INTRODUCTION: PIVOT IS THE NEW NORMAL

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.

—José Saramago

“I think I am going crazy.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Am I asking for too much?”

“I just can’t do this anymore.”

“I think I am having a midlife crisis.”

“Will I ever be happy?”

NO MATTER THEIR AGE, LIFE STAGE, BANK ACCOUNT BALANCE, OR CAREER LEVEL, these are the sentiments I hear from people who are looking for more in their lives, even if they have found career success by traditional standards.

Many have perfect-on-paper jobs, but have hit a plateau and feel an inexplicable urge to do things differently. They may be considering walking away from a robust salary, folding or starting their own business, or taking time off altogether. Some are unsatisfied or frustrated with their work for other reasons: they have outgrown their position or business, or they feel drawn to a new area that better suits their values and interests, where they can make a greater contribution.

Through their confusion and self-doubt, one thing remains clear: the way they have been working is no longer working. Maybe you can relate to some of the following stories of people who reached a career crossroad:

From the outside, it may have looked like we were all undergoing quarter-life or midlife crises. Onlookers might have wrongly assumed we were falling apart or going crazy for seeming unsatisfied with our current paths and leaving our stable jobs behind.

However, on the inside we all knew we had hit a plateau, or pivot point, in our careers. We were talented, hardworking, and committed to making a positive impact—and yet we all felt called to do things differently than how we had been doing them. Tackling these massive changes felt disorienting but right. For whatever uncertainties lay ahead, each of us knew that staying in the same place would have been the greater risk.

Calling such career aspirations a crisis, shaming and blaming people for wanting to prioritize meaningful work in a volatile economy by saying they are “entitled” or “too picky,” means we are missing a huge opportunity to celebrate and support those who seek to make a greater contribution to their workplaces, society, and the lives of everyone around them.

We do not have a productive description for this type of career transition. Or at least we didn’t, until now.

PIVOT OR GET PIVOTED

People are no longer working at the same jobs for forty years with the safety of pension plans waiting at the end. The average employee tenure in America is now four to five years and job roles often change dramatically within those four to five years. Among workers twenty-five to thirty-four years old, the average tenure drops to three years.

Many jobs that disappeared during the last recession are not coming back. Every day, breakthroughs in technology generate greater automation in the workplace, threatening positions held by hardworking people and the stability of companies large and small. Job security has become an antiquated idea, a luxury most people today do not enjoy, whether they are aware of it or not.

Corporate loyalty has given way to uncertainty; companies that seem too big to fail have collapsed, along with many smaller ones. New ones take their place. With the advent of app marketplaces, crowdfunding, the maker revolution, and sharing economies, we now see billion-dollar valuations for companies that would not have existed ten years ago, and many smaller businesses cropping up in parallel.

To add to the upheaval, a recent Gallup study revealed that almost 90 percent of workers are either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged from their jobs.”

But you do not need to read any of the statistics, books, or articles to have a visceral sense of this volatility. “Virtually everything about jobs and work and careers has changed,” said Scott Uhrig, an executive recruiter for technology firms and author of Navigating Successful Job Transitions. “Just like the boiling frog, we may not fully appreciate the magnitude of the change even though we are completely immersed in it.” Perhaps you are currently experiencing this boiling frog feeling in your career—if you have not already jumped out of the pot.

Some say the word career itself is dead—a throwback to a bygone era—as we move increasingly toward a project-based economy. Certainly, we can expect to experience significant changes every few years, much more often than was socially acceptable in the past. Because our careers are so fundamentally tied to our livelihood and sense of confidence, meaning, and purpose, these transitions can be traumatic without a road map for traversing them.

But this doesn’t all have to be bad news. Navigating this accelerated pace of change and this transitional career state, learning to embrace it instead of resisting it, can become an edge and advantage. You can learn to enjoy calculated risk and uncertainty in exchange for adventure, flexibility, freedom, and opportunity.

By approaching their career transitions in a positive, methodical way, each of the people whose stories I shared earlier recalibrated toward more resonant trajectories:

As much as we began from similar places of dissatisfaction, our stories all have something in common with how we proceeded, too. We each shifted to new, related work by leveraging our existing base of strengths, interests, and experience. Though it might seem as if each of us made drastic changes, we were not starting from scratch. In Silicon Valley parlance, we pivoted.

Eric Ries, author of the business bible The Lean Startup, defines a business pivot as “a change in strategy without a change in vision.”

