The hidden continuity beneath every career change.
By Jill Szoo Wilson
Author’s Note
This is Part 2 of a series on vocation, giftedness, and meaningful work.
Since 2020, our economy, our culture, and our professional norms have been in a state of remarkable change. For traditional and nontraditional students alike, the pressure to choose the “right” major, the “right” career, or the “right” place to begin has taken on even greater weight than it did when I was in college. Many people are trying to build meaningful lives while carrying a fear that one “wrong” decision will define everything that follows.
This short series is my attempt to interject a bit of hope into that conversation. My hope is not to offer a formula for choosing the perfect path, but to encourage readers to think differently about vocation, giftedness, and the ways God has equipped us to flourish in a changing world.
Midlife career change carries its own mythology, distinct from the one that shapes a twenty-year-old’s choice of major, though built from similar material. The story goes something like this: at some point, usually after a decade or two in a field, a person realizes the work has stopped fitting. What follows, in the popular version, is a kind of erasure. Somewhere in the retelling, a lawyer starts throwing pottery, and a banker ends up teaching ninth-grade English. The story treats the earlier career as a costume, something worn for years and finally, gratefully, removed.
What rarely gets mentioned in these accounts is how much survives the change. The lawyer who now throws pottery still argues, in a sense, with the material, coaxing a stubborn piece of clay toward the shape it was always capable of holding. The banker who now teaches still reads a classroom the way she once read a boardroom, watching for the moment attention drifts and adjusting the pitch of her voice to pull it back. The old skill simply changes its clothes, arriving in the new work under an unfamiliar name.
Herminia Ibarra, whose work already shaped the argument in the piece before this one, describes reinvention as a process of trying on possible selves through action, long before the identity settles into language. The self doing the trying gets assembled from what came before, carried forward from a different room, under a different title. Much of its deepest work remains the same. It simply finds a new place to express itself.
When people ask me how to reinvent themselves, I have started asking a different question back: what did you already do well, long before this job, that this job happened to interrupt? The answer usually surprises them. A marketing director recalls the elaborate treasure hunts she used to plan for her cousins every summer, mapping clues across a whole neighborhood, while an accountant remembers building furniture in his garage on weekends, following instructions so complicated that friends stopped trusting him to help with theirs. These stories rarely make it onto a resume, yet they hold real evidence of a mind that already knows how it likes to work.
We often imagine careers as collections of technical competencies, though much of what makes work distinctive lives somewhere underneath the technique. Long before someone learns accounting or teaching, medicine or design, they are already developing habits of attention. A person notices patterns before anyone teaches them to. Another organizes chaos instinctively, or feels a pull toward explaining a difficult idea until it makes sense to someone else. Occupations give these habits a context, though they rarely invent them from scratch. Reinvention succeeds when a person finally recognizes the deeper continuities that have been shaping them all along, continuities that were there well before the new job gave them a name.
Reinvention, looked at this way, is less a departure and more a continuation of the same conversation, carried into a new room, with different furniture and unfamiliar lighting, though the old habits of attention are still standing in the corner, waiting to be recognized.
The person who starts over rarely starts empty-handed. They are simply moving the conversation into a room with a better view.
Jill Szoo Wilson 