by Jenny Blake
Of all the criteria in this section, the one that seems to cause the most stress is waiting for full agreement from family members. The fact is, you may never get it, or it may come only after you launch. Determine whose approval is critical to your decision, and whose is nice to have, even if disappointing not to receive. For example, if you are married, making a decision might require consensus with your partner, which is different from making a decision to please your parents or to do what “they” (society at large) would approve.
My mom and I did not see eye to eye on my decision to leave Google when I did. We still don’t! Although I can understand her point of view and wholeheartedly respect her advice and career choices, I also know that my process and Launch timing decision was the right one for me, despite our differing opinions.
Our family and closest friends are those who have the greatest emotional interest in our safety and survival. It is likely that their threshold for risk for you will be lower than your own, or that they may pepper you with “what ifs” that sound strikingly similar to your existing fears. Determine which of these fears you can and want to address, and which ones you are prepared to leave in the smart risk category that can only be reduced through action.
Pivot Paradox: Make Short-Term Trade-offs if Necessary
“Maybe you are being too picky.” Perhaps you have heard this at one point in your career (or dating life). I do not believe this is the case most of the time. We are often not being picky or creative enough! With one exception: you may have become too picky if you are standing still in the midst of a pivot and growing increasingly despondent about it. At this point, it is possible that you may need to choose among several of your top criteria, even if they seem to compete with other important values. Choose and build steadily from a place of stability, even if it seems subpar at first.
Sometimes you need to take a job you are not crazy about for your own sanity, to gather new information and buy time. Counterintuitive though it may seem, that may be your best next move.
Now, before the Personal Development Police start protesting that “Anything is possible!” and you have to “Dream big!” I will say that there are absolutely careers that can meet your most important, even if seemingly opposed, criteria. But sometimes in order to get unstuck you need to find a bridge solution that requires trade-offs while searching for the pivot that will match most or all of your values.
PIVOT HEXAGON
On the subject of trade-offs, my dad, an architect, shared an industry maxim with me. For any project, a client can optimize for two of three core variables: time, cost, and quality. If the client wants their house done quickly and with the highest quality, it will cost more. If they need the job done yesterday and at a low cost, it suffers in quality. If they want the house low cost and high quality, it will take more time. There is an official name for this: the Project Management Triangle.
The Project Management Triangle trade-off shows up for impacters in what I call a Pivot hexagon. There are three reciprocal pairs of values people express frequently in the midst of career change, and they sometimes conflict with each other. Three of these values represent our desire for security, and three represent our desire for freedom.
Impacters are often aiming for one of each pair more than the other, even though all may feel important on some level:
Security—minimizing fear, risk, and uncertainty; seeking outside protection, backup, consistency, or approval versus
Freedom—financial freedom, ability to choose one’s own projects, where one wants to work, and with whom.
Money—steady cash flow, earning potential; amount and consistency of income versus
Time flexibility—how much time someone wants or needs to make a move; the flexibility to choose how to spend one’s time each day and overall work schedule.
Structure—routine, predictability, set schedule and environment versus
Adventure—excitement, creativity, travel, variety, meeting new people.
Pivot Hexagon
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Until you land on a next move that takes you closer to your desired threshold for all six criteria, you may want to consider bridge options that meet at least a few values in your Pivot hexagon, even if they involve trade-offs. For example:
A coffee barista job brings some security, structure, and money, but may take away from time and freedom. Adventure is up for grabs; you might end up liking it, and meet many new people.
A leadership role within your company might bring growth, impact, and security, but not as much freedom or time flexibility.
A job at a hot new start-up might bring you (potential) money and adventure, but lack security and take away from time, if the expectation is that you work around the clock.
Starting your own business could bring freedom, time flexibility (though not always; as the business owner, your brain is never really off the clock), and maybe more money—but you may forgo financial security, at least in the early days.
Returning to graduate school could bring adventure in terms of growth and connections, and some amount of freedom and security, but it requires money and time.
Pivot Hexagon Assessment
You can measure your values on the Pivot hexagon in two ways:
First, take an overall assessment of how important each of these six values is to you in general, where 0 is “not at all important” and 5 is “critical to my well-being.” If any of the hexagon values I listed do not resonate, swap them out for your most important decision criteria.
Next, if you are considering two or more potential opportunities, give each its own hexagon and rank how well each option fits the six values, where 5 is “meets this need completely” and 0 is “does not satisfy this need at all.” How does each opportunity stack up against the hexagon and with your personal values?
