Lend a Hand
10. Unlearn. Transform. Re-Invent:
Three decades plus into work still leave a decade or two of career ahead and this is where things can get really dangerous or full-filling.
If you have been successful you might be getting set up for a fall because —without you knowing it —the Industry you grew up in is being transformed and there are new technologies and approaches that make what you learned obsolete and just when you think you have arrived you have to unlearn what made you successful.
Now you have to start learning and changing and making mistakes that you long thought you no longer have to do since you are a leader and not a rookie. You are too cool and too senior to actually make a fool of yourself but if you do not want to become as irrelevant as you fear privately you will have to change.
Now all this talk about "change is good "that you have been stating to your teams has to be applied to yourself and you begin to realize that change actually sucks since you have to learn and trip and re-grow.
The really successful folks in the last third of the career have become students and learners again. If they have built a brand and have worked with integrity and helped others along the way, a swarm of people come to help them adjust. They reverse mentor, form a trampoline and ensure that you do not fail since they recall the days you helped them. Sooner or later you will sow the seeds you planted and Karma is real.
For many folks the later years within a firm or outside it are often the best since they have all the mastery and fewer and fewer of the constraints.
At this stage the best folks become artists. Think of late Monet with his Water Lilies which are a play on light and water that only a master could achieve or Beethoven's late String Quartets or anything from a later Picasso.
David
Strategy & Actions
617-331-7852
david@davidcutler.net
www.DavidCutler.net
