The people interviewed for this study ranged in age from thirty-two to fifty-one, with most between thirty-eight and forty-three, squarely at midcareer.^[9] The reason I chose this age range was not to coincide with the famous “midlife crisis” but rather to study a group of people with enough experience to both know themselves and to make changing careers a high-stakes endeavor. Professional identity, Edgar Schein argues, develops over time with varied experiences and meaningful feedback that allow people to discover their central and enduring preferences, talents, and values, which he termed their “career anchors.”^[10] Following his definition, my objective was to study people with enough experience to have already developed a sense of working identity in the old career. The people in my sample had invested at least eight to ten years in their previous career paths—and many had invested more—when they began to question the fit of those careers with either enduring or new preferences.

Sixty-five percent of the participants are men; 35 percent are women; 74 percent were married at the start of their transition. Since I conducted part of the study while on a sabbatical from Harvard in France, I added French and British subsamples to the U.S. group in order to diversify in terms of national background and country of residency. Almost half (46 percent) live and work outside the United States. It is a highly credentialed sample: All have college degrees, and about 74 percent have graduate degrees (e.g., business, science, law, and so on).