The surprising joy and liberation of knowing your career limits

"IF I stay in this job any longer, I'm at risk of becoming more senior than I should be."

The words were muttered in a rush, but I caught them distinctly. That day, a colleague had arranged a meeting with me to tell me he was quitting. I was gutted - we'd just gotten a major project off the ground together. He was important to the team.

I asked him to elaborate. He'd been with the organisation for well over a decade and had leadership responsibilities, but no longer felt he was growing, he explained. Sure, he would probably be promoted. But that wasn't the same thing. He wasn't getting better at his job.

He could stay, and move up in the organisation; or he could draw the line. So off he went.

Confronting our career limits is scary business. People tend to treat their careers as a ladder, ending in a nebulous nest of clouds they'd rather not think too hard about. But the truth is that our careers look more like a hill - and most of us are unprepared for the descent.

Research by leading expert Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus in psychology from UC Davis, suggests that our success and productivity increase for the first 20 years of our careers on average, and then begin to wane.

That certainly seems to bear out in Singapore, where manpower ministry statistics indicate that our prime earning years are from the ages of 40-44.

The ministry's Labour Force in Singapore 2021 report reveals the median gross monthly income of full-time resident workers to be S$6,825 in that age band, before falling to S$5,958 from ages 45-49, and continuing to dwindle thereafter.

With a national life expectancy of about 84 years, that leaves us the second half of our lifetimes to confront our professional decline. And, as Arthur C Brooks has pointed out in an insightful piece for The Atlantic in 2019: that's sooner than we think.

The colleague I described was in his early 40s at the time, which placed him squarely in the age band where his career was most likely to plateau.

I think his choice to leave was wise. Any promotion at that stage would have been a poisoned chalice. His job prospects - but more importantly, his skillsets - would likely have stagnated from there.

Instead he chose to pursue a new job, in a company where he felt he could learn more. I never asked how his next salary or designation would compare; those details were irrelevant. What matters is that he was thinking about his growth.

Breaking news: you will not make it to 'the top'

Like society in general, most organisations are structured like a pyramid. That means statistically, you won't make it to the top.

You will find yourself at some point languishing on a flat level, looking at someone else's dangling feet above you. That's the case for employees at all levels, although high-achievers may find it an especially bitter pill to swallow.

Even chief executives have a chairman, and ministers have a prime minister.

If you define success as always being the highest-paid person in the room, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Measuring our worth by the magnificence of our designations, or the size of our monthly wages, is a surefire way to end up an embittered prune.

Far better to acknowledge that every career arc has a point where it begins to flatten or decline, and to question what we want to do about ours.

I remember the day I first had that conversation with myself, about 4 years after I'd entered the workforce. My career was proceeding as planned, and I was ticking off my progress the straightforward way: by slaying one job grade at a time.

It was on a perfectly ordinary day at the office - in a moment of ennui, clicking through emails - that a stray thought snaked lazily across the universe and planted itself in my brain:

Can I ever make it to the top?

That cunning question, niggling away, began to unfurl and sprout shoots of doubt. I was fairly sure I could do my boss's job one day, and his boss's job. But after that, things got hazy.

I thought about the most competent and admirable leaders in my field. I had seen how quickly they could process complex information, derive insight, and make far-sighted decisions.

I didn't know if I could ever do what they were doing. I felt it would be unethical for me to even try, unless I were confident in my abilities. The weight of their responsibilities gave me pause.

It sounds ludicrous now, but up till that day, I had never really thought about my limits. And it pains me to admit that when I finally did, I questioned my self-worth.

An ending is a beginning

In the years since, I have started to worry less about when and where my career will plateau. It would be dishonest to say it doesn't trouble me, but there are some things that help.

First, being able to identify the "danger zone" - when for most of us, career progression begins to flatten - helps us to plan ahead.

Like my colleague, who evaded the trap of his next promotion, we can make our career decisions based on what will maximise our long-term growth, and not our short-term compensation package.

Second, we should never conflate our employer's definition of success with our own. There are many sources of well-being and satisfaction we can cultivate - whether it's family, spiritualism, a secret passion, volunteering, or a simple joy of continuous learning.

Knowing this helps us make wiser decisions about how to allocate our time, and reminds us to invest in friends, family, hobbies and interests outside of work.

Third, and perhaps most difficult, is to understand that growth and success themselves - in any and all dimensions of life - are not the only things that give us worth.

It is true that adult happiness is intertwined with one's relevance and usefulness to others - our families, our communities, our countries. But it is also true that stumbling, falling short, and waning are part of the human experience.

There will always be people "more successful" than we are, howsoever we define and seek success: richer, smarter, more accomplished, with more friends. That's simply how the bell curves.

Remembering these things - that promotions are not the same as progress, that our careers do not contain us, and that our success does not define our worth - can help us look beyond our limits, and realise a surprisingly peaceful truth:

The end of our careers, is simply where the rest of life begins.