Financial Independence Is A Hall Pass For Safe Reinvention

I’ve been part time at my main W2 job for well over 4.5 years now.  Not 32 hours a week, but a scant 20 hours a week.  A drastic change like that after almost 25 years of full time workaholism has huge consequences. 

I wrote about how I was slowly losing what I called my “W2 muscles” back in 2019, only about 2.5 years into my part time status.  My presentation skills were waning, my grasp of technical terms and corporate-speak was weakening.  I was losing my sharpness even then in 2019. 

Now three years later I’m a literal has-been, a persona non grata in my industry.  But I’ve embrace my professional decline with reinvention.

 

Going Down?

Most of us will experience a decline in our work performance as we age.  In his book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, (<– affiliate link) Arthur Brooks writes about how we cognitively decline as we age and how there are different kinds of intelligence such as crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. 

As this Harvard Business Review article says:

Lawyers, financial professionals, doctors—these types of workers often expect their abilities to remain steady or grow with time. But Brooks points to data showing that’s not the case. In almost every high-skill profession, he finds, decline sets in between a person’s late 30s and early 50s as the brain’s prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness.

Ouch.  Sounds like we’re all headed on the inevitable path to “old man shouting at cloud” status. 

But the good news according to Brooks is that we don’t just decline cognitively, we change.

The research showed that it’s not all decline past 40. Certain aptitudes grow during middle age that favor wisdom, teaching, and sharing ideas. Language skills and articulation tend to increase, he says, and professions that combine and use existing ideas—such as applied mathematics—see much greater longevity. Teachers often experience long-lasting success, and a Chronicle of Education study says the oldest college professors tend to have the best teaching evaluations. 

That’s good news for me as I’ve spent over 20 years teaching in my career, including 17 as an adjunct faculty member at a large university.  Sounds like I could do that again in the future without much cognitive decline. 

Hell I could even buy a corduroy sport coat with elbow patches and become the poster child of the old college professor.

 

4 Step Program Of Regression

As Brooks says in a different article he wrote for the Atlantic, the key to managing your professional decline is to learn to be content with your reduced capacity and accomplishments, and to find your self worth in other aspects of life. 

And he lists four strategies for coping with your decline:  turning inward, teaching the next generation, deepening relationships, and staring down death. 

Turning inward involves self reflection of your career and what you’ve accomplished.  It also involves spirituality and finding deeper meaning than the career or business goals you’ve been pursuing. 

Teaching the next generation is self explanatory.  You’ve done your best work, you’re on the decline.  Now teach others how to do their best work.  You have wisdom, pass it on. 

Deepening relationships is also pretty self explanatory.  It’s likely that you’ll start figuring out in your 50’s and 60’s that people are what matter in life, not achievements, bonuses, medals and accomplishments. 

Those are great but once you’ve peaked and are declining they can become sad memories of when you were living the glory days.  Move on, focus on people. 

Stare down death.  None of us gets out of here alive.  Following the stoic advice of thinking about death is a hell of a great way to remind yourself to live the best life you can while you have it. 

It’s more likely you’ll teach others and deepen relationships when you regularly remind yourself that you might not be able to do it tomorrow.

 

Reinvention

I like Brooks’ advice and 4 strategies, but I would add a 5th.  Reinvention. 

Why not just have a second career trying something totally different?  Most of us are complex personalities with many interests, yet we often spend careers in just one field.  Experienceing professional decline in your chosen field is a just a queue to start the ball rolling on a new career. 

That’s what I did.  I’m still in the muddy middle of pivoting from a long career in a pretty technical and stressful job for the Federal Government to being a solo-preneur producing and selling art and graphic designs.

The two careers couldn’t be more drastically different.  But one fit the time and place of my younger life, and the new one fits like a glove for where I’m at in 2022.  My brain has a techie side and a creative side, and I want to fully experience both.

Being financially independent is the magic trick that underpins this reinvention.  It’s the bedrock beneath it all.  Without that I’m far too risk averse to do it.  Being FI allows me to take risks with the comfort of knowing the consequences of failure are minor. 

Financial independence is basically a hall pass for safe reinvention. 

And don’t think striking out on your own is the only way to reinvent yourself after your professional decline.  You could do what Austin Murphy did and just get a new job.  He was a top writer for Sports Illustrated for years and wrote over 140 cover articles for that magazine.  He then pivoted to delivering packages for Amazon.  It’s an entertaining story, and a testament to the power of humility and joy through simplicity.

 

A New You

There are thousands of benefits to financial independence.  Being able to safely reinvent yourself after your professional decline is one of the bigger ones, and worth pursuing FI in and of itself.  Because you have to face the facts, you will decline in your career.  You may have already done the best thing you will ever do in your line of work.

So maybe it’s time for a safe reinvention.