CHAPTER 11
Escaping Tunnel Vision
Reconsidering Our Best-Laid Career and Life Plans
A malaise set in within a couple hours of my arriving. I thought getting a job might help. It turns out I have a lot of relatives in Hell, and, using connections, I became the assistant to a demon who pulls people’s teeth out. It wasn’t actually a job, more of an internship. But I was eager. And at first it was kind of interesting. After a while, though, you start asking yourself: Is this what I came to Hell for, to hand different kinds of pliers to a demon?
—Jack Handey
What do you want to be when you grow up? As a kid, that was my least favorite question. I dreaded conversations with adults because they always asked it—and no matter how I replied, they never liked my answer. When I said I wanted to be a superhero, they laughed. My next goal was to make the NBA, but despite countless hours of shooting hoops on my driveway, I was cut from middle school basketball tryouts three years in a row. I was clearly aiming too high.
In high school, I became obsessed with springboard diving and decided I wanted to become a diving coach. Adults scoffed at that plan: they told me I was aiming too low. In my first semester of college, I decided to major in psychology, but that didn’t open any doors—it just gave me a few to close. I knew I didn’t want to be a therapist (not patient enough) or a psychiatrist (too squeamish for med school). I was still aimless, and I envied people who had a clear career plan.
From the time he was in kindergarten, my cousin Ryan knew exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up. Becoming a doctor wasn’t just the American dream—it was the family dream. Our great-grandparents emigrated from Russia and barely scraped by. Our grandmother was a secretary, and our grandfather worked in a factory, but it wasn’t enough to support five children, so he worked a second job delivering milk. Before his kids were teenagers, he had taught them to drive the milk truck so they could finish their 4:00 a.m. delivery cycle before the school day and workday started. When none of their children went on to med school (or milk delivery), my grandparents hoped our generation would bring the prestige of a Dr. Grant to the family.
The first seven grandchildren didn’t become doctors. I was the eighth, and I worked multiple jobs to pay for college and to keep my options open. They were proud when I ended up getting my doctorate in psychology, but they still hoped for a real doctor. For the ninth grandchild, Ryan, who arrived four years after me, an M.D. was practically preordained.
Ryan checked all the right boxes: along with being precocious, he had a strong work ethic. He set his sights on becoming a neurosurgeon. He was passionate about the potential to help people and ready to persist in the face of whatever obstacles would come into his path.
When Ryan was looking at colleges, he came to visit me. As we started talking about majors, he expressed a flicker of doubt about the premed track and asked if he should study economics instead. There’s a term in psychology that captures Ryan’s personality: blirtatiousness. Yep, that’s an actual research concept, derived from the combination of blurting and flirting. When “blirters” meet people, their responses tend to be fast and effusive. They typically score high in extraversion and impulsiveness—and low in shyness and neuroticism. Ryan could push himself to study for long hours, but it drained him. Drawn to something more active and social, he toyed with the idea of squeezing in an economics major along with premed, but abandoned that idea when he got to college. Gotta stay on track.
Ryan sailed through the premed curriculum and became a teaching assistant for undergrads while he was still an undergrad himself. When he showed up at exam review sessions and saw how stressed the students were, he refused to start covering the material until they stood up and danced. When he was accepted to an Ivy League medical school, he asked me if he should do a joint M.D.–M.B.A. program. He hadn’t lost his interest in business, but he was afraid to divide his attention. Gotta stay on track.
In his last year of med school, Ryan dutifully applied to neurosurgery residencies. It takes a focused brain to slice into the brain of another human. He wasn’t sure if he was cut out for it—or if the career would leave any space for him to have a life. He wondered if he should start a health-care company instead, but when he was admitted to Yale, he opted for the residency. Gotta stay on track.
Partway through his residency, the grueling hours and the intense focus began to take their toll, and Ryan burned out. He felt that if he died that very day, no one in the system would really care or even notice. He regularly suffered from the heartache of losing patients and the headache of dealing with abusive attending surgeons, and there was no end in sight. Although it was his childhood dream and our grandparents’ dream, his work left little time for anything else. The sheer exhaustion left him questioning whether he should quit.
Ryan decided that he couldn’t give up. He had gone too far to change course, so he finished the seven-year neurosurgery residency. When he submitted the paperwork for his credentials, the hospital denied him because he had placed the dates on his résumé on the right instead of the left. He was so fed up with the system that, out of principle, he refused to move them. After winning that battle with bureaucracy, he added another feather to his cap, doing an eighth year of a fellowship in complex, minimally invasive spinal surgery.
