On Next!

I picked this up expecting classic self-help and was pleased to find it had little in common with the genre — in fact I wouldn’t call it self-help at all, but the kind of journalism-cum-psychology that Malcolm Gladwell does best. Joanne Lipman starts from a simple question: how do people reinvent their lives when things aren’t working, or when they’re just unhappy? To get at it she dives into success stories large and small. I had no idea James Patterson was an advertising executive before he pivoted to spy thrillers; I knew nothing about Colonel Sanders beyond his being the old man on the KFC logo; and I didn’t realize Play-Doh started life as a cleaning compound for getting soot off walls back when houses were heated by coal. They’re interesting stories, and Lipman deploys them well.

In essence she lays out a four-step process behind the most significant reinventions:

• Search
• Struggle
• Stop
• Solution

The model reminds me a little of that old internet meme:

• Step One
• Step Two
• ???
• Profit!

And yet there’s serious truth to it. In the “search” stage we try on what Lipman calls “potential selves” — business executive, bestselling author, musician, programmer. In the “struggle” stage we fight whatever problem we’re facing and look for solutions; here the problem is “How do I want to live the rest of my life?”, a big enough question that it would be unusual to answer easily — we apply to jobs, network, do all the things, and find it simply won’t work. Eventually we give up, distract ourselves, pick up new projects, maybe take a long vacation, and it’s often when we “stop” working on the problem that the neurons make their connections and we have the eureka moment. The stop is fundamental to reinvention; only by stopping do we find the big, durable solutions. Not everyone follows this exact path — some inch toward goals they barely know they have across an entire lifespan, only able to look back from the finish line and assemble a coherent story of what they were after all along, while others reinvent themselves suddenly, in a day or a week — but those are the exceptions.

Lipman marshals a huge number of anecdotes, none half-baked: some from scientific experiment, illuminating how our brains work, others following individuals and groups laboring at business innovations. For all that it’s about a process, it’s also useful — it taught me a bit about the paths open to me, and it gave me the validation of knowing I’m not doing anything wrong. There are plenty of models here to look toward. More than anything, the book contextualizes what we go through, which makes the work a little easier to bear.