KNOW WHEN TO HOLD VERSUS FOLD
One of the most challenging aspects of pivoting is knowing when to launch, especially when it means leaving a good option behind for something with the potential to be great, but that has no guarantee. As Kenny Rogers sings in his hit “The Gambler,” “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.”
We all know at least one person who is always on to their next big idea before seeing the current one through. They are famous for skipping out the minute things get hard, or ditching the last big idea for a fresher one, poking holes in all the reasons that once made the first one great. No one choice to shut down a project or switch directions is necessarily a bad one, but the cumulative effect is that they never give themselves time to ride out the dips and reach a point of momentum or critical mass in terms of results, reputation, or platform.
This operating mode is what SkilledUp cofounder Brad Zomick calls Career Roomba Syndrome. Roombas are the robotic vacuum cleaners that scan floors on their own, switching directions whenever they hit an obstacle. Brad defines Career Roomba Syndrome as “an occupational affliction that is characterized by a string of different job roles, some related, some starkly different than the last. The afflicted lacks passion for these jobs, and each time the ‘patient’ hits a dead end at a job, they back up and redirect their career path, but more often than not, the new path is not determined by any clear strategy.”
If you shut things down before they have a chance to create value for yourself and others, you will remain stuck in the same cycle of feeling like you are starting from scratch without a clear strategy or rationale to back it up. How can you prevent this, while leaving room to make the tough choice of changing something that is not working despite your best efforts?
If you leave too soon, you risk leaving unrealized gains behind; too late, and you risk experiencing diminishing returns on your time and effort. Let’s take a look at both of these Pivot pitfalls.
Unrealized Gains
If you are succes
sful in your current position—which you probably are as an impacter—it is likely that you have unrealized gains on the table. In investing terms, unrealized gains refers to profit that exists on paper, but that has not been cashed in, such as a winning stock that has not yet been sold. In a career sense, unrealized gains typically fall into three categories:
Financial incentives: A large commission, bonus, or stock options vesting.
Results and reputation: Completing a project or receiving an upcoming promotion.
Growth: Gaining skills and experience that will be helpful for long-term career goals.
Your unrealized gains could be an upcoming promotion, contributing to a large-scale project, working toward an annual bonus, or in the case of a commission-only job, negotiating several large deals over many months that would provide a hefty lump sum if and when they come to fruition.
Some employers dangle “carrots” in front of employees to encourage them to stay. If the incentives are valuable and you benefit from collecting them steadily over time, this is not an issue, it is a perk. It is when they become a far-off promise that delays your gut decision that they become more of a distraction and temptation than a payoff worth waiting for.
If I had left Google when I first entertained the idea, it would have been a huge mistake in terms of unrealized gains, but not solely for financial reasons. I was on the cusp of leaving three years in, when I ran into my coworker Becky Cotton in the parking lot. She asked how I was doing, and I told her I was discouraged from doing work that was not a fit, and I no longer felt engaged with my role.
When Becky told me about an opening on the newly formed career development team that she had joined, I applied for the one open role remaining. I was able to pivot internally, rejuvenating my Google career for another two years, and contribute to the company in even more significant ways. If I transitioned to self-employment too soon, I would have forfeited unrealized gains in results and experience across two areas I was increasingly passionate about: career coaching and manager training, both now central to my business.
Diminishing Returns
You will have to decide for yourself if you risk leaving crucial unrealized gains behind. On the other hand, sometimes we obsess over these potential gains out of fear or emotional attachment to what feels safe. We clutch at security while ignoring the fact that, like the boiling frog, our surrounding environment is no longer hospitable.
In economics, the law of diminishing returns asserts that past a certain point in production, adding more resources will no longer yield favorable results. In fact, every added effort or input yields increasingly lower returns.
Melissa Anzman left a job as senior manager of HR communications at a medical device company to launch her own business, Launch Yourself, aimed at helping clients launch books, brands, and career changes. Six months in, she realized she needed a source of bridge income while she got her business off the ground, so she started part-time contract work with a career transition company, coaching people who were laid off to find their next job. At fifteen hours per week, the outplacement company became her largest and most consistent client.
Although it was a great fit for the first six months, soon after that it became tedious, and Melissa’s efforts no longer yielded a worthwhile payoff. Still, she stayed, out of fear of losing her biggest source of income.
“I stayed for way too long because I was nervous about losing that safety net,” Melissa said. “From there on, I was not learning, and the work felt dreadful. I was really miserable. After coaching so many of the same clients with the same issues, it’s not coaching anymore. It felt like rinse and repeat, and was no longer challenging or interesting.”
