The secret of an enduring career: Multiple S-curves

Most of us think of a career as a source of livelihood, but a slightly different definition can offer a radical perspective. Let’s look at a career as ‘anything that keeps you meaningfully occupied’. By that argument, there’s no cutoff date for a career. You can go on with it till you are on. An enduring career is one that offers you a meaningful existence all the way—enriching you with purpose, relationships and means. Let’s look at the recipe for such careers.

A paradigm shift is to think in terms of careers rather than a career. Better still, a portfolio of careers. Such an enterprise view is not just deeply enriching but also highly liberating. In such a portfolio, one career offers you money, the second provides pleasure, the third offers avenues to learn, and yet another enables lifelong connections. By burdening your dominant or only career with all such expectations, which is so very typical of most employees, you become almost a parasite. Your entire world order revolves around the vagaries of your work—a precarious state to be in. Honing careers, instead of a dream career, liberates you of the pressing need to get to that perfect fit—the dream job—and allows you to remain more experimental with what comes your way.

How do you create such a portfolio for an enterprise? Start with S-curves. An S-curve, or the price-performance curve, imitates an S—a slow start, rapid rise and then a plateau. Originally meant to represent technological advancements, an S-curve shows how a new technology takes time to deliver goods, then shows rapid strides and thereafter saturates, awaiting another technology to supersede it—the so-called S-curve shifts. Your career follows the very same S-curve. You learn, you deliver, then you saturate. On average, any skill can run its course in about five to seven years, and then it’s up for revival, except that most people continue exploiting it, extending their career precariously even in the light of a visible decay. 

The recipe of an enduring career is a series of overlapping careers, much like cascading S-curves. The trick is to plant your next S-curve before you experience saturation in your dominant career. You do that by planting early experiments and not jumping across the career chasm. If you don’t prepare for the transition well in advance, you will either be forced to continue on a dead course or make rash career choices.

To illustrate, let me share my career transitions with you.  

While working at my first employer, Wipro, I always felt a sense of talent-surplus, that my inherent capabilities weren’t put to good use, and that I risked being incapacitated with time. But by honing an experimental mindset and with the benevolence of my superiors, I could navigate to suitable roles that further unlocked my potential and gave me both confidence and visibility. On weekends and most evenings, I would go out and teach just to see if teaching could be a viable career option. Mind you, I was far from running out of steam at Wipro; that’s what I call overlapping careers. Once I had sufficient validation of teaching, researching and writing as a viable career alternative, I transitioned, for good, to pursue my PhD program at IIM Bangalore. 

While at IIMB, I continued my industry connect through consulting, speaking, and coaching assignments; after all, management is a social science, and one can’t be separated from the ultimate customer. But midway through my program, I was convinced that a full-time teaching or research role would again be at odds with my age of 32 and with what the city has to offer. So, I started a consulting company months before my convocation. Since the pipeline was visible and legitimacy in terms of a PhD was secured, venturing wasn’t a risky option at all. 

At my firm, clients brought unique demands regarding the nature of training programs and consulting assignments, pushing me to hone new skills and temperaments. Throughout all of this, I never ceased to read, research, and write, which led to me being spotted by Penguin Random House. One of the agents there reached out to me with an offer to write a book on design thinking, and that started my authoring career.

Did I stop my consulting assignments to write? No. I straddled, shaping another S-curve before plateauing on the present. Three books hence, the portfolio remains vital—offering money, purpose, legitimacy, connection and above all, satisfaction. 

What are the lessons from this S-curve story of mine? Firstly, don’t wait, or else the inertia of your current predicament will suck you in. Plan your next career while you are at the peak of the present. Your mind works best when things are going well, and you aren’t under pressure to make a choice. Secondly, you discover your next career by planting low-cost experiments. Thirdly, don’t be in a hurry to sever the umbilical cord that served you so well so far.

Your career is like a banyan tree, and not a ladder. Let the shoots grow, roots take on yet new forms, and may you spread wide and achieve longevity. Hope you remain meaningfully occupied for as long as you live. Start with your own S-curve.