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Over at davidmaister.com, in a recent post entitled Down Time, David posts a question from a reader in “mid-career crisis” and Doctor Dot-Connector responds:
David - I think I’m in a mid-career crisis. I love what I do and I’ve found a great organization in which to do it. Coworkers and clients are great and I’m asked to be more creative and given more autonomy (and more money, incidentally) than ever before. My problem is that I’m having trouble motivating myself to do my best work.
I don’t understand it - I’ve worked so hard to get here, and I’ve enjoyed that hard work. I don’t know if this is burnout or not. I’m early 30’s, finished a master’s while working full time, worked in high-profile roles in a couple of Fortune 200 companies and have always been labeled a high-achiever.
How do I motivate myself, so that I can motivate those around me? I’m experiencing some pretty severe cognitive dissonance over this - my behavior just doesn’t match my idea/expectations of myself, but no one else seems to notice. Thanks in advance, L.
L.,
There are many different ways of describing or explaining the experience you’re having, but I agree with David that it’s not at all uncommon, particularly among those who strive for success and then achieve it.
From my point of view, you’re not actually having a ”mid-career crisis”, so it may help to put that notion aside for a while. I also don’t believe that motivation, or regaining your motivation, is the real issue at hand here.
The real issue is understanding exactly what it is that you’ve accomplished, and identifying new ways of being, thinking, and acting that are consistent with where you are now, having accomplished what you’ve accomplished.
If you step back and separate yourself from your career, you can start to see your career as its own entity. You can also see that this entity has evolved over the years in terms of its power, productivity, and influence in the world. Your career affects more people, produces more results, and does so with less effort from you then ever before.
There’s a relationship between effort and results. When your career started, that relationship was skewed toward the effort side of the equation. If you contributed 10 or 20 units of effort toward achieving a goal, you would produce 1 unit of results. Given that equation, you adapted yourself. You learned how to be, think, and act in order to achieve your goals at the ratio of 20e:1r. You learned how to motivate yourself in that state of effectiveness to produce the results you needed to. When the relationship between effort and results is skewed toward the effort side of the equation, motivation is usually connected to survival. Survival requires putting out fires and pushing things forward with all of your might, all of the time.
Over the years, the work you did slowly shifted the relationship between effort and results such that the same 20 units of effort would produce 2, 3, 7, 10, and then 20 or more units of results. Now, the relationship between effort and results is skewed toward the results side of the equation. Landmark Education defines this as the operating state of high momentum, although the phenomenon itself has been experienced and described by countless multitudes.
You’ve achieved a degree of momentum with regard to your work and the results you produce. The key to understanding momentum is realizing that your entire career thus far has been organized around an equation that was skewed toward effort. Now that the equation has changed, the things that used to motivate you occur differently. Survival as motivation has become mundane. Putting out fires and pushing things forward with all of your might has become boring. You love what you do, but how you used to do what you do is no longer consistent with what you’ve achieved. Where you are now in relation to your career as an entity, requires you to start being, thinking, and acting differently.
Assuming you’re still with me and I haven’t completely alienated you with my convoluted rambling, the million dollar question is something like, what now?
Here’s what:
Everything you did that allowed for your current level of success is important. Despite being bored or unmotivated, you have to continue doing the work that got you to this point in order to continue moving forward through your current experience. Now is not the time to start making big changes. Not yet, at least. What you seek is further down the path you’re already on. Stay on THIS path.
Next, work on expanding your focus to include motivating those around you from the perspective of advancing their own goals, ideals, or objectives. The twist here is that you have to be able to see motivating others as distinct from and unrelated to motivating yourself. You don’t have to be motivated (at least not in the way you’ve viewed motivation in the past), in order to motivate others. It’s not sequential. In fact, if you succeed in motivating others to move forward in relation to their own goals, ideals, and objectives, you may start to experience a new level of motivation for yourself as a result.
Motivating others has to do with allowing them ownership. Your job is to begin to express your goals, ideals, and objectives through those around you, so that they experience themselves as owners of their work.
Lastly, remember that you get to choose how you relate to your experience. When you label your experience with a name like “mid-career crisis”, it evokes a certain response, based on a set of thoughts and feelings that you use to react to a crisis. Who says you’re having a crisis? You do. Try saying something different. For example, I would say that you’re in the process of evolving your career, having acheived a state of high momentum.
Best of luck to you, and I hope this helps!
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