Make your transition
Future Work/Life is a weekly newsletter that casts a positive eye to the future. I bring you interesting stories and articles, analyse industry trends and offer tips on designing a better work/life. If you enjoy reading it, please SUBSCRIBE HERE, and share it!
"There will be people who will say you can’t
But you will (you will)
There will be people who will say you don’t mix this with that
And you will say watch me (watch me)
There will be people who will say play it safe, that’s too risky
And you will take that chance and have no fear (no fear)
Do not let these questions restrain or trouble you
Just point yourself in the direction of your dreams
Find your strength in the sound
And make your transition
Make your transition"
(From Transition by Underground Resistance)
Good morning,
Like many people, the location of my upcoming summer holiday isn’t one that’s familiar to me. This year, I’m replacing the sun and sand of Ibiza with a few days in a field in Hampshire. I must say, though, I’m looking forward to the break as much as ever! I don’t half need some time off after what has been the strangest of years.
We will remember 2020 for one thing, of course. Yet, as I’ve been reflecting on the previous nearly eight months of late, the word that keeps coming to me is ‘transition’.
Over several years, Bruce Feiler compiled more than a thousand hours of interviews in an attempt to codify how we manage life transitions, meaning and purpose. His recent book, Wake-Up Call: Life Is In the Transitions, contends that no life follows a straight path. Rather than a linear trajectory (as paradigms like the hero’s journey suggest), we can instead identify a series of ‘lifequakes’ that fundamentally shift how we perceive our place in the world.
Pretty deep stuff for a Friday morning, I know.
Let me give you some content with Feiler’s own words about one of his favourite examples that emerged from his research:
“One of my favorite stories was a woman named Christy Moore, who hated school when she was younger and grew up in Savannah, Georgia.
She got pregnant when she was 16, dropped out of school, had three children in the next eight years, worked in fast food, and hit a wall because her husband got sick and they couldn’t afford insurance.
Come Monday, she takes a toddler to the local library. She’s pregnant. She reaches over and grabs the first book she can find. It’s Wuthering Heights. She has to read it twice to understand it and decides she’s going to go back to school.
She gets an undergraduate degree in health, then a Master’s Degree, and then a PhD. She went from GED to Ph.D., and now she helps nontraditional students get an education.
I love that story because we think our lives are going to be linear. But in fact, we have nonlinear lives. We all get kind of buffeted at least three to five times in our lives, by these huge disruptive experiences. I call them life quakes. And we have to adjust our lives in response.”
Lifequakes may be involuntary (such as a world war, a recession, or a partner leaving you) or voluntary (like quitting your job to start a new business or to travel around the world). We may experience these major upheavals personally or collectively and we can characterise them by the questions that often arise. For example, questioning ‘your true meaning’ or exploring whether ‘you’re living the life of which you always dreamed’.
How we react to these events, however, is critical. And this is where transitions come in.
Unlike lifequakes, which in some cases are out of our control, undergoing a transition is something we choose.
Feiler describes this transitional process as having three parts; and they're easily recognisable.
‘The long goodbye’, when we come to terms with leaving the old person behind.
‘The messy middle’ in which we ditch some habits and acquire new ones.
And the ‘new beginning’, in which we redefine our story to reflect a new direction.
Now I don’t know exactly which stage I’m currently at, but it’s fair to say that I’m smack bang in the middle of a voluntary transition – starting with me selling up and leaving my previous business in January, before literally documenting the search for ‘my reason for being’ – my Ikigai.
What’s interesting is that I’m not the only one. I may have started this process in January, but I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve spoken over the last few months who are asking themselves some existential questions. I'm happy to say that several of these people have now used the Ikigai framework to help work out some answers.
And none of this is a surprise given we’re in the middle of a rare, involuntary and collective transition - a global pandemic. The natural reaction in these circumstances is, as discussed, to reconsider what’s important and reassess whether we’re on track to achieving it.
A desire to move house is evidence of this. 61% of people relocate during a significant transition, which I would say is a fair representation of the number of times I’ve had a conversation on the subject in recent times.
The good news is that transitions work. They are an opportunity to break bad habits and adopt new, more positive ones. As I discussed before the trick is to introduce these changes incrementally and establish routines that help deliver progress and engender feelings of fulfilment.
We can also feel a sense of renewal and reinvention during a transitional period that (to continue the lyrical theme) helps reinvigorate and rejuvenate.
I’ll hopefully experience some of this over the coming weeks as I take a break from work and from writing this newsletter. I’ll return in September and plan to introduce a few changes to the Future Work-Life format but will continue to give you (what I hope is) a fresh take on the future of work and how that intersects with our personal lives.
Thanks for your support over the past few months. As ever, I appreciate the generous feedback.
Cheers,
Ollie
Any Other Business:
As I've mentioned before, I'm currently interviewing business leaders from organisations of all sizes to assess how they've responded to the challenges of an involuntarily distributed workforce. The short-term future of the office has been top of the agenda in almost all of these meetings and Bruce Daisley has written an excellent summary of this issue in his Make Work Better newsletter, this week.
Bruce mentions this story in his piece, but it's worth a read in its own right. Amazon Bets on Office-Based Work With Expansion in Major Cities by Sebastian Herrera in the Wall Street Journal. The e-commerce giant is adding 3,500 employees in six major cities, including 2,000 jobs in New York.
Here's the BBC's animated take on what coronavirus will do to our offices and homes.
And finally, one for all those parents out there who have their fingers crossed that school's do open in September, as planned. Who knew there existed such a simple way to do long multiplication?