How to find a new job, purpose and life in 27 easy steps (and the one thing you must NEVER do)

What I’ve never understood about work is that at the very moment when you realise you’re in the wrong job, it’s almost impossible to change course.

It takes a couple of decades until you possess enough confidence and self-awareness to know what you’re good at (and, just as importantly, not good at), what you enjoy doing, the skills that have built your reputation and which you want to develop, the emotional intelligence and maturity to make a difference. By then, you’re in your 40s and – unless you’re one of the lucky ones - stuck.

I was. And the only way out was to jump off a metaphorical cliff and try to reinvent myself. Sometimes the best way of turning your life around is to put yourself in an impossible situation and ask: ‘Is this it?’

Only now do I realise that middle age is the perfect time to reinvent yourself. It’s daunting and scary but you have the talent and wisdom and, with work perpetually disrupted by technology, it’s increasingly necessary. There are endless doomsday-like warnings that the over-50s haven’t got a hope in this new world of work . Age, we’re told is a barrier to success. Believe me, it’s the opposite.

Ten years ago this week, my annual salary was ￡8,000, less than my teenage daughter brought in from her nannying job. Without my wife’s salary, we wouldn’t have been able to pay the bills – and with a sizeable mortgage, two cars, school fees and all the luxuries of a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, there were a lot of outgoings.

Blame it on my midlife crisis, in retrospect the best thing that ever happened to me. Because instead of doing all the stupid hedonistic things middle-aged men do as they try to reinvent themselves, I did something equally stupid. I decided to reinvent my career from a standing start, abandoning a lucrative desk-job in journalism to see what else there was out there.

Today, with a successful business and clients on four continents, I look back on that relatively tiny sum with immense pride. I own a training company, EveryRung that provides businesses with strategies that enable data-obsessed teams to ‘translate’ complex material into the kind of simple stories that not even ChatGPT can match. Yet.

Back then, I had nothing. No clients, no income, no real clue what I was going to do, where I was headed or how I’d get there. Just a mad idea that there was something else. ?

And now I’m asking a different question. Not ‘Is this it?’ but ‘Why is this it?’

Why do we lavish endless careers advice and ‘life transition’ therapy on teenagers and university graduates too young to know what they want to do, and yet expect the middle-aged to just muddle through? The kids have got plenty of time to figure it out themselves!

Ten years in, I’ve been asked many times how I reinvented myself and have forced myself to look backwards instead of forwards, outlining the ‘rules’ that helped me do it. The most important one being Rule Number 25: ‘Make it up as you go along’, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t appear in any of those ‘How to…’ guides lining the self-help shelves.

In my latest Substack Storytelling Newsletter, I’ve compiled a list which I hope people will add to. Other middle-aged people who have decided to take that leap. Hopefully you’ve landed as happily as I have. Tell me how and why – and then let’s help everyone else reinvent themselves with a little midlife careers counselling.

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