“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…

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In almost every story of career change come to fruition, there is a palpable moment when things click into place, as they did for John Alexander. A new option materializes. Taking the leap looks easy. Diverse experiences form an intelligible pattern; feelings that had been building up jell as a coherent story. Facts and intuitions,…

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Early transition events unfreeze us—get us unstuck, ready to move—by making more vivid a feared possible self. Our early doubts about our current career may seem too vague and nonspecific to justify action; but after a defining event, we have concrete evidence of a problem. In Brenda’s case, the cartoon episode showed that her life…

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Arranging life’s events into a coherent story is one of the most subtle yet demanding challenges of career reinvention. To reinvent oneself is to rework one’s story, revising it frequently, trying out different versions on others. Events punctuate continuous experience, giving us some pegs on which to hang our reinvention stories. Some events unfreeze us,…

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In an essay about how we change our opinions, novelist Nicholson Baker argues that most of the time, we are in some inconclusive phase of changing our minds about many things, without being consciously aware that we are doing so. Events intrude and interrupt, occasioning what he calls alert intermissions.[4] Many stories of career change,…

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