I define a career pivot as doubling down on what is working to make a purposeful shift in a new, related direction. Pivoting, as we will refer to it in this book, is an intentional, methodical process for nimbly navigating career changes.

Typically when the word pivot is applied to a business strategy shift, it is considered Plan B: changing directions to save a business from dwindling profits or a dismal forecast. Pivoting was a response to failing at Plan A, the original goal. But when it comes to our careers, learning to pivot is Plan A. Pivoting, within our roles and throughout our careers, is the new normal.

Punctuated moments of career success—promotions, launches, and financial windfalls—are nice, but they are only a tiny fraction of our overall experience. By doubling down on what is working best while thinking about how to develop into what’s next, you accelerate the experimentation and change process. You can proceed with confidence, knowing that you already have what it takes to get where you want to go.

Your choice, today and in the future, is to pivot or get pivoted. Pivoting is a mindset and a skill set, and you can get better at both. In this book I will share a framework to help you manage the process with focus, fulfillment, and—dare I say—fun.

CHANGING CAREERS IN THE AGE OF THE APP

Careers are no longer straightforward, linear, and predictable like ladders. They are now much more modular, customizable, and dynamic, like smartphones. Our education and our upbringing are the out-of-the-box model. After that, it is up to us to download the apps—for skills, interests, experiences, and education—that we want and need to feel fulfilled.

But what do you do when your entire operating system needs an upgrade? It is not as easy as clicking “update now” and waiting five minutes for shiny new features to set in. We are not machines; we are flawed, fear-prone, desire-driven, sometimes irrational, endlessly creative human beings.

Career changes seem to threaten our most fundamental needs on Maslow’s hierarchy: food, shelter, clothing, and safety, in addition to higher-level needs for belonging, esteem, and even self-actualization. We are afraid that if we make one wrong move, we will soon become homeless (or forced to live in our parents’ basement) and unemployed, unable to fend for our very survival. Perceiving this potential threat to our primary needs, we freeze, flee, or fight the nagging voice within us that seeks greater fulfillment.

As Stephen Grosz writes in The Examined Life, “All change involves loss.” It is natural to fear change when we know that we must grieve what we may leave in its wake. Even the most exciting changes can be bittersweet, as they often involve letting something else go.

But many of us fear change for a more irrational reason: we anticipate worst-case scenarios, which may or may not occur. To remain calm and to have access to our most creative faculties, we must learn to see the new career change landscape as normal, expected, and part of a revolution ripe with opportunity. As my friend Monica’s mother advises when she worries about the future, “Don’t suffer twice.”

In the career-as-smartphone analogy, pivoting is about learning to download apps one by one—or a few smaller apps simultaneously—so you can reduce risk, experiment with ideas, and enhance your career operating system without sending yourself into a panic by trying to make moves that are too drastic, too far removed from what you are doing right now.

You will never see the entire pivot path at the outset, nor would you want to. If the next steps were obvious and manageable with a simple spreadsheet, you would either already be taking them or you would be bored. The exhilarating part of tackling new opportunities is the inherent risk and uncertainty involved. It is the “call to adventure” from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey archetype, which necessitates that we venture into the land of the unknown and become bigger, more fully expressed versions of ourselves in the process.

What Is the Difference Between a Crisis and a Pivot?

There are certain life events that are all consuming; they rock us to the core, break us down, and torch the world as we knew it. The death of a loved one, disease, divorce, getting fired—all of these can be extremely traumatic. To call them pivot points would be a gross understatement.

A pivot is change you make of your own volition when you have reached a point in your career when you are ready for increased challenge and impact. Traumatic events, ones that leave you with the feeling that you are crawling out of your own skin, are most often not voluntary.

Certain events happen to us and they require space for patience, compassion, grief, and sometimes therapy or spiritual guidance in order to heal. These events demand a period of time to retreat, process, and regroup. Sometimes just waking up and making it through the day is an enormous accomplishment. Crises typically require more processing than planning, though not everyone will have the luxury to do those two things in sequence. It is likely that those in the throes of trauma need time to heal before embarking on the more proactive phases of pivoting.

In many cases, painful experiences also serve as powerful wake-up calls, encouraging us to rebuild in an even more authentic direction. I recommend books for each Pivot stage in the Pivot 201 section at the back of the book, but the two I suggest for processing major life events are When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön, and Second Firsts by Christina Rasmussen.

