You're having the wrong midlife crisis
Readtime: 2.5 minutes
About three years ago, someone who barely knew me told me I was having the opposite of a midlife crisis.
His name was Jake. He ran the client side of a personal branding company I'd hired, and his job was to get to know me, so he'd been asking about what I did outside of work. And that was the conclusion he reached.
It was my birthday on Monday, so it's been on my mind again.
When someone in their forties or fifties takes up something new, we tend to call it a midlife crisis. Which isn't exactly a compliment. It hints that the person's a bit lost, and that the new thing is a sign something has gone wrong.
Jake’s comment made me think we've got it the wrong way round.
The real crisis is the quieter one. It's the life that slowly gets narrower, the person who keeps doing more of the same, year after year, because it's the easy and expected thing.
Starting something new is the healthy bit. It's the sign you're still growing.
The unglamorous version
When Jake said it, I'd recently learned to ride a motorbike, and I'd been doing some improv comedy and a bit of stand-up comedy. I had also recently learned to DJ. From the outside, I can see how that looks. A bloke in his mid-forties suddenly taking up a load of new things.
The truth is a lot less dramatic. I had learned to ride a motorbike mainly so I could get around on a scooter in Bali without falling off (which is what happened the last time I rode a scooter in India). The improv and the stand-up were to help me develop my public speaking skills for my corporate keynotes and leadership development programmes. And the DJing, well, that was just for fun.
As I've built my business over the last few years, I've carried on learning in quieter ways: writing this newsletter, designing interactive keynotes and workshops, going on podcasts, and joining communities of people building businesses like mine. Some of them have become good friends.
I’ve also learned how to post on LinkedIn, which meant getting used to sharing my thinking in public, where anyone can disagree with me.
None of it looks like much on its own, but together these things have meant my life has kept getting a little wider.
The crisis no one points at
This is the bit I think we get wrong. We watch out for the showy version, the motorbike or the convertible, and we miss the thing that actually costs people something.
The quiet narrowing. The same commute, the same meetings, the same opinions, the same handful of people, for another decade. Hardly anyone calls that a crisis. It doesn't come with a leather jacket. But year on year your world gets a bit smaller, and the appetite for anything new tends to go with it.
And it creeps up on you. There's no single day you decide to stop trying new things. You're just busy, and the new thing is uncomfortable, and the familiar one is right there. So you take the familiar one.
If that sounds a bit like you at the moment, the encouraging thing is how little it takes to make a change. It doesn't mean overhauling your life or buying the motorbike. It can be saying yes to the event you'd normally skip, signing up for a class that has nothing to do with your job, or booking the trip you keep putting off.
Whatever it is, it's the slightly uncomfortable option rather than the familiar one, and that's usually enough to start widening things again.
I turned 48 on Monday, and I don't feel like I'm winding anything down. There's now so much more I want to get after than there was a few years ago.
So I'm less interested in whether any of us are having a midlife crisis, and more interested in the other question. Is your life getting wider this year, or is it getting narrower?
I'd really love to hear how you'd answer that.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. If you’re thinking of making a more radical change in your career, don’t do anything until you’ve spent 12 minutes watching this video.