Today Ryan is a neurosurgeon at a major medical center. In his midthirties, he’s still in debt from student loans more than a decade after graduating from med school. Even though he enjoys helping people and caring for patients, the long hours and red tape undercut his enthusiasm. He tells me that if he could do it over, he would have gone a different route. I’ve often wondered what it would have taken to convince him to rethink his chosen line of work—and what he truly wanted out of a career.
We all have notions of who we want to be and how we hope to lead our lives. They’re not limited to careers; from an early age, we develop ideas about where we’ll live, which school we’ll attend, what kind of person we’ll marry, and how many kids we’ll have. These images can inspire us to set bolder goals and guide us toward a path to achieve them. The danger of these plans is that they can give us tunnel vision, blinding us to alternative possibilities. We don’t know how time and circumstances will change what we want and even who we want to be, and locking our life GPS onto a single target can give us the right directions to the wrong destination.
GOING INTO FORECLOSURE
When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment. Evidence shows that entrepreneurs persist with failing strategies when they should pivot, NBA general managers and coaches keep investing in new contracts and more playing time for draft busts, and politicians continue sending soldiers to wars that didn’t need to be fought in the first place. Sunk costs are a factor, but the most important causes appear to be psychological rather than economic. Escalation of commitment happens because we’re rationalizing creatures, constantly searching for self-justifications for our prior beliefs as a way to soothe our egos, shield our images, and validate our past decisions.
Escalation of commitment is a major factor in preventable failures. Ironically, it can be fueled by one of the most celebrated engines of success: grit. Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance, and research shows that it can play an important role in motivating us to accomplish long-term goals. When it comes to rethinking, though, grit may have a dark side. Experiments show that gritty people are more likely to overplay their hands in roulette and more willing to stay the course in tasks at which they’re failing and success is impossible. Researchers have even suggested that gritty mountaineers are more likely to die on expeditions, because they’re determined to do whatever it takes to reach the summit. There’s a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness. Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting our teeth and turning around.
Ryan escalated his commitment to medical training for sixteen years. If he had been less tenacious, he might have changed tracks sooner. Early on, he had fallen victim to what psychologists call identity foreclosure—when we settle prematurely on a sense of self without enough due diligence, and close our minds to alternative selves.
In career choices, identity foreclosure often begins when adults ask kids: what do you want to be when you grow up? Pondering that question can foster a fixed mindset about work and self. “I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child,” Michelle Obama writes. “What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”*
Some kids dream too small. They foreclose on following in family footsteps and never really consider alternatives. You probably know some people who faced the opposite problem. They dreamed too big, becoming attached to a lofty vision that wasn’t realistic. Sometimes we lack the talent to pursue our callings professionally, leaving them unanswered; other times there’s little hope that our passions can pay the bills. “You can be anything you wanna be?!” the comedian Chris Rock quipped. “Tell the kids the truth. . . . You can be anything you’re good at . . . as long as they’re hiring.”
Even if kids get excited about a career path that does prove realistic, what they thought was their dream job can turn out to be a nightmare. Kids might be better off learning about careers as actions to take rather than as identities to claim. When they see work as what they do rather than who they are, they become more open to exploring different possibilities.
Although children are often fascinated by science from a young age, over the course of elementary school, they tend to lose interest and confidence in their potential to be scientists. Recent studies show that it’s possible to maintain their enthusiasm by introducing them to science differently. When second and third graders learned about “doing science” rather than “being scientists,” they were more excited about pursuing science. Becoming a scientist might seem out of reach, but the act of experimenting is something we can all try out. Even prekindergarten students express more interest in science when it’s presented as something we do rather than someone we are.
Recently at dinner, our kids decided to go around the table to ask what everyone wanted to be when they grew up. I told them they didn’t need to choose one career; the average person ends up holding a dozen different jobs. They didn’t have to be one thing; they could do many things. They started brainstorming about all the things they love to do. Their lists ended up including designing Lego sets, studying space, creative writing, architecture, interior design, teaching gymnastics, photography, coaching soccer, and being a fitness YouTuber.
Choosing a career isn’t like finding a soul mate. It’s possible that your ideal job hasn’t even been invented yet. Old industries are changing, and new industries are emerging faster than ever before: it wasn’t that long ago that Google, Uber, and Instagram didn’t exist. Your future self doesn’t exist right now, either, and your interests might change over time.
TIME FOR A CHECKUP
We foreclose on all kinds of life plans. Once you’ve committed to one, it becomes part of your identity, making it difficult to de-escalate. Declaring an English major because you love to read, only to discover that you don’t enjoy the process of writing. Deciding to start college during a pandemic, only to conclude later that you should have considered a gap year. Gotta stay on track. Ending a romantic relationship because you don’t want kids, only to realize years down the road that you might after all.
