Your Career Is Not Your Life
Notes on Career Identity
Deep Life Notes | Career Identity
Yes, work matters. But when it becomes the whole story, other parts of life begin to pay the price.
There is a scene towards the end of the excellent sports documentary, Arsène Wenger: Invincible, that captures a moment familiar to many. Regret. Wenger, a scholarly Frenchman who moved to England in 1996 to manage the Premier League club, Arsenal, became one of the most successful managers in British football history, building intelligent, technical, title-winning teams.
They once went an entire season undefeated, a remarkable feat no team has achieved before or since. Hence the documentary’s title. But there is an overwhelming sense Wenger stayed too long at Arsenal, damaging his legacy. Yet, this isn’t the regret I saw. Wenger, a self-confessed workaholic who spent every day watching and thinking about football, talks at the end of the film about not spending enough time with his daughter. It’s a brief moment, but it might be the most important. It’s only now, in his seventies, that he’s trying to make up for lost time.
We live in an era where, for many people, work has become more than work. For some it has become their whole identity, status, and community wrapped into one. Proof that life is moving and being lived and won. Career achievement can give us meaning of course, but when it becomes the only definition of a successful life, other parts of life can only begin to suffer.
How we got here
The writer Derek Thompson summarises the history of work in six words: from jobs to careers to callings. Initially, people had jobs out of necessity, focused on putting food on the table rather than chasing status or meaning. Then came the managerial revolution as the rise of railroads and telegraphs created new complex businesses that needed mid-level managers to run them. This created the modern concept of the career and a sense that one could progress through the ranks. Finally, careers evolved into callings. A job can’t just be a job or a career, it must be a calling. Settling for anything less isn’t good enough. This is where we are today.
Thompson has a word for our era: ‘workism’. He defines it as a complex phenomenon “rooted in the belief that work can provide everything we have historically expected from organised religion: community, meaning, self-actualisation.” With declining trust in national governments and public institutions, people are increasingly relying on their workplace as the last remaining community stand. This shift is one reason companies have become more involved in political debates and cultural issues that they would have avoided a decade or two ago.
In the era of workism, work is the default setting of how we operate. Busyness is a status symbol. Having free time in our calendars makes us feel lazy or a failure. We go after the things we can count and track. This is the way our brains are wired. Work provides the most concrete evidence we are moving forward. We can close a sale, publish a paper, create a marketing strategy, win a case, get paid, get promoted, receive an award. Work provides immediate returns and tangible proof of progress. Other areas of our life require a much longer-term investment without a key performance indicator in sight.
There’s nothing wrong with someone who loves their job and finds meaning in it. That’s a great place to be, and I’ve been fortunate to have been in this position during my career. But if we hold that work and career come above all else, that failing to find your “vocational soulmate” as Thompson puts it, amounts to a wasted life, then we are going to see consequences. Important ones, such as less time dedicated to family and friends, health, and personal passions and hobbies.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed a good life orbits around the idea that human beings are naturally inclined towards flourishing in both mind and body. He believed people should seek to live well—physically, mentally, and spiritually—with a person’s character being the most critical aspect of their life.
This feels a long way from where we are today.
A broader understanding of success
Professional achievement matters, but it is too narrow a measure for a whole life.
There is plentiful research on the importance of a balanced approach to life. In 2020, an international team of scholars came up with 68 ways that people are commonly advised to raise their own happiness, then asked 18 of the most distinguished and prolific academic experts on the science of happiness to rate them in terms of effectiveness and feasibility. These were the top three:
Invest in family & friends
Join a club
Be active both mentally and physically
Other activities in the top ten included act nicely, be generous, and experience nature.
These pursuits are more in line with Aristotle’s belief of a good life.
On ineffective ways, the 18 experts weren’t fans of creating a “pride shrine”—an area of your home devoted to your successes and accomplishments. Reminding yourself of your own past greatness can often lower your current satisfaction.
Your career doesn’t define your entire existence
If you have a career, it’s likely important to you. It’s too big a thing not to take seriously, but too small a thing to take too seriously. The website 80,000 Hours estimates a typical career to be 80,000 hours long. However, with the typical person being alive for 4,000 weeks, and awake and conscious for the equivalent of 3,000 weeks, work makes up only one-sixth of our waking existence. So, while work is significant, it does not deserve to become the whole of our existence.
In his book, How Will You Measure Your Life, Clayton Christensen talks about the need to dedicate our resources carefully. Our resources are things like time, energy, and talent, but they are limited and at the whim of many competing needs. He argues that unless we manage our resources intentionally, our default human wiring will select those activities that provide the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. This is often in our careers: it’s much easier to measure a monthly salary than to invest in a long-term relationship.
As Christensen says, “With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you.”
A wider foundation for life
What really matters to me is trying to move through the waves of life with awareness, substance, and care: choosing deliberately, looking beyond simple stories, and giving time and attention to the right things in an ever-shifting world. Work belongs inside that, but cannot carry all of it. A deeper life needs a wider and richer foundation.
This is the thinking behind my 4C Model. It recognises four areas that can help shape a deeper life: how we relate to others, how we are useful to others through our skills and craft, how we sustain ourselves, and how we stay open to the world and its possibilities.
Connection (toward others)
How we relate
Nurturing strong relationships and supporting the communities around us.Contribution (toward usefulness)
How we build
Creating meaningful work through the ongoing pursuit of skill, effort, and craft.Continuity (toward the self)
How we sustain
Maintaining the physical, emotional, and inner foundations that support a good life.Curiosity (toward the world)
How we explore
Exploring culture, ideas, learning, and life beyond pure utility.
Together, the 4Cs encourage closer attention to the relationships, work, foundations, and experiences that give life its substance and vitality, helping us make the most of our window of time. Work still has an important place, but now sits among the other things that make life full, rather than towering above them as the only serious measure of progress.
What comes after workism?
Some commentators believe we’re on the cusp of a fourth revolution in work. If we evolve from jobs to careers to callings, it poses an intriguing question of what might come next. My suggestion is cultivation: jobs to careers to callings, to cultivation. By this I mean a recognition that work can play a meaningful role in one’s life, but to cultivate all parts of life, including work, is just as important, making the whole of life richer. The word also plays to the theme of focusing on building those rare and valuable skills that can make a difference.
A career can still be one of the great sources of meaning in life. But it should not require the sacrifice of everything else. A more cultivated life asks us to take work seriously, but not worship at its altar.
Arsène Wenger recognised the importance of repairing the relationship with his daughter at the end of the film about his life. He was lucky.
Many don’t realise until it’s too late.
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