by Jenny Blake
Here is an overview of each stage in more detail:
Plant by creating a foundation from your values, strengths, and interests, and your one-year vision for the future. The most successful pivots start from a strong base of who you already are, what is already working, and how you will define success for this next phase of your life.
Scan by researching new and related skills, talking to others, and mapping potential opportunities. This is the exploration phase: identifying and plugging knowledge and skill gaps, and having a wide variety of conversations.
Next, you will run a series of pilots—small, low-risk experiments to test your new direction. Pilots help gather real-time data and feedback, allowing you to adjust incrementally as you go, instead of relying on blind leaps.
Eventually it is time for a bigger move, or launch. The first three stages of the Pivot Method, repeated as many times as necessary, help reduce risk and give you a greater chance of success, often taking you 80 to 90 percent of the way toward your goal. Launch is when you pull the trigger on the remaining 10 to 20 percent. These are the bigger decisions that require commitment even in the face of remaining uncertainty.
Pivot Cycle
Throughout the book you will find exercises, marked with an , to apply what you are learning and plan your pivot. All exercises have a corresponding template online that you can personalize at PivotMethod.com/toolkit.
The book also includes a fifth and final stage, lead, that describes how organizations and leaders can apply the Pivot Method as a coaching framework for career conversations. The Pivot Method and mindset creates dynamic cultures that encourage employees to pivot internally and within their roles before looking for opportunities outside of the company, strengthening the organization as a whole through greater transparency and communication.
How Long Should a Pivot Take?
The Pivot Method is a cycle, not a one-and-done process. Some pivots take one month, while others can take years. Sometimes it takes several smaller pivots to reach your destination. Just as an 18-wheeler cannot turn on a dime, bigger pivots often require several smaller turns. Repeat the Plant-Scan-Pilot process as many times as necessary to gain clarity and gather feedback before advancing to the fourth stage, Launch.
Your pivot timing will depend on the scope of your change, how far your ideal end state is from where you are now, your risk threshold, your savings runway, your expertise and reputation, and the complexity of what you are building toward. Ultimately, results are the indicator of where you are in your pivot. Are you experiencing momentum and fulfillment? The income and energy that you desire? If not, you will return to the earlier Pivot stages to determine what adjustments to make.
I have worked through the Pivot Method with others in as little as ten minutes when demonstrating it as a coaching tool, and conversely have often spent one month or more on each of the four stages when working with individual coaching clients. The method works just as well when applied within sticking points on projects and business plans as it does for career moves.
I have shared versions of this coaching model in various forms with thousands of people to help them find career clarity. Because the method reveals latent strengths, pivoters will often express sentiments like, “I can’t believe I didn’t see this sooner, it seems so obvious in hindsight,” or “I feel like my whole life and career have been unknowingly preparing me for this.”
We might think we are in total control of our careers, but consider that they are working on our behalf behind the scenes. My pivots start shaping me long before I see them coming.
Embracing this reality requires surrender: admitting that we cannot plan in perfect specificity how the next ten, twenty, or thirty years of our lives will unfold. In surrendering, we make way for curiosity and serendipity.
Release the illusion of security within a fixed future and allow life to surprise you instead. The only move that matters is your next one.
A Note Before We Proceed
This book is not a rallying cry for quitting your job and fighting against “the man.” There have been plenty of those since people discovered they could start a company from their laptop, live out of a suitcase, outsource every task, and work from a beach in Southeast Asia. And don’t get me wrong—I have done all those things and felt alive while doing them. They are just not the whole story.
Nor is this book a caution to stay put, shackled by golden handcuffs, if you have hit a career plateau. I do not believe in resigning yourself to a subpar working life just because friends and family (whose top priority is often to keep us safe) or society tells us so.
It would be a mistake to assume that everyone should follow one path or the other, or to judge one as categorically better or worse. A Pivot mindset is not one that proposes reckless job hopping by quitting a job or folding a business at the first sign of displeasure. Rather, it emphasizes shifting naturally within your role and from one position into the next, while remaining open to a wide variety of options along the way.
Many people dip in and out of self-employment. Sometimes they work entirely for themselves or with partners, sometimes they take on longer-term consulting work with bigger companies, and sometimes they go back to work in other organizations full or part time. The most successful entrepreneurs I know are adept at working with companies, consulting for them as clients as they build their own businesses. After all, even the most nonconformist, hoodie-wearing coders may end up managing massive companies, becoming “the man” they once rebelled against.