Identity foreclosure can stop us from evolving. In a study of amateur musicians, those who had settled on music as a professional calling were more likely to ignore career advice from a trusted adviser over the course of the following seven years. They listened to their hearts and tuned out their mentors. In some ways, identity foreclosure is the opposite of an identity crisis: instead of accepting uncertainty about who we want to become, we develop compensatory conviction and plunge head over heels into a career path. I’ve noticed that the students who are the most certain about their career plans at twenty are often the ones with the deepest regrets by thirty. They haven’t done enough rethinking along the way.*
Sometimes it’s because they’re thinking too much like politicians, eager to earn the approval of parents and peers. They become seduced by status, failing to see that no matter how much an accomplishment or affiliation impresses someone else, it’s still a poor choice if it depresses them. In other cases it’s because they’re stuck in preacher mode, and they’ve come to see a job as a sacred cause. And occasionally they pick careers in prosecutor mode, where they charge classmates with selling their souls to capitalism and hurl themselves into nonprofits in the hopes of saving the world.
Sadly, they often know too little about the job—and too little about their evolving selves—to make a lifelong commitment. They get trapped in an overconfidence cycle, taking pride in pursuing a career identity and surrounding themselves with people who validate their conviction. By the time they discover it was the wrong fit, they feel it’s too late to think again. The stakes seem too high to walk away; the sacrifices of salary, status, skill, and time seem too great. For the record, I think it’s better to lose the past two years of progress than to waste the next twenty. In hindsight, identity foreclosure is a Band-Aid: it covers up an identity crisis, but fails to cure it.
My advice to students is to take a cue from health-care professions. Just as they make appointments with the doctor and the dentist even when nothing is wrong, they should schedule checkups on their careers. I encourage them to put a reminder in their calendars to ask some key questions twice a year. When did you form the aspirations you’re currently pursuing, and how have you changed since then? Have you reached a learning plateau in your role or your workplace, and is it time to consider a pivot? Answering these career checkup questions is a way to periodically activate rethinking cycles. It helps students maintain humility about their ability to predict the future, contemplate doubts about their plans, and stay curious enough to discover new possibilities or reconsider previously discarded ones.
I had one student, Marissa Shandell, who scored a coveted job at a prestigious consulting firm and planned on climbing up the ladder. She kept getting promoted early but found herself working around the clock. Instead of continuing to just grit and bear it, she and her husband had a career checkup conversation every six months, talking not just about the growth trajectory of their companies but also about the growth trajectory of their jobs. After being promoted to associate partner well ahead of schedule, Marissa realized she had reached a learning plateau (and a lifestyle plateau) and decided to pursue a doctorate in management.*
Deciding to leave a current career path is often easier than identifying a new one. My favorite framework for navigating that challenge comes from a management professor, Herminia Ibarra. She finds that as people consider career choices and transitions, it helps to think like scientists. A first step is to entertain possible selves: identify some people you admire within or outside your field, and observe what they actually do at work day by day. A second step is to develop hypotheses about how these paths might align with your own interests, skills, and values. A third step is to test out the different identities by running experiments: do informational interviews, job shadowing, and sample projects to get a taste of the work. The goal is not to confirm a particular plan but to expand your repertoire of possible selves—which keeps you open to rethinking.
Checkups aren’t limited to careers—they’re relevant to the plans we make in every domain of our lives. A few years ago, a former student called for romantic advice. Caveat: I’m not that kind of psychologist. He’d been dating a woman for just over a year, and although it was the most fulfilling relationship he’d ever had, he was still questioning whether it was the right match. He had always imagined himself marrying a woman who was ambitious in her career or passionate about improving the world, and his girlfriend seemed less driven and more relaxed in her approach to life.
It was an ideal time for a checkup. I asked him how old he was when he formed that vision of a partner and how much he’d changed since then. He said he’d held it since he was a teenager and had never paused to rethink it. As we talked, he started to realize that if he and his girlfriend were happy together, ambition and passion might not be as important to him in a partner as they had been in the past. He came to understand that he was inspired by women who were highly motivated to succeed and serve because that was who he wanted to be.
Two and a half years later, he reached out with an update. He had decided to let go of his preconceived image of who his partner should be:
I decided to open up and talk to her about how she’s different from the person I’d imagined being with. Surprisingly, she told me the same thing! I wasn’t who she imagined she’d end up with either—she expected to end up with a guy who was more of a creative, someone who was more gregarious. We accepted it and moved on. I’m thrilled to have left my old ideas behind to make space for the full her and everything our relationship could bring.