Even with these realizations, it took Melissa a long time—in her words, way too long—to leave. She stayed for another two years. The last straw was when she had to turn down a client for her own business, the one she had left her well-paying job to launch. “I left corporate America making six figures for a reason, and here I was getting paid hourly for fifteen hours a week for the same grind, and turning down my ideal clients,” she said. “It was unacceptable to me.”
In year one of self-employment, the career transition company was Melissa’s life preserver. She credits the part-time work as saving her business at a critical time when she felt scared and had little income coming in. However, by year two, it had become an albatross.
“Every call became a struggle, every e-mail was a drain,” Melissa said. “I was doing all this to float Launch Yourself to begin with, and I ended up being so burned out that I didn’t touch my business for months.”
The silver lining of Melissa’s diminishing returns was that after leaving the outplacement firm and taking a few months off to reflect, she completely shifted how she approached her business. Instead of focusing all her efforts on one-on-one clients, she sought corporate clients more in line with her HR experience. “I committed to working only with the right type of client, doing the right type of work.” she said. “My burnout experience helped me focus on how important that was for me.”
As you evaluate your pilots and Launch criteria, note when you may be passing the point of diminishing returns on your time, money, and effort. If unrealized gains suggest leaving too soon, how do you know when you are resigning from a job or a project too late? The following exercise will help you examine both.
When to Hold or Fold
1. Notice where you hang out on the spectrum of unrealized gains versus diminishing returns: In work and relationships, since there may be parallels.
Do you stay far longer than you should, second-guessing yourself?
Is your response usually just right, balanced on the spectrum without swinging to extremes in either direction?
Or are you more impulsive? Do you tend to quit too soon, often wondering if you should have given something a second chance?
In their book Attached, authors Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller say that most of us fall into one of three relationship types: anxious, secure, or avoidant. Think about this as it relates to work. Are you secure in your position and the value you bring? Or are you constantly anxious that you are not doing enough or that you should make a change? Or are you avoidant, never sticking around long enough to find out, quitting a job, project, or client at the early signs of trouble or dissatisfaction?
2. Separate must-haves from nice-to-haves: Within the unrealized gains categories—financial, results, reputation, or personal growth—differentiate between short-term gains of three to six months and long-term unrealized gains of one year or more. First, eliminate those that would not substantially impact your Launch decision. Next, note any items that would be deal breakers, things you would not leave without completing. Finally, reflect:
How long are these must-have gains worth staying for?
What might you be forfeiting in the meantime, the longer you stay?
At what point do the potential gains of a new direction outweigh your potential losses?
3. Zoom out: Sometimes people struggle with smaller pilots because they have not yet envisaged the bigger Pivot umbrella that creates room for them all. If you find yourself conflicted between starting many separate projects, ask:
What do they all have in common?
What is the larger goal or theme that ties them all together?
How do they fit with the values and vision you identified earlier?
4. Push past project plateaus: In his book Making Ideas Happen, Scott Belsky writes that our addiction to new ideas often cuts project journeys short. “The easiest and most seductive escape from the project plateau is the most dangerous one: a new idea,” he says. “The end result? A plateau filled with the skeletons of abandoned ideas.” To combat this, Belsky says that you must “develop the capacity to endure, and even thrive, as you traverse the project plateau.”
Before you f
old too quickly or declare it time for another pivot, consider:
Are you hitting a natural plateau or is this a true sign that you should not continue?
What is important about pressing onward, even without the shine of newness?
Is there something about your approach that you can shift?
Can you ask for help to make it through this motivation dip more quickly?
Pivot Paradox: Don’t Push the River
The average life span of human cells is seven years. Skin cells regenerate every two weeks, and the cells lining our gut turn over every five days. Our bodies cycle through circadian rhythms—physical, mental, and behavioral changes—within each twenty-four-hour day. We hear about the seven-year itch for relationships. Now there’s the two- to four-year itch for careers, and the eight-second itch of our attention spans. That’s right, the average attention span is now eight seconds, one second less than that of a goldfish.
So why is it that change, and going through low or slow seasons in our work, can feel so disorienting? Because our culture is one that values doing, producing, and achieving.
“Don’t push the river” is a Zen saying that reminds me not to force the rhythms of my life. Society glamorizes “go-getters” and people who “take the bull by the horns,” but some larger life questions require the fullness of time to marinate. Again, if answers about next steps were easy, we would be doing them. Pivots require effort and cannot be forced. Time is an unknown element, and big changes cannot be muscled with brute strength simply to meet high expectations.
Besides, who is to say you know what precise timing is best? Periods of uncertainty are their own indicator of “no” or “not yet.” One day, you will wake up and you will know that it is time to launch. Until then, be as impartial an observer as you can.
