Psychologists find that passions are often developed, not discovered. In a study of entrepreneurs, the more effort they put into their startups, the more their enthusiasm about their businesses climbed each week. Their passion grew as they gained momentum and mastery. Interest doesn’t always lead to effort and skill; sometimes it follows them. By investing in learning and problem solving, we can develop our passions—and build the skills necessary to do the work and lead the lives we find worthwhile.

As we get older, we become more focused on searching for meaning—and we’re most likely to find it in actions that benefit others. My favorite test of meaningful work is to ask: if this job didn’t exist, how much worse off would people be? It’s near midlife that this question often begins to loom large. At around this time, in both work and life, we feel we have more to give (and less to lose), and we’re especially keen to share our knowledge and skills with the next generation.

When my students talk about the evolution of self-esteem in their careers, the progression often goes something like this:

Phase 1: I’m not important

Phase 2: I’m important

Phase 3: I want to contribute to something important

I’ve noticed that the sooner they get to phase 3, the more impact they have and the more happiness they experience. It’s left me thinking about happiness less as a goal and more as a by-product of mastery and meaning. “Those only are happy,” philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

Careers, relationships, and communities are examples of what scientists call open systems—they’re constantly in flux because they’re not closed off from the environments around them. We know that open systems are governed by at least two key principles: there are always multiple paths to the same end (equifinality), and the same starting point can be a path to many different ends (multifinality). We should be careful to avoid getting too attached to a particular route or even a particular destination. There isn’t one definition of success or one track to happiness.

My cousin Ryan finally wound up rethinking his career arc. Five years into his neurosurgery residency, he did his own version of a career checkup and decided to scratch his entrepreneurial itch. He cofounded a fast-growing, venture-backed startup called Nomad Health, which creates a marketplace to match clinicians with medical facilities. He also advised several medical device startups, filed medical device patents, and is now working on multiple startups to improve health care. Looking back, he still regrets that he foreclosed so early on an identity as a neurosurgeon and escalated his commitment to that career.

At work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want to learn and contribute over the next year or two, and stay open to what might come next. To adapt an analogy from E. L. Doctorow, writing out a plan for your life “is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

* * *

We don’t have to upend our entire paths to rethink some of our plans. Some people are perfectly content with their fields of work but dissatisfied with their current roles. Others may be too risk averse to make a geographic move for a job or a partner. And many don’t have the luxury of making a pivot: being economically dependent on a job or emotionally attached to an extended family can limit the options available. Whether or not we have the opportunity or appetite for major changes in our lives, it’s still possible to make smaller adjustments that breathe new meaning into our days.

My colleagues Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton find that in every line of work, there are people who become active architects of their own jobs. They rethink their roles through job crafting—changing their daily actions to better fit their values, interests, and skills. One of the places Amy and Jane studied job crafting was in the University of Michigan health-care system.

If you visited a certain floor of the hospital, it wouldn’t be long before cancer patients told you how grateful they were for Candice Walker. Her mission was not only to protect their fragile immune systems—it was also to care for their fragile emotions. She called the chemotherapy center the House of Hope.

Candice was often the first one to console families when their loved ones went through treatment; she showed up with bagels and coffee. She would make patients laugh by telling stories about her cats drinking her milk or showing them that she had accidentally put on one brown sock and one blue sock. One day she saw a patient on the floor of an elevator writhing in pain, and the staff members nearby weren’t sure what to do. Candice immediately took charge, rushed the woman into a wheelchair, and took her up in the elevator for urgent treatment. The patient later called her “my savior.”

Candice Walker wasn’t a doctor or a nurse. She wasn’t a social worker, either. She was a custodian. Her official job was to keep the cancer center clean.

Candice and her fellow custodians were all hired to do the same job, but some of them ended up rethinking their roles. One cleaner on a long-term intensive care unit took it upon herself to regularly rearrange the paintings on the walls, hoping that a change of scenery might spark some awareness among patients in comas. When asked about it, she said, “No, it’s not part of my job, but it’s part of me.”

Our identities are open systems, and so are our lives. We don’t have to stay tethered to old images of where we want to go or who we want to be. The simplest way to start rethinking our options is to question what we do daily.

It takes humility to reconsider our past commitments, doubt to question our present decisions, and curiosity to reimagine our future plans. What we discover along the way can free us from the shackles of our familiar surroundings and our former selves. Rethinking liberates us to do more than update our knowledge and opinions—it’s a tool for leading a more fulfilling life.

Epilogue

    “What I believe” is a process rather than a finality.

—Emma Goldman

When reading fiction, my favorite part has always been the conclusion. As long as I can remember, whether I was devouring sci-fi like Ender’s Game or mystery like The Westing Game, the twist at the end wasn’t just the highlight of the story. It transformed the story, making me rethink everything I’d read before.

In writing about ideas, though, I’ve never liked conclusions. Can’t the final chapter just serve as the end? It’s a book, not a book report. If I had something else worth saying, I would’ve already said it.*

What bothers me most about a conclusion is the finality. If a topic is important enough to deserve an entire book, it shouldn’t end. It should be open-ended.

That’s an inherent challenge for Think Again. I don’t want the conclusion to bring closure. I want my thinking to keep evolving. To symbolize that openness, I decided to make the epilogue a blank page. Literally.

My challenge network unanimously rejected that concept. Two of my most insightful students convinced me that although it might represent an endpoint for me as a writer, it’s a starting point for you as a reader—a springboard to new thoughts and a bridge to new conversations. Then they proposed a way to honor the spirit of the book: I could take a cue from Ron Berger’s classroom and show some of my rethinking of the conclusion from one draft to the next.

I loved the idea.* For a book about rethinking, it seemed delightfully meta. Like the Seinfeld coffee table book about coffee tables—or the time when Ryan Gosling wore a shirt with a photo of Macaulay Culkin, and Macaulay Culkin one-upped him by wearing a shirt with a picture of Ryan Gosling wearing that shirt.*

The conclusion seemed like the perfect place to show a few key moments of rethinking, but I still didn’t know what to cover. I went back to my challenge network, and they suggested one more way to synthesize key themes and provide an update on what I’m rethinking right now.