Seasons
“To everything,” said the Wise Man, “there is a season.” Our careers included.
The thing about seasons is that they are best defined in retrospect. It’s pretty easy to look back on the summer that was, but not as easy to say the day it arrived or the day it left. The same is true for the seasons of our lives and of our careers.
Most of us experience a season of beginnings, a time of training and apprenticeship and, usually, great energy, the energy of newness.
There’s no clear demarcation between the season of beginnings and the next, no waking up one morning to the appreciation that a new era has dawned. More likely than not you just look around at all the fresh-faced kids in the ranks and realize that you’ve become mainstream. In the trades you would be called a seasoned journeyman.
Some of us never leave the journeyman season, we just grow older and weary and one day the boss gives us a gold watch and sends us home to play golf, sleep in, grow older still, and die.
Others never stop learning and perfecting their skills, and they become the masters of their trades. Courtroom lawyers who could run a trial in their sleep (but never do). Architects whose design stamps the face of a city with unique art. Scientists who crack genetic codes to yield drought resistant wheat.
Some of these grand masters never go home to play golf and die. Amongst lawyers, the saying is that you’re going to get carried out of the office on a board. It’s a great way to go if you love what you’re doing, a dreadful way to go if you have to work into your eighties because you need the money.
The wise professional understands the seasons of life. Not only understands, but plans and grows accordingly. They move with sure feet from the apprenticeship through the journeyman stage to the masters level. Above all else, they stay exactly in the place where their giftings align perfectly with the needs of their clients, and they continue to hone and polish their skills and their knowledge, while the needs of the clients become more precise, and more interesting.
Whether the master craftsman retires, or not, is entirely a matter of their own choosing. Some firms (I think unwisely) eject everyone, across the board at a certain age. But whether or not, the master craftsman is not quite dead, yet, and often goes on to teach, freelance, and write. They can, frankly, do as they like.
Your profession and mine may have different-looking seasons, but seasons are inevitable. The real question is whether or not you understand them and work through them to your personal profit and wellbeing, or if you just let stuff happen to you.
Do you have a plan for your seasons? Happy to chat.