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—when we settle prematurely on a sense of self without enough due diligence and close our minds to alternative selves—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.

This pattern isn’t just a failure to rethink; it’s also fed by escalation of commitment. When we dedicate ourselves to a plan that isn’t going as hoped, our first instinct is rarely to pivot. Instead we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. Evidence shows that entrepreneurs persist with failing strategies, NBA general managers keep investing in draft busts, and politicians continue sending soldiers to wars that didn’t need to be fought. Sunk costs are a factor, but the most powerful causes are psychological: we rationalize, searching for self-justifications to soothe our egos, shield our images, and validate past decisions. Escalation of commitment is a major driver of preventable failures, and ironically it can be fueled by one of the most celebrated engines of success: grit. The combination of passion and perseverance helps us accomplish long-term goals, but when it comes to rethinking, grit has a dark side. Gritty people are more likely to overplay their hands in roulette and more willing to stay the course in tasks where 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.

Consider Ryan. He escalated his commitment to medical training for sixteen years. If he had been less tenacious, he might have changed tracks sooner. He had fallen victim to identity foreclosure, closing his mind to other possible selves and spending years rationalizing a path that didn’t fit.

Where does identity foreclosure begin? Often with a seemingly innocent question 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. As Michelle Obama writes, “I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child. 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, foreclosing on following in family footsteps and never really considering alternatives. Others dream too big, becoming attached to a lofty vision that isn’t realistic—sometimes we lack the talent to pursue our callings professionally, or there’s little hope that our passions can pay the bills. The comedian Chris Rock quipped, “You can be anything you wanna be?! Tell the kids the truth. . . . You can be anything you’re good at . . . as long as they’re hiring.” Even when a career path proves realistic, what a child imagined as a dream job can become 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. Recent studies show that when second and third graders learned about “doing science” rather than “being scientists,” they were more excited about pursuing science. The act of experimenting is something we can all try out; even prekindergarten students show more interest when science is presented as an action, not an identity.

I’ve taken this to heart at home. At dinner, my kids once went around the table asking 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 all the things they love to do—designing Lego sets, studying space, creative writing, architecture, interior design, teaching gymnastics, photography, coaching soccer, 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.

My advice is to take a cue from health-care professions. Just as we make appointments with the doctor and the dentist even when nothing is wrong, we should schedule checkups on our careers. I encourage putting a reminder in the calendar 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 periodically activates rethinking cycles. It helps maintain humility about our ability to predict the future, contemplate doubts about our 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 the ladder. She kept getting promoted early but found herself working around the clock. Instead of just gritting her teeth, 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.

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; they were engaged when this account was written.

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.