A "new midlife crisis" story from the Williams-Sonoma Chairman

[This story is from Howard Lester, Chairman of Williams-Sonoma, the large home-goods retailer.]

...I realized that to that point in my working career, I had kind of done the things that were necessary. I was trying to make a living and just do the best I could and make money, but I was never really happy. I wasn't excited about getting out of bed in the morning and going to work, so I gave a lot of thought to what it was that I wanted to do, and I knew it was something different.

One of the main conclusions that I reached was that it was important for me at that point in my life--as I mentioned, I was in my early forties--to do something; you know, this is not a dress rehearsal. And I wanted to do things that I loved doing. Why go through life doing things that you don't love doing? And I felt that if I was doing something I loved, I'd have a better chance at being good at it than doing something I didn't love, because it wouldn't be work, it would be a joy.

So I went on a little journey of looking at a lot of businesses, some of them pretty weird. And one day I came across this little company called Williams-Sonoma, which was struggling. It was a little $4 million company with four stores and a small catalog, located in San Francisco. One thing led to another, and I was able to purchase the business in the summer of 1978.

We've been very fortunate. We've grown a business that we're quite proud of, and I can tell you that since acquiring Williams-Sonoma, I don't think there has been a day or a morning when I wasn't excited about getting up and going to work.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Starting a Business. Copyright (c) 2008 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the "Lessons Learned" series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.

Related posts:
"The New Midlife Crisis: It's an existential necessity"
"Midlife Crisis--21st century style"

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narrative, career, midlife crisis, reading list

The new midlife crisis--it's an "existential necessity"

I've been working through my midlife crisis (profiled in this earlier post)--not buying a sports car or seeking a trophy wife (I have one of those already), but confronting this: since retiring at fifty is neither practical nor desirable, working 2000 hours or so per year better be fun and have some meaning in it.

For me, that means working for myself, engaging in lots of different projects with different clients, working with folks from different countries (UK, Brazil, Japan, Northern Ireland in the past year), reading and researching, and playing with some new product ideas that may never earn a dime. (And being able to spend time with the family guilt-free.)

It may not be a house on the Maui beachfront, but it's a bit of paradise to me.

I have found that I have company in this new midlife crisis. I just caught up with a colleague from the '80s who left the rat race to develop a business combining his passions of marketing and auto racing. Very cool.

And now I learn that it is not only desirable, but necessary, to go through this change. Carlo Strenger and Arie Ruttenberg write in the February Harvard Business Review about "The Existential Necessity of Midlife Change" (link - $$). Strenger and Ruttenberg recognize that the midlife years often bring a need for career transition--boredom with the "same old job," lack of promotion opportunities, corporate restructuring or even being fired during our forties and fifties. Yet our assumptions of what we have left to offer are hopelessly out of date:

The myth of midlife as the onset of decline is rooted in historically outdated conceptions. According to this myth, people end their productive lives and retire at age 65. Sixty-five is not a magical number, however. It was introduced as the retirement age in Germany in 1916. Twenty-seven years earlier, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had established 70 as the age to begin receiving a pension. When asked how the state could afford such largesse, Bismarck replied that almost nobody would reach this age anyway. He was right. According to one source, life expectancy in Germany at the time was 49.

Since life expectancy in much of the developed world exceeds 80 years, retiring at 65 is a decade or more too early (ask my 83-year-old dad, who is completing his seventeenth year of work at the local elementary school, a job he took after retirement).

But for those forty-somethings who are looking at how to spend their next thirty years' productivity, there's another trap, write the authors: the myth of magical transformations:

This myth, the fruit of the past few decades, has been fed by countless self-help books and magazine articles, and by a general cultural atmosphere. The myth tries to sell the illusion that if people have enough vision and willpower, they can be anything or anybody they want to be. Paradoxically, this doesn’t make midlife career changes easier—it makes them more frightening. Faced with stories of doctors who get up one morning knowing that they want to become chefs, housewives who have a sudden vision of the business empires they are about to build, and lawyers who one day have crystal clear plans for high-tech businesses, real-life human beings are bound to feel inadequate. They have fears, doubts, and vague ideas at best, so they’d better stick to their knitting.

To sidestep this trap, the article gives us some commonsense advice: "To be productive, dreams must be connected to our potential. Otherwise, they are idle fantasies."

So, there's a prescription. Dream your future--as connected to your capabilities and strengths. Then go do it.

Anyone else out there giving it a go? Let me know.

(Photo by outrequin)

career, midlife crisis, Harvard Business Review

Midlife Crisis, 21st Century Style

My friends and I have been working for 20-odd years now, and midlife crisis is starting to take hold of us.

I don't mean Porsches and trophy wives; instead our midlife crises involve trying to find meaning in our work. None of us is rich, but we can handle next month's mortgage or rent payment without undue stress. We're trying to find a better balance between work and family time. Each of us has accomplished a great deal, but none of us will be CEO of IBM--the goal we might have had coming out of college. If we have to work for twenty more years, it better be something we care about. Here's a sample:

• Tom has been with three different companies that have been sold or restructured, and is looking for something where he has some control of the direction of the company.
• Michael has left high-tech to become president of a small company that installs advanced wiring systems in new homes.
• Ross has left management consulting to become a teacher in New York City (go, Ross!).
• Dan is contemplating leaving the defense contractor he works for to be one of the initial team at a high-tech startup.
• And I've become a lone wolf, doing independent consulting and researching areas I've had a long-term passion for. And some fun things, like this blog.

So, if you see me driving around town in the car pictured above, that's my answer to the Porsche. Our generation's midlife-crisis car is an 11-year-old Isuzu. What does that say?

career midlife crisis balance