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she also wonders whether she could have been successful at it, if she had focused all of her energy and attention on that goal. With so many student loans to repay, she feels increasingly trapped by her financial responsibilities, even though she makes a good living as a physician.

What many people (of all ages) fail to realize is how important it is to like and care about the work you do—to do work you love and love the work you do. Tom Peters, a noted author and management consultant, has said that when it comes to career choices, it’s inconceivable to him that ambitious and talented people would do anything other than follow their hearts toward things they love. How can you possibly expect to be successful, Peters asks, if you don’t care about and value the work you do?

Looking Forward to Career Growth

The Hansel and Gretel strategy requires some 20/20 hindsight. It involves learning from your mistakes and redirecting your path toward more rewarding and fulfilling choices. But there is also a part of you that needs to go exploring, to learn about career fields and choices to which you might not yet have gained exposure.

There might be 26,000 occupations in the labor force, but most people tend to focus their attention on a handful of possibilities. Rather than limit yourself to specific job titles (which can often be misleading), try focusing on what career consultant Bernard Haldane called “motivated skills.” A motivated skill is something that you like to do, and do well. That’s how an insurance claims manager who likes project management and writing became a technical writer, a CPA with a passion for New Age health care became a spa manager, and a systems engineer with an innate talent for foreign languages positioned herself as an international expert in telecommunications. Instead of focusing on job titles, these successful career changers did some “soulsearching” to figure out what they were really good at and loved to do. Then they positioned themselves accordingly.

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There are also career changers whose primary motivation is to keep on growing and learning. What they want is variety, challenge, and intellectual stimulation. These are people who should expect to change careers voluntarily several times over the course of their working lives because they will always need a new challenge. To become too closely identified with a job title or career identity would be severely self-limiting.

This is how (and why) a test engineer became an engineering manager, a management consultant, an entrepreneur, and finally, a professor. At each transition point in his career path, he determined what he needed to do in order to stay stimulated and energized—and then committed himself to doing it.

Changing Careers—The New Norm

The days of choosing one career for life are long gone. Perhaps they should never have existed at all. Isn’t it unrealistic to think that the career choice you made at 20 should automatically suit your needs at 30, 40, 50, or 60? If your first career choice doesn’t work out the way you once hoped it would, there’s no reason why you can’t continue to make new choices that better suit your needs. My oldest career-change client was age 70 when she decided to retire from medicine and pursue a law degree. (She then became a medical-legal consultant to a medical products manufacturer.)

Somewhere along the line you might have picked up the mistaken idea that the need for growth stops in adulthood. But it is only people with limited career ambitions or those who “learned everything they needed to know in kindergarten” who can expect to roll gracefully into retirement without changing one iota.

To lead a fulfilling life, you need to keep challenging yourself to grow at every stage in your life. Frank Mackey exemplifies that philosophy. Mackey retired from a successful law practice in Little Rock, Arkansas, (in his sixties) to pursue an acting career in Chicago. Later he moved on to New York City. This isn’t his first career change. His

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previous vocational hats include sales, marketing, human resources, and business management. He also preaches what he practices. One of the most liberating career moments for Mackey’s son came with his father’s recommendation that he “stop trying to choose for life and start thinking in five-year increments.” From that day forward, the younger Mackey felt free to pursue careers on the stock exchange, in business management, and in real estate.

Many baby-boomer parents have been reluctant to make the same mistakes that their parents did. When it comes to offering career advice and guidance, they are inclined to tell their sons and daughters that “you can do anything you want to do.” Although their kids often appreciate all this freedom of choice, they also often complain that the advice is unhelpful.

“I know I can do anything I want to do,” says Leslie, a 21-year-old retail sales clerk. “My problem is I don’t know what I want to do.” Nor can she be expected to. She hasn’t worked long enough or developed strong enough vocational interests to be able to make a good career choice. What she needs to do is to commit herself to the process of figuring out what career choice makes the most sense for her. Leslie can follow her interests and experiment with new skills and different environments. Her goal should be to learn more about herself and the job market, and to gain more confidence in her abilities (and more skills). In her case, a career plan is nothing more—or less—than a highly individualized learning plan. She needs to focus on identifying what she needs to know and learn in order to make good career decisions.

This advice doesn’t just apply to 20-year-olds. If you’ve been working in one career field or industry for any length of time, you might not know enough about other career opportunities or feel qualified enough to pursue other options. Recognizing your limitations does not have to be the endpoint. It should become the starting point for new growth and development.

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Becoming a Grown-Up

Gerontologist Stephen Baum makes the distinction between cultural adulthood and emotional adulthood. Cultural adults are people who have acquired the possessions of adulthood. They have houses, cars, and kids. They live adult lives. Emotional adulthood has different requirements. Emotional adulthood means making authentic choices and living an authentic life.

When columnist Bob Greene asked, “How old are you supposed to be before you become a grown-up in your own head?” he was reflecting on the consequences that come from living your life according to someone else’s agenda. Taking on the conventions of adulthood might make you a cultural adult; but it can also keep you one step removed from your real dreams and desires.

Author Tom Clancy remembers the moment when he reached that epiphany. He was in his mid-thirties at the time, living the traditional American dream. He had a wife, two kids, and a fairly successful career in the insurance business. He also had a car and car payments, a house with a mortgage, and other trappings of middle-class respectability. But he knew something was missing when he asked himself for the umpteenth time: “What do I want to be when I grow up?”

Says Clancy: “The stunning and depressing realization hit me that I was grown up, and I might not be what I wanted to be.”

Clancy’s dilemma reflects a failure of imagination. What he lacked was a dream of his own. He was so busy following society’s agenda, he hadn’t realized that he was programming himself for unhappiness. The type of success he had been taught would make him content turned out to be surprisingly unfulfilling.

To arrive at a more emotionally satisfying resolution, he had to make more self-directed choices, to forge a different kind of connection to his work that would enable him to express himself more fully. Clancy was an insurance broker with a passion for naval history. He had once

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dreamed of writing a novel that reflected that passion. So, he handed over the reins of his insurance business to his wife while he wrote a novel about a Russian submarine captain who defects, along with his submarine, to the United States. The Hunt for Red October was the first of many Tom Clancy successes and the beginning of a new literary genre known as the techno-thriller that includes Red Rabbit, Shadow Warriors, The Bear and the Dragon, and Patriot Games.

Many dissatisfied careerists recognize themselves in Clancy’s dilemma. Surrounded with financial responsibilities, it isn’t easy to “follow your dream”—or even to find it under all the layers of conventional thinking that obscure it.

Can Money Buy Happiness?

Money plays an important role in career choice and development. But it does not play the same role for everyone. How much money you need to make depends on: (1) your financial goals; and (2) your personal values. If you are not a money-oriented kind of person, it simply doesn’t make sense to choose a career strictly for its financial rewards. It is unrealistic to think that you will be able to stay motivated in a career or profession that is meaningless to you. More likely you will end up feeling trapped by what career experts call “golden handcuffs.” People with golden handcuffs are chained to their jobs or professions either because they can’t afford to leave or because they have become so attached to the financial rewards that they don’t want to make less money, even though they hate their work.

This is definitely the case for my friend Joel. Joel is a lawyer who has worked in the same office for 20 years. He can do the work with his eyes closed; and, in fact, he often does, which accounts for why he feels like he’s sleepwalking through the day. Joel claims he wants to change careers—“to do something meaningful and important.” But he’s been waffling for years because he doesn’t want to give up his safe job and comfortable income. Although this is definitely understandable, he is also digging a vocational grave for himself. The longer he waits, the harder the change will become. At 45, he doesn’t have an

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