the outside.”
Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts. Each “story of me” continues to evolve. We should all heed the wisdom of Alice, who, when asked by the Gryphon in Wonderland to share her story, decided she had to start with the beginning of her adventure that very morning. “It’s no use going back to yesterday,” she said, “because I was a different person then.” Alice captured a grain of truth, one that has profound consequences for the best way to maximize match quality.
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Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, studied how young consultants and bankers advance (or don’t) in firms she described as up-or-out hierarchies. When she followed up a few years later, after her project, she found that some of the budding stars either weren’t there anymore, having embarked on new careers, or were hatching escape plans.
Ibarra began another study, this time adding web entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, professors, and IT professionals. The focus would be on career switching. Ibarra tracked ambitious professionals, most in their thirties and forties, in the United States, United Kingdom, and France who had traveled a linear career path for a minimum of eight years. Over the course of her work, she watched midcareer professionals move from a flicker of desire for change, to an unsettling period of transition, to the actual jump to a new career. Occasionally she saw the entire process occur twice for the same individual. When she compiled her findings, the central premise was at once simple and profound: we learn who we are only by living, and not before.
Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat. If that sounds facile, consider that it is precisely the opposite of a vast marketing crusade that assures customers they can alight on their perfect matches via introspection alone. A lucrative career and personality quiz and counseling industry survives on that notion. “All of the strengths-finder stuff, it gives people license to pigeonhole themselves or others in ways that just don’t take into account how much we grow and evolve and blossom and discover new things,” Ibarra told me. “But people want answers, so these frameworks sell. It’s a lot harder to say, ‘Well, come up with some experiments and see what happens.’”
If only you fill out this quiz, the promise goes, it will light the way to the ideal career, never mind what psychologists have documented about personal change across time and context. Ibarra criticized conventional-wisdom articles like one in the Wall Street Journal on “the painless path to a new career,” which decreed that the secret is simply forming “a clear picture of what you want” before acting.
Instead, she told me, in a clever inversion of a hallowed axiom, “First act and then think.” Ibarra marshaled social psychology to argue persuasively that we are each made up of numerous possibilities. As she put it, “We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.
Think of Frances Hesselbein, who assumed over and over she was just dipping her toe into something new, until she was near the age when her peers were retiring and finally realized she had short-term-planned her way to a vocation. Or Van Gogh, who was certain he found the perfect calling again and again, only to learn in practice that he was mistaken, until he wasn’t.
Ibarra documented extreme transitions: Pierre, a thirty-eight-year-old psychiatrist and bestselling author, became a Buddhist monk after a winding road that started with meeting a Tibetan lama at a dinner party. And more quotidian conversions: Lucy, a forty-six-year-old tech manager at a brokerage firm, was floored by the critical personal feedback she got from an organizational development consultant, so she hired the woman as a personal coach. Lucy soon realized she was more inspired to manage people (an area of weakness, the consultant convinced her) than technology. Gradually, she attended classes and conferences and tapped the far-flung fringes of her personal network to get a sense of what was possible. One gig at a time, a weakness became a strength, and she transitioned into an organizational development coach herself.
Themes emerged in