Managing Yourself Into Your Second Half – Three Critical Steps

“When work for most people meant manual labor, there was 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 your 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. At 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 one-self increasingly leads one to begin a second career.”

I stole the long quote from a short Harvard Business Review booklet entitled “Managing Oneself”  by the late, great,  and revered management/business guru, Peter F. Drucker.

Drucker suggests that there are three ways to develop a second career: Read Full Article.