Preparation Favors Reinvention

Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 8:43 am

“Fortune,” said Louis Pasteur, “favors the prepared mind.”^[12] The story behind his famous dictum illustrates the mechanics of insight in any domain, including career change.

At age fifty-seven, Pasteur was studying chicken cholera. Because of an oversight, he left some batches of bacillus culture, taken from some diseased chickens, unattended in his laboratory over the summer. When he returned in the fall, he injected his chickens with the bacilli out of a relentless spirit of experimentation. To his surprise, the chickens did not die. He concluded that the bacillus cultures had spoiled over the summer and went out to get a new, more potent batch as well as some new chickens. Both old and new chickens were injected with the new culture. The new chickens all died, while the old ones survived. When he realized that all the survivors had been injected once before with the weaker strain, the account tells us that Pasteur “remained silent for a minute, then exclaimed as if he had seen a vision: ‘Don’t you see they have been vaccinated.’ ”^[13]

Although vaccination against smallpox had already existed for seventy-five years, no one before had hit on the idea of extending vaccination from smallpox to other infectious diseases. Pasteur saw the analogy: His surviving chickens were protected against cholera by the spoiled bacilli just as humans were protected from smallpox by inoculation with cowpox cultures. He also saw a second analogy: The weakening of the cultures left unattended in the lab was akin to the weakening of the smallpox bacilli that happened naturally inside a cow’s body. The vaccine for the latter had to be extracted physically from cows. Now Pasteur saw that vaccines could be produced at will in the laboratory.

Discovery literally means uncovering something that has always been there but was hidden from sight by the “blinkers of habit.”^[14] In the case of vaccination, the blinkers of habit stemmed from the convention that work on vaccination and research on microorganisms took place in separate, previously unconnected fields of scientific practice. Pasteur was ready to make a discovery when a favorable opportunity presented itself because he knew both fields and had primed himself through years of study and hard work.

It is also no accident that the vaccination idea came to Pasteur right after his summer break. Having stepped back from his direct work on cholera, he was able to see his old problem in a new light. This is the famous “incubation” phenomenon, in which, “after ceasing to consciously work on a difficult problem, [artists and scientists] sometimes experience an apparent flash of illumination, during which a solution appears to them unexpectedly.”^[15] Professional reinvention also requires a stepping back to obtain a new way of seeing what is.^[16] The full emotional and cognitive complexity of the change process can only be digested with moments of detachment and time for reflective observation. In the same way, time away from the everyday grind creates the “break frame” that allows people in transition to articulate intellectually what they already knew emotionally.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career