The most successful employees I know are skilled at creative thinking and innovating within the organizations they work for as intrapreneurs. Many pivot within the companies they love, even crafting entirely new positions in the process. They know they can make a huge impact by leveraging the company’s resources, while receiving a consistent paycheck to boot. They are able to build a portfolio of skills, experiences, and contacts within these companies that will stay with them for the rest of their careers.
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There is no doubt that amplified anxiety lurks in the shadows of all this economic upheaval, innovation, and transformation. I will not discount your fears by telling you this career carving will always be easy and fun. It certainly can be, but it can also take work, focus, question asking, problem solving, and adapting to new tools and tactics.
Many of these skills are already in your wheelhouse. The opportunity now is to surface your strengths so that you will be ready and primed to pivot when a compelling opportunity knocks. Through the Pivot process, you can stop taking your struggles and searching personally, as shortcomings in your operating system, and start redirecting your valuable attention and brainpower toward what matters most.
There is no point in sugarcoating the truth: this new terrain can be challenging. But how you meet and interpret that challenge is paramount. You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear, insecurity, and uncertainty as the doorways of opportunity. So before we put the Pivot Method into practice, there is one critical element to explore in depth first: the mindset that makes it possible. If change is the only constant, let’s get better at it.
HIGH NET GROWTH
I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.
—Steve Martin, Born Standing Up
I WAS SITTING BEHIND A CARD TABLE in the sticky Texas heat at the South by Southwest Conference in 2011, signing copies of Life After College at a small launch party. The books were not even in stores yet—they were truly “hot off the press.” The first person in line walked up to the table and, as I started signing, asked, “So . . . what’s next?”
I stuttered and stammered through an awkward reply. Even though he had the best intentions, I could not help but feel a bit deflated. It was so strange. Here was this massive project, this life goal embodied in a bound stack of
paper, sitting in my hands after three years of staring down my gremlins to write it, and people were already asking what’s next.
The truth was, I had no idea. I had just started three months of unpaid leave from Google, and as regularly as brushing my teeth, I agonized over my own next career move as the clock on my sabbatical ticked down. Every day I struggled with what the right decision would be: return to Mountain View after my book tour, ask to work part time from New York City, or leave the company altogether? Should I make the safe, secure choice? Or should I take the risk of leaving and do the thing that terrified and excited me most by taking my own business full time?
Though I loved my time at Google—it was the best five-year MBA I could ask for—ultimately I felt I could make the biggest contribution if I pursued a new direction. I ran the numbers: I could support up to 35,000 Googlers at the time through internal career development programs, or I could leave and try to expand my reach and global impact to a far greater number, following my personal mission to be as helpful as possible to as many people as possible.
Some people measure their lives in terms of money, orienting their careers around acquiring wealth and material markers of success. Those who have accumulated financial wealth are considered high net worth individuals. But for the vast majority of people I encounter, money is not the number one driver of purpose and fulfillment. It is only a partial means to that end. A study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton confirms this: once people surpass $75,000 in annual net income ($82,000 in today’s dollars), they experience no statistically significant bump in their day-to-day emotional well-being.
For many, money is nice to have, but not at the expense of soul-crushing work, if they have the economic flexibility to choose otherwise. The people I am talking about, and the ones for whom this book will resonate most, are those who are unwilling to settle for a career of phoning it in. They are willing to pay dues, but are not prepared to sit stalled for long, unable to see the value or impact of their work.
These individuals optimize for high net growth and impact, not just high net worth. I call them impacters for short. Impacters love learning, taking action, tackling new projects, and solving problems. They are generous and cooperative, and imbued with a strong desire to make a difference.
Impacters aim first and foremost for a sense of momentum and expansion. They ask, “Am I learning?” When their inward desire for growth is being met, they turn their attention outward, seeking to make a positive impact on their families, companies, communities, and global societies. Often these happen in tandem; by seeking problems they can fix and tackling them, impacters meet their needs for exploration and challenge, uncovering callings along the way.
Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The Psychology of Success, discovered in her research that the most successful people are those with a growth mindset. These are people who believe that their basic qualities are things they can cultivate through their efforts, rather than believing their gifts (or lack of them) are fixed traits. The truth, Dweck says, is that brains and talent are just the starting point. “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset,” Dweck writes. “This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”
Maintaining a growth mindset is critical to navigating a pivot successfully. By seeing change as an opportunity, rather than a personal shortcoming or obstacle, you will be much more likely to find creative solutions based on what excites you, rather than subpar choices clouded by fear. Making career moves based solely on running from unhappiness and avoiding fear is like trying to fix a gaping wound with a Band-Aid; the solution does not stay in place for long. With a growth mindset, you will be open to new ideas, observant in your experimentation, deliberate in your implementation, and flexible in the face of change.
