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 share it!
So much changes in a year, but then again, so much remains the same.
Well, at least that's what crossed my mind as I looked up one of my old newsletters last week. I'd just spent a wonderful couple of hours with a group of collaborators working on ideas for a new project, during which the challenges of life transitions came up.
The broader topic of conversation was one of my favourite ones - how changes in work intersect with our personal lives - an inextricable connection for many people that is at some times wholly positive and at others a cause of significant friction.
I recommended reading Bruce Feiler's fantastic book Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change in a Nonlinear Age, which, as the title suggests, embraces the idea of life's messiness. While we'd prefer to progress through every stage smoothly, with a sense of purpose and a clear understanding of how it fits into our grand plan, we all know that's not the reality.
After digging the book out the other day and reflecting on this, I was reminded of why recognising this is not only essential, it's desirable. Wouldn't life be boring if everything went exactly as planned? Yes, there are obviously events happening to us and going on around us that we wouldn't want to endure, but often, the transitions these precipitate, lead to positive changes.
So, it's with this attitude that I head off on my second camping trip of the summer, and this time, if we experience torrential rain and gale-force winds on the first night, I promise that I won’t complain to my wife and threaten to pack up and leave in the morning. No, as that wise old sage Kelly Clarkson said (or was it Nietzsche, I forget): “what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger.”
For those of you who missed it, here is the article, which I wrote almost a year ago to the day. Aside from the year and the English county I mentioned, it's as relevant now as ever.
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.
1. ‘The long goodbye’, when we come to terms with leaving the old person behind.
2. ‘The messy middle’ in which we ditch some habits and acquire new ones.
3. The ‘new beginning’, in which we redefine our story to reflect a new direction.
[Fru Pinter]
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 to 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 introducing these changes incrementally and establishing 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.
Thanks as ever for reading. I’ll be back in September.
Ollie
Any Other Business:
I was very interested to see that Satalia, the company I discussed in FWL43 - AI, decision-making, and the future of jobs were acquired by WPP this week. One of their reasons for the purchase was to leverage their skills and technology to optimise people’s work. It’ll be interesting to see how such a uniquely structured workplace will fit into the advertising behemoth and fascinating to keep track of whether the ideas I discussed - including greater autonomy, fast decision-making and collective decisions about remuneration - scale.
We probably already had a sense of why introverts thrived with a shift to remote working. Still, if you’re interested in some of the evidence behind it, this article from BBC Worklife explains how it offers ‘quiet deliverers’ the chance to stand out.
If you’ve logged into LinkedIn at any point this week, you’ll probably have seen someone share Google’s wellbeing manifesto. If not, here it is. As always, these things are great as long as the reality is as described.
I’ve spoken with a few businesses already this week about the developing hybrid working model. In one case, it’s not only working well, it’s proving an asset for their recruitment strategy. There are still plenty struggling with how best to juggle the competing needs of employees and how to navigate the changes in culture that embed themselves after so long working collectively ‘away from the office’.
And finally, many of you who know me will have heard me discuss Paul Graham’s concept of ‘makers’ and ‘managers’. Well, this great article from the Farnam Street archives combines the theory with another of my favourite topics - how to structure your working day. As it neatly concludes in Arnold Bennett’s words:
“You have to live on 24 hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use … is a matter of the highest urgency.”