Just before the pandemic, he proposed to her, and they’re now engaged.
A successful relationship requires regular rethinking. Sometimes being considerate means reconsidering something as simple as our habits. Learning not to be fashionably late to everything. Retiring that wardrobe of ratty conference T-shirts. Rolling over to snore in the other direction. At other times being supportive means opening our minds to bigger life changes—moving to a different country, a different community, or a different job to support our partner’s priorities. In my student’s case, it meant rethinking who his fiancée would be, but also staying open to who she might become. She eventually switched jobs and became passionate about both her work and a personal cause of fighting educational inequity. When we’re willing to update our ideas of who our partners are, it can give them freedom to evolve and our relationships room to grow.
Whether we do checkups with our partners, our parents, or our mentors, it’s worth pausing once or twice a year to reflect on how our aspirations have changed. As we identify past images of our lives that are no longer relevant to our future, we can start to rethink our plans. That can set us up for happiness—as long as we’re not too fixated on finding it.
WHEN CHASING HAPPINESS CHASES IT AWAY
When we think about how to plan our lives, there are few things that take priority over happiness. The kingdom of Bhutan has a Gross National Happiness index. In the United States, the pursuit of happiness is so prized that it’s one of the three unalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence. If we’re not careful, though, the pursuit of happiness can become a recipe for misery.
Psychologists find that the more people value happiness, the less happy they often become with their lives. It’s true for people who naturally care about happiness and for people who are randomly assigned to reflect on why happiness matters. There’s even evidence that placing a great deal of importance on happiness is a risk factor for depression. Why?
One possibility is that when we’re searching for happiness, we get too busy evaluating life to actually experience it. Instead of savoring our moments of joy, we ruminate about why our lives aren’t more joyful. A second likely culprit is that we spend too much time striving for peak happiness, overlooking the fact that happiness depends more on the frequency of positive emotions than their intensity. A third potential factor is that when we hunt for happiness, we overemphasize pleasure at the expense of purpose. This theory is consistent with data suggesting that meaning is healthier than happiness, and that people who look for purpose in their work are more successful in pursuing their passions—and less likely to quit their jobs—than those who look for joy. While enjoyment waxes and wanes, meaning tends to last. A fourth explanation is that Western conceptions of happiness as an individual state leave us feeling lonely. In more collectivistic Eastern cultures, that pattern is reversed: pursuing happiness predicts higher well-being, because people prioritize social engagement over independent activities.
Last fall a student stopped by my office hours for some advice. She explained that when she chose Wharton, she had focused too much on getting into the best school and too little on finding the best fit. She wished she had picked a college with a more carefree culture and a stronger sense of community. Now that she was clear on her values, she was considering a transfer to a school that would make her happier.
A few weeks later she told me that a moment in class had helped her rethink her plan. It wasn’t the research on happiness that we discussed, the values survey she took, or the decision-making activity we did. It was a comedy sketch I showed from Saturday Night Live.
The scene stars Adam Sandler as a tour guide. In a mock commercial advertising his company’s Italian tours, he mentions that customer reviews sometimes express disappointment. He takes the opportunity to remind customers about what a vacation can and can’t do for them:
There’s a lot a vacation can do: help you unwind, see some different-looking squirrels, but it cannot fix deeper issues, like how you behave in group settings.
We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking.
Remember, you’re still gonna be you on vacation. If you are sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in a new place.
© Saturday Night Live/NBC
When we pursue happiness, we often start by changing our surroundings. We expect to find bliss in a warmer climate or a friendlier dorm, but any joy that those choices bring about is typically temporary. In a series of studies, students who changed their environments by adjusting their living arrangements or course schedules quickly returned to their baseline levels of happiness. As Ernest Hemingway wrote, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” Meanwhile, students who changed their actions by joining a new club, adjusting their study habits, or starting a new project experienced lasting gains in happiness. Our happiness often depends more on what we do than where we are. It’s our actions—not our surroundings—that bring us meaning and belonging.
My student decided not to transfer. Instead of rethinking where she went to school, she would rethink how she spent her time. She might not be able to change the culture of an entire institution, but she could create a new subculture. She started doing weekly coffee chats with classmates and invited the ones who shared her interests and values over for weekly tea. A few months later, she reported that she had formed several close friendships and was thrilled with her decision to stay. The impact didn’t stop there: her tea gatherings became a tradition for welcoming students who felt out of place. Instead of transferring to a new community, they built their own microcommunity. They weren’t focusing on happiness—they were looking for contribution and connection.
LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF MEANING
To be clear, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to stay in a role, relationship, or place they hated unless they had no other alternatives. Still, when it comes to careers, instead of searching for the job where we’ll be happiest, we might be better off pursuing the job where we expect to learn and contribute the most.
Psychologists find that passions are often developed, not discovered. In a study of entrepreneurs, the more effort they put into their startups, the more their enthusiasm about their businesses climbed each week. Their passion grew as they gained momentum and mastery. Interest doesn’t always lead to effort and skill; sometimes it follows them. By investing in learning and problem solving, we can develop our passions—and build the skills necessary to do the work and lead the lives we find worthwhile.
As we get older, we become more focused on searching for meaning—and we’re most likely to find it in actions that benefit others. My favorite test of meaningful work is to ask: if this job didn’t exist, how much worse off would people be? It’s near midlife that this question often begins to loom large. At around this time, in both work and life, we feel we have more to give (and less to lose), and we’re especially keen to share our knowledge and skills with the next generation.
When my students talk about the evolution of self-esteem in their careers, the progression often goes something like this:
Phase 1: I’m not important
Phase 2: I’m important
Phase 3: I want to contribute to something important
I’ve noticed that the sooner they get to phase 3, the more impact they have and the more happiness they experience. It’s left me thinking about happiness less as a goal and more as a by-product of mastery and meaning. “Those only are happy,” philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”
Careers, relationships, and communities are examples of what scientists call open systems—they’re constantly in flux because they’re not closed off from the environments around them. We know that open systems are governed by at least two key principles: there are always multiple paths to the same end (equifinality), and the same starting point can be a path to many different ends (multifinality). We should be careful to avoid getting too attached to a particular route or even a particular destination. There isn’t one definition of success or one track to happiness.
My cousin Ryan finally wound up rethinking his career arc. Five years into his neurosurgery residency, he did his own version of a career checkup and decided to scratch his entrepreneurial itch. He cofounded a fast-growing, venture-backed startup called Nomad Health, which creates a marketplace to match clinicians with medical facilities. He also advised several medical device startups, filed medical device patents, and is now working on multiple startups to improve health care. Looking back, he still regrets that he foreclosed so early on an identity as a neurosurgeon and escalated his commitment to that career.
At work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want to learn and contribute over the next year or two, and stay open to what might come next. To adapt an analogy from E. L. Doctorow, writing out a plan for your life “is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
We don’t have to upend our entire paths to rethink some of our plans. Some people are perfectly content with their fields of work but dissatisfied with their current roles. Others may be too risk averse to make a geographic move for a job or a partner. And many don’t have the luxury of making a pivot: being economically dependent on a job or emotionally attached to an extended family can limit the options available. Whether or not we have the opportunity or appetite for major changes in our lives, it’s still possible to make smaller adjustments that breathe new meaning into our days.
My colleagues Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton find that in every line of work, there are people who become active architects of their own jobs. They rethink their roles through job crafting—changing their daily actions to better fit their values, interests, and skills. One of the places Amy and Jane studied job crafting was in the University of Michigan health-care system.
If you visited a certain floor of the hospital, it wouldn’t be long before cancer patients told you how grateful they were for Candice Walker. Her mission was not only to protect their fragile immune systems—it was also to care for their fragile emotions. She called the chemotherapy center the House of Hope.
Candice was often the first one to console families when their loved ones went through treatment; she showed up with bagels and coffee. She would make patients laugh by telling stories about her cats drinking her milk or showing them that she had accidentally put on one brown sock and one blue sock. One day she saw a patient on the floor of an elevator writhing in pain, and the staff members nearby weren’t sure what to do. Candice immediately took charge, rushed the woman into a wheelchair, and took her up in the elevator for urgent treatment. The patient later called her “my savior.”
Candice Walker wasn’t a doctor or a nurse. She wasn’t a social worker, either. She was a custodian. Her official job was to keep the cancer center clean.
Candice and her fellow custodians were all hired to do the same job, but some of them ended up rethinking their roles. One cleaner on a long-term intensive care unit took it upon herself to regularly rearrange the paintings on the walls, hoping that a change of scenery might spark some awareness among patients in comas. When asked about it, she said, “No, it’s not part of my job, but it’s part of me.”
Our identities are open systems, and so are our lives. We don’t have to stay tethered to old images of where we want to go or who we want to be. The simplest way to start rethinking our options is to question what we do daily.
It takes humility to reconsider our past commitments, doubt to question our present decisions, and curiosity to reimagine our future plans. What we discover along the way can free us from the shackles of our familiar surroundings and our former selves. Rethinking liberates us to do more than update our knowledge and opinions—it’s a tool for leading a more fulfilling life.