The reasons why I plan to have two, three, or four careers in my lifetime.
Introduction
Despite what our careers advisors would tell us in school, we’ve got more than just the one career inside of us.
In the first decade of the 20th century (1901-1910) the life expectancy was 51.5 for men and 55.4 for women. A century later, life expectancy has increased by 53% to 79 years old for men and 49% for women (82.8 years old) (1). Therefore, I can deduce we have more time to fill with personal development.
The five generations throughout this one-hundred-year period were exposed to different stimuli and had a life expectancy increase by a rate of around three years per decade – meaning that the ‘millennial’ generation – who have been out of University for over two decades now and in leadership and responsibility positions - have an extra 23 years of productivity than their great-great-great grandparents of the ‘GI generation’ (1).
Popular media is full of people who are showing how healthy and able they are in their sixties, seventies and eighties these days. By example, just look at Ranulph Fiennes who at the age of 65 summitted Mount Everest, or Rosie Swale-Pope who ran around the world, starting at age 58!
Compared to one hundred years ago – we have less physiological demands on our free time: supermarkets sell food from all corners of the world; we can connect with friends and family instantly using mobile phones and can access previously hard-to-reach information from worldwide sources using the internet. If Maslow was alive today, I suspect he’d likely revise his hierarchy of needs.
As automation starts to take over more-traditional careers, we find ourselves increasing becoming pushed towards joining the knowledge economy – or become irrelevant.
Automation is pushing us towards the ‘knowledge economy’
The psychologist Malcolm Gladwell first popularised the 10,000-hour rule (2) however there is a school of thought suggesting it is constantly misapplied. Gladwell himself suggests that the rule doesn’t take into account the cognitive demands of what you’re trying to become an expert in (especially not if you’re physically orientated to a specific career – such as elite sports).
As our working lives have now become longer, it means we no longer remain in a single career throughout our entire lives as our forebears once did. Our professional lives are so long now that we need career breaks, training to keep us current, planning for our transition periods and other issues that previous generations may not have encountered in the same way.
If you take Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule and applied it to three hours of focussed-practice per day, it would take around nine years before you came an expert. And if you achieved the level that you could make money from it, how long would you be able to sustain this career until you felt frustrated by your lack of growth – or the vocation changed due to technological advancement?
Multi-potential-ite
In her TEDx video, Emilie Wapnick proposes the idea of the ‘multipotentialite’.
In her own words, [a multipotentialite] is “someone with many interests and creative pursuits. It's a mouthful to say. It might help if you break it up into three parts: multi, potential, and ite. You can also use one of the other terms that connote the same idea, such as polymath, the Renaissance person.”
Furthermore, she proposes that those with interests in different areas, are often the ones at the centre of innovation as they overlap fuelling innovative ideas. She calls this ‘idea synthesis’.
She states: “Innovation happens at the intersections. That's where the new ideas come from. And multipotentialites, with all of their backgrounds, are able to access a lot of these points of intersection.”
When interviewed about his bagless vacuum cleaner designs, inventor James Dyson (3) shared that the inspiration for his first bagless vacuum cleaner originally came from when he saw an innovative solution and attempted to repurpose it in other areas:
“I'd purchased what claimed to be the most powerful vacuum cleaner. But it was essentially useless. Rather than sucking up the dirt, it pushed it around the room.
I'd seen an industrial sawmill, which uses something called a cyclonic separator to remove dust from the air. I thought the same principle of separation might work on a vacuum cleaner. I rigged up a quick prototype, and it did.”.
Whilst the innovation worked and made him and his company a household name, he says it still took him "15 years and 5,127 attempts" before the bagless vacuum cleaner was able to become a commercial success (3).
Summary
With the potential to work in many areas across ever expanding professional lives, we should be better prepared for the challenges that multiple careers will bring.
We should be alive to the idea that our third or even fourth career, may not even be a reality when we’re embarking on our first once we’ve left education.
If our current vocation is no longer fulfilling us, we must hold the idea of going back into full-time education to retrain us for our next professional phase – firmly in our mind. This may involve taking a pay cut to change areas, particularly if the one we want to go into is oversubscribed and full of people.
Changing our profession when we are in a strong position is going to be better for us than waiting until we become completely disenfranchised with it. By being cognisant to what is happening around us, we can make good decisions on where and how we are investing our time, effort and energy.
References
2. https://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwell-explains-the-10000-hour-rule-2014-6?r=US&IR=T
3. https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/vacuum-innovation.html
5. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704206804575468162805877990
6. https://www.ft.com/content/0151d2fe-868a-11e7-8bb1-5ba57d47eff7
9. https://www.wired.com/2012/11/mf-james-dyson/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory
