David had made his money. He had worked for more than thirty years at the same job. His home was almost paid off. His children had all graduated from university. His retirement funds had been carefully invested. He had a solid career and a solid life. Get up, go to work, pay the bills, go home, go to bed. Wake up the next day and do it all again. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
For years David had been asking the same question over and over. He carried this question with him on the train to work, to coffee shops, to the dinner table, to his place of worship, and even to the local pub, where a few rounds of scotch would quite the question. But always it would return. For close on a decade, the question had woken him up at 2:00 a.m. and stood with him in front of the bathroom mirror – “Why the hell am I doing this?”
Not once had the guy looking back at him in the mirror ever had a good answer. David’s limiting belief was related to a belief, a story and a script he had written for himself with the headline that – ‘A life of responsible and successful work should make him happy’. It should be enough? But David had another limiting belief: that he couldn’t stop doing what he’d always done. If only the guy in the mirror could have told him that he was not alone, and he did not have to do what he had always done. That the results would always be the same until he started to think in a defferent way. He started to undo what he had always done.
In the United States alone, more than thirty- one million people between the ages of forty- four and seventy want what is often called an “encore” career – work that combines personal meaning, continued income, and social impact. Some of those thirty-one million have found their encore careers, and many others have no idea where to begin and fear it’s too late in life to make a big change.