CONNECT THE DOTS LOOKING BACKWARD

When I was twenty years old, I took a leave of absence from UCLA, where I was studying political science and communications, to join a political polling start-up in Silicon Valley as its first employee. This was my first pivot, and it kicked off my examination of what it takes to switch quickly and successfully from one trajectory to the next, even when it seems to go against the grain of what others are doing.

In hindsight I see my entire career as a series of pivots, within companies and also on my own, where I have made several smaller pivots in my business since:

As Steve Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.” The days of mapping an entire career path are over. You do not have to specify the details of your life five moves or five years out. Consider what you were doing five years ago. Did you have any idea where you would be today? The challenge now is to be present. In doing so, we stay awake to the dots that are right in front of us.

I encourage you to reflect on your work history and connect the dots looking backward to see how you have already pivoted from one related area to the next. It is likely that, before even reading this book, many of these concepts will be things you have unknowingly applied in your own career.

I disagree with Jobs on one point: I do think it is possible to connect at least one or two dots looking forward. Maybe not with perfect detail, but we can get better at making the connection to our one next career step, and we must, as the economy demands that we all respond to change more deftly. By learning how to connect the dots looking backward and then forward, we can get better at making career connections in real time, not waiting too long until we are burned out, unhappy, or forced to make a change.

I have spent the last decade studying and reverse engineering career change, as my own life has been defined by these transitions. By reviewing through the lens of hindsight, examining my career and interviewing others, I uncovered patterns in what makes those transitions successful and what impedes them.

I have worked with people of all ages and career stages. Those who are most successful give themselves permission to explore continually, improving how quickly they spot their next move. They find and create cultures—whether in an office of one or ten thousand—that allow space to shift purposefully from one related area into the next.

While at Google I worked in the People Operations organization for five and a half years as the company skyrocketed from 6,000 to 36,000 employees. I trained over 1,000 people, from recent graduates to senior-level managers and directors, and saw how the feeling of bumping up against a career plateau affected everyone, not just entry-level workers. Moreover, both employees and managers wanted the same things—a happy, engaged, productive workforce—but did not always know how to close the communication gaps that opened between them when clarifying next career steps. When I started coaching entrepreneurs, I noticed how they, too, longed to create success without falling into the pressures of what “everyone else” was doing. They had to connect at least a few dots looking forward, on their own terms and based on their existing strengths, in order to stay in business.

Together, we will explore how to get better at this process no matter what work environment you are in. You can already connect your career dots looking backward to see how each related area led to the next; this book will teach you how to become an expert dot connector looking forward, now and in the future.

To operate this way, let go of expectations and fears about what can or should or might happen. Zoom back in to where you are right now, and where you want to go next. That is all you have to do. Once you make your next move, you will collect the experience and real-world data to plan the move after that.

When I was a freshman at UCLA I plotted all four years of required courses on a quarter-by-quarter, year-by-year spreadsheet to figure out how to double-major most efficiently. I printed this one-page, next-four-years-of-my-life plan, slipped it into a sheet protector, and followed it to the letter until I graduated, setting the stage for a rude awakening after graduation as I entered the unpredictable real world.

On one hand, my plan-heavy approach gave me the structure to jump at the opportunity to work at a start-up during my junior year, because I was ahead in my course work. However, this plan suffocated day-to-day spontaneity—and I missed out on following threads of exploration outside of checking boxes for maximum efficiency and compliance. After all, the best thing that happened to me in college, the job offer that set the stage for the rest of my career, was the one thing I didn’t plan for.

PIVOT METHOD AT A GLANCE

Agile development is a collaborative approach to project management that emphasizes continual planning, testing, and launching. One of my favorite sayings from this business practice is “Each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it.” Given that we will have many more career iterations than previous generations, it behooves us all to become better at the steps involved.

This book is structured around a four-stage process, the Pivot Method. Through each of the four stages—Plant, Scan, Pilot, and Launch—you will learn how to systematically bridge the gaps between where you are now and where you want to be.

In basketball, a pivot refers to a player keeping one foot firmly in place while moving the other in any direction to explore passing options. Much like a basketball player, successful pivots start by planting your feet—setting a strong foundation—then scanning the court for opportunities, staying rooted while exploring options. Scanning alone will not put points on the board, so eventually you start passing the ball around the court—testing ideas and getting feedback, or piloting—generating perspectives and opportunities to make a shot—eventually launching in the new direction.

Here is an overview of each stage in more detail:

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.