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| The Second Half of Your Life | | Date Created: Jan 13, 2005, 11:18 PM |
These are some extracts from an article ?Managing Yourself? by Peter Drucker that resonated with me. Maybe I am going through an early mid-life crisis if I am asking myself these questions all the time ?.
The Second Half of your Life
When work for most people meant manual labour, there as no need to worry about the second half of your life. You simply kept on doing what you had always done. And if you were lucky enough to survive 40 years of hard work in the mill or on the railroad, you were quite happy to spend the rest of our life doing nothing. Today, however, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not ?finished? after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.
We hear a great deal of talk about the midlife crisis of the executive. It is mostly boredom. A 45, most executives have reached the peak of their business careers, and they know it. After 20 years of doing very much the same kind of work, they are very good at their jobs. But they are not learning or contributing or deriving challenge and satisfaction from the job. And yet they are still likely to face another 20 if not 25 years of work. That is why managing oneself increasingly leads one to begin a second career.
There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is actually to start one. Often this takes nothing more than moving from one kind of organization to another : the division controller in a large corporation, for instance, becomes the controller of a medium-sized hospital. But there are also growing numbers of people who move into different lines of work altogether: the business executive of g0overnmetn official who enters the ministry at age 45, or the midlevel manager who leaves corporate life after 20 years to attend law school and become a small-town attorney.
We will see many more second careers undertaken by people who have achieved modest success in their first jobs. Such people have substantial skills, and they know how to work. They need a community --- the house is empty with the children gone --- and they need income as well. But above all, they need change.
The second way to prepare for the second half of your life is to develop a parallel career. Many people who are very successful in their first careers stay in the work they have been doing, either on a full-time or part-time or consulting basis. But in addition, they create a parallel job, usually in a non-profit organization, that takes another 10 hours of work per week. They might take over the administration of their church, or as the presidency of the local Girls? Scout council.
Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs. These are usually people who have been very successful in their first careers. They love their work, but it no longer challenges them. In many cases they keep on doing what they have been doing all along but spend less and less of their time on it. They also start another activity, usually a non-profit.
People who manage the second half of their lives may always be a minority. The majority may ?retire on the job? and count the years until their actual retirement. But it is this minority, the men and women who see a long working-life expectancy as an opportunity both for themselves and for society, who will become leaders and models.
There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life : you must begin long before you enter it. No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a serious setback in his or her life or work. There is the competent engineer who is passed over for promotion at age 45. There is the competent college professor who realizes at age 42 that she will never get a professorship at a big university. There are tragedies in one?s family life. At such times, a second major interest ? not just a hobby?may make all the difference.
In a society in which success has become so terribly important, having options will become increasingly vital.
---O---
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