This year’s Lexpert Zenith Awards celebrate “Mid-Career” success. They include lawyers who have continued in one firm for their career, and those that have made several changes. Some readers said we were too generous in our year parameters of mid-career. In any event, we intended to include a group of lawyers for whom their career is still dynamic.
In researching the term mid-career, it seemed to most often arise beside the word “crisis.” The Harvard Business Review has an entire series on the theme (https://hbr.org/2015/05/reading-list-midcareer-crisis series). Calling the mid-career crisis a “widespread regularity,”Hannes Schwandt had “good news” to tell in that series: “In the second half of people’s working lives, job satisfaction increases again, in many cases reaching even higher levels than earlier in the career — essentially forming a U-shaped curve.
“Subsequent research discovered that this age-related U-shape in job satisfaction is part of a much broader phenomenon. A similar midlife nadir is detectable in measures of people’s overall life satisfaction and has been found in more than 50 countries. On average, life satisfaction is high when people are young, then starts to decline in the early 30s, bottoming out between the mid-40s and mid-50s before increasing again to levels as high as during young adulthood.”
Presumably, in order to move up the U curve, we all need to make changes of one sort or another.