’s essential for being
able to overcome setbacks and hardships of any sort, including
career mid-life crises and stagnations.
Eric Greitens knows a lot about this subject. In his just-released
Resilience, Greitens recounts hard-won wisdom for living a better
life, drawn from his interpretation of ancient philosophy, modern
existentialism, and his own experience as both a humanitarian
and a Navy SEAL. The central idea is to find purpose in what you
can do. While you are not responsible for all that happens to you,
you are responsible for how you react to what happens to you.
Stop the blaming and the resentment and assert control over what
you can.

As I describe in my books Total Leadership and Leading the Life

You Want (in which Greitens is featured), you have to take
positive action that’s rooted in your core values – in what you now
care most about in your life. Accepting the facts of your current
reality is the first and most important thing you can do to move
through the trials of a mid-career crisis. Next, reflect on what is
truly most important to you. Is it really that promotion, or is it
your family, your friends, your community, your own health and
well-being? At the midpoint of life, most people are able, upon
reflection, to consider their own lives and their own legacies
beyond their positions and their paychecks. Considering what is
essential to your sense of purpose and your sense of contentment
can help you look for ways to move in the direction you choose – a
direction that somehow makes the world a bit better for others
and is closer to the future you now want to fashion. Some people
might find deep satisfaction, and solace, in a creative endeavor
(for example, art or writing) that feeds their soul. Others might
invest more attention in friends and family. Others might find
meaning in charitable community efforts. And others might
discover a new dream, one that’s now attainable – an encore that’s
ultimately more fulfilling than any earlier career aspirations.

In short, even without that once hoped-for promotion, big job

title, or salary bump, you can find meaning, purpose, fulfillment,
and even happiness and joy in your life when you realize you
might need to let go of an earlier dream. And while you’re still on
the path to discovery, there are ways of making work more
fulfilling and meaningful, too. For instance, maybe you’ve seen
Millennials as the enemy – the ones taking the positions you’ve
always coveted. If you change your mindset, you can instead start
to see yourself as a mentor to them. But this, of course, requires
you to let go of denial and anger and come to accept things as they
are.

While you might not get to be the rock star you once dreamed
you’d be, with resilience, persistence, and conscious
experimentation, trial-and-error may eventually lead you to a
place where you will feel that you’re doing what you were actually
meant to do all along. In that vein, I have heeded The Boss’s oft-
quoted admonition to not “spend your life waiting for a moment
that just won’t come,” and instead have been striving to listen to
my heart and become myself.

Stewart D. Friedman is an organizational

psychologist at the Wharton School. He is the
co-author of Parents Who Lead. For more, visit
www.totalleadership.org, find him on Twitter
@StewFriedman, or on LinkedIn.
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