Dear Friends,
A few months ago, a client told me she'd known for two years that she was done.
Not burned out. Not unhappy. Done. She could run the Monday meeting in her sleep. She knew which clients would call before the phone rang. The work still went well. It had simply stopped asking anything new of her.
And she was still there.
When I asked what was keeping her, she didn't mention money. She'd run the numbers years ago. She didn't say she had nothing to do, either. She had a list.
What she said was, "I don't know who I am at ten o'clock on a Tuesday if I'm not there."
I thought about her last weekend, reading a story in The Wall Street Journal.
On September 18, Erin Mulvaney reported that some of the most elite law firms in the country have a problem: their senior partners aren't retiring. Roughly a third of U.S. lawyers are 55 or older, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it isn't unusual to see them practicing into their 80s. That creates a bottleneck. Younger partners can't get the lead roles they want, so they leave for firms where they can have them.
Firms are responding with financial incentives, and Latham & Watkins, Morgan Lewis, Debevoise and others have brought in consultants to help partners think through what comes next. The retirees profiled became a helicopter photographer, a screenwriter, and a Tony-winning Broadway producer.
I love those stories. Each of those people did real, brave work to get there.
But the article names a problem it doesn't fully solve, and it's one I see every week.
The firm has a succession plan. The partner doesn't.
Incentives solve the institution's problem by making leaving financially sensible. But almost nobody I work with is staying for the money. Most aren't short on imagination, either. Ask them what they'd do if success were guaranteed, and many could answer on the spot.
They stay because the role is where everything lives. Their competence. Their standing. The structure of their week. The people they talk to every day.
John Balsdon, who later retired and built a photography business, admitted to the Journal that it's in the DNA of lawyers to work.
That isn't stubbornness. It's identity.
Nobody walks away from all of that for an incentive package.
What I keep coming back to is this. The dramatic second act is the one that gets written up. It's rarely the one most people are living. The question keeping my client in her chair wasn't "what would I do if I couldn't fail?" It was simpler, and harder.
What part of me do I get to keep?
A version of that question was mine once. For over 20 years I was an oboist, and when I set the instrument down, I had to answer it for myself. The answer surprised me then, and it surprises my clients now. You get to keep a great deal.
The title and the office stay behind. What carries forward is the way you think. The standard you hold yourself to, which doesn't retire when you do. The kind of problem you were built to solve, the tangled one everyone else backs away from. And the people who matter, some of whom you met through work and none of whom need your title to stay in your life.
You can take all of that with you and still leave.
My client didn't need to become someone new in order to go. She needed to see which parts of her were hers and which parts belonged to the building.
Once she could see that, the door looked different. It looked like somewhere she could walk through as herself.
I don't think the firms are wrong to plan. They should. The practice needs a succession plan, and so do the client relationships, and so does the younger partner waiting for a chance to lead.
But the person needs one too, and it starts years before the retirement party, while the role is still intact and there's time to notice what you'd carry with you if it ended.
So here's the question I'd leave you with this week.
If the role ended tomorrow, what would you refuse to leave behind?
Warmly,
Cara
Future Identity Strategist
founder, Good Morning Freedom
P.S. Some of what feels essential about your working life is really you. Some of it is habit that came with the job. The Future Identity Snapshot is designed to help you tell the difference.
The client described here is a composite, with details changed to protect privacy.