Fixed anything doesn’t work for impacters, who are allergic to stagnation and boredom. Author Tim Ferriss captured this sentiment in The 4-Hour Workweek, saying, “The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is . . . boredom.” It turns out that boredom itself can induce stress, causing the same physical discomfort as too much work: increased heart rate and cortisol levels, as well as muscle tension, stomachaches, and headaches.
For impacters, boredom is a symptom of fulfillment deficiency—of not maximizing for growth and impact—rather than a sign of inherent laziness. As University of Waterloo professor of neuroscience James Danckert wrote, “We tend to think of boredom as someone lazy, as a couch potato. It’s actually when someone is motivated to engage with their environment and all attempts to do so fail. It’s aggressively dissatisfying.”
In her 1997 study, Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski, associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale University’s School of Management, proposed that people see their work as a job, career, or calling. Those with a job orientation see work as a means to the end of paying the bills; those with a career orientation are more likely to emphasize success, status, and prestige; and those with a calling describe work as integral to their lives, a core part of their identity and a fulfilling reward in itself. Impacters fall clearly into the second category and aspire to the third, if they are not already there.
Impacters are not just asking What did I earn? but What did I learn? What did I create? What did I contribute? They measure their quality of life by how much they are learning, challenged, and contributing. If they are doing all three intelligently and intentionally, they work hard to ensure that the money will follow.
It is not that impacters are not interested in money—they are. They have no desire to live as starving artists. They know it is challenging, if not impossible, to focus on others if one’s own basic needs are not met first. But when faced with the prospect of a career plateau, they would make the horizontal move, leave the cushy corporate job, or bootstrap their own business to prioritize growth and impact. A person who aims for learning and contribution may rank intellectual capital over financial capital if pressed to choose, but often ends up wealthy in both.
Take Christian Golofaro and John Scaife, who traded coffee and cotton in the open outcry pits on Wall Street for five years. Tired of the daily pressures of their jobs and looking for meaning beyond buying and selling commodities, they pooled their money in 2014 to start an urban farming business in Red Hook, Brooklyn. They sought to help revolutionize food production by bringing fresh, local, pesticide-free produce to New York City year-round. They were more inspired as impacters in their new business, SpringUps, than they ever were in finance.
Though he spent thousands of hours in high school and college preparing for a career in medicine, Travis Hellstrom decided to join the Peace Corps after graduation instead. He gave up his full ride to medical school and moved to Mongolia, where he served in the Peace Corps for over three years, living on two hundred dollars a month. When Travis reflects on the decision, he says, “It took a lot of soul-searching and being okay with disappointing myself and others, but I left my life and found my calling.” After he returned, Travis pivoted again to nonprofit coaching and community management. Several years later, he parlayed that independent consulting work into a role as chair of the Mission-Driven Organizations graduate program at Marlboro University.
Impacters continue learning and contributing throughout their working lives, which often extend far past what is traditionally thought of as retirement age. When I asked Kyle Durand about his impending retirement from the military after twenty-seven years of service, his sentiments reflected those of many people I know who have no plans to retire in the traditional sense.
“I think retirement is an antiquated notion. The whole idea that you work for most of your adult life in order to eventually do the things you want is outmoded,” Kyle said. “My retirement from the military is simply closing the chapter on that part of my career, b
ut it is not the end of my working days by any stretch. Now I can shift into building my businesses full time. That is my future, part of my legacy. That is how I want to make an impact with the people I care about.”
Christian, John, Travis, and Kyle pivoted in new directions that were more aligned with their values, interests, and goals, even though there was not a guarantee of success. As impacters, they saw these changes as opportunities for growth and recognized that their ability to learn and adapt would help them land on their feet no matter what. This helped them maintain a positive outlook throughout their pivots, knowing they would benefit from following their instincts and aspirations instead of societal expectations, no matter the outcome.
As I was writing this book, many of the people I initially interviewed returned six months or one year later and said things like, “Don’t bother putting my story in the book. I am pivoting again.”
This manifested in a variety of ways: they got poached by another company for an even better role; their company folded, got acquired, or got sold; they decided not to pursue a new skill or industry after all; they realized entrepreneurship was or was not for them; or they shifted their business into a more promising new direction.
Hearing these updates did not surprise me, nor did it mark their initial pivot as a failure. Instead, they are prime examples of what it means to be high net growth and impact individuals. I expect to hear that impacters are pivoting and adjusting dynamically at every turn.
For a directory of people featured in this book and what they are up to now, visit PivotMethod.com/people; for audio interviews and episodes from the Pivot Podcast, visit JennyBlake.me/podcast.
