Midlife crisis, the law of 35 years old, I believe you have heard, every touch will make you feel a little bit of anxiety, after all, time will not let anyone. The midlife crisis or the 35-year-old rule is real and it’s bound to happen to you sooner or later. Do you have the confidence to overcome it?
The midlife crisis is scary partly because you are unsure of winning the encounter and partly because middle age is a time when you can’t afford to lose. The ancients say: know yourself and know your enemy, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat. Fear, mainly from the enemy and their own do not know, do not know the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy, do not know their own strengths and weaknesses, often short attack their strengths, will lose. As the saying goes: crisis, dangerous organic. When God closes one door, he will open another. The key is to know where the danger comes from and where the opportunity lies. First, you and I must understand the nature of the midlife crisis!
- The nature of midlife crisis
You and I both know the signs of a midlife crisis. You’ve hit a ceiling, salary increases have stalled, and you’re no longer a marketable seller. Especially for technical positions, employers rarely consider hiring people over the age of 35, and you find yourself unable to sell at a higher price. Just like the old vegetables in the market, it is hard to sell after being picked and picked. Look through the phenomenon to see the essence, only clear what the midlife crisis is, you can grasp the main contradiction of the problem, solve the main contradiction, other contradictions will be easily solved.
Midlife crisis seems cruel, but its essence is the law of market economy. If there is love in the sky, the sky is also old, no matter the law of nature or the law of society, it does not depend on the will of man. As a commodity in the labor market, you are less cost-effective and less competitive with younger people. Just like when you go to the vegetable market to buy vegetables, you must choose those with good quality and low price. The recruitment logic of the enterprise and employer is the same as your logic of buying vegetables, reasonable and irrefutable.
The question is why are you getting less bang for your buck? According to the mathematical formula, price-performance ratio is equal to value divided by price, and price-performance ratio decreases for two reasons: first, your value decreases; Second, your prices have gone up. What caused these two changes?
- Causes of midlife crisis
As the saying goes: 30 years old before you find disease, disease after 30 years old to find you. From an individual point of view, the years take their toll, and as your physiology changes, it’s true that you can no longer work overtime and stay up late as you did when you were younger. In addition to work, I have to balance my family and life, so I’m not as energetic as I used to be. The willingness and ability to learn new knowledge and skills is also reduced. If the job itself is not high tech, the employer will think you are less willing to work overtime than younger people. If your job requires constant recharging, you may be perceived as a less eager learner and less willing to embrace change than younger people.
When one is young, the whole family is not hungry. Now, the old and the young, also carrying car loans, daily expenses everything. What’s more, as people get older, the externals from pay packages become less effective, and the same pay increase becomes less motivating than it was when they were younger. If coupled with the slow development of the enterprise, the career space is limited, the prospect is not clear enough, the lack of internal and external driving force, it will lead to low not high not the awkward situation, the midlife crisis followed.
Usually, the antidote to the poison comes together. Once the nature of the problem is clear, the solution is there. Since the problem of midlife crisis is cost performance, the solution to the crisis is to increase your cost performance, either by increasing your value, or lowering your price. A fire sale is unlikely, as the overhead is there, leaving only value to be raised. But I just said that compared to young people, middle-aged people are at a disadvantage. What if I can improve my personal value?
- The strategy of turning danger into opportunity
What can you do to get a better price for vegetables that the farm can’t sell? Secondary processing and increasing added value are optional. You may not have the physical stamina of a young person, but you have the advantage of experience. Your curiosity and ability to learn are waning, but you know the methodology. While external drives are less effective, your sense of self is clearer and deeper, and you are better able to tap into internal drives. So there’s still a chance you can increase value to mitigate the crisis, as long as you play to your strengths and avoid your weaknesses.
Confidence is more important than gold. When confidence is established, we’ll think about what to do. Tradition tells us that moving to management is the best choice. Why can management escape the curse of midlife crisis or the 35-year-old rule? The object of management is people. The key to managing people is whether you have a deep enough understanding of human nature. Throughout 5,000 years of human history, everything has changed countless times, but human nature has never changed, there is nothing new under the sun, all history is contemporary history. To do management is to master those eternal knowledge and skills. Only by grasping the eternal things can you avoid being eliminated by the ever-changing society.
Is there anything invariable other than the immutable nature of humanity? Technology, like people, comes and goes at a faster pace, but the logic at the bottom becomes more stable. As The Taoist Lao Tzu said, “Two in life, two in life, three in life, all things.” If you can master “one, two, three,” you can take any change in stride, you can create countless changes through innovation, and you can do whatever you want without breaking the rules. Based on your rich past experience, you can sort out, abstract and summarize it, find out what is constant, and then build your own new skill tree and value realization system based on this, so that you can stand on a new dimension, and no longer need to compete with young people on the same plane of homogeneity.
In the case of programmers, after the age of 35 it’s time to move from development to another job. If you are particularly interested in a technical field, relatively introverted personality, hobbies and hobbies, then you can go to the direction of specialization, become a technical expert in this field, improve their irreplaceable. If you’re an extrovert with broad interests, you can go broad and become an architecture expert across different disciplines. Architecture is like management: you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each product, and then you need to deploy them to work together to meet the various business challenges. In addition, you can move into consulting, sales or training roles that are closer to the customer. The customer is the one who ultimately pays you, and the boss is in the middle. The closer you are to the customer, the closer you are to the value and the more control you have.
Of course, the transformation is inseparable from the construction of a new skill tree, such as: architecture design, technical writing, PPT making, consulting speeches, etc. Whether it’s the 10,000-hour rule or the 10-year rule, it tells us that it takes time and effort to develop any new skill. Guidance might save time and effort, but it won’t happen anytime soon. In addition, midlife transition is like changing a tire while driving on a bumpy mountain road. After all, middle-aged people have too much responsibility and pressure, and without the right strategy and method, it is easy to ruin the car and injury. So don’t wait until you’re 35 to think about transitioning. You need to start planning and building new skills early.
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