Control Generates Resistance
Lulu’s story, as I mentioned earlier, is an example of control done right. Like Ryan and Sarah of Red Fire Farms, her career is compelling because she has infused it with control over what she does and how she does it. Also like Ryan and Sarah, she succeeds in this effort where others have failed—for example, Jane from the last chapter—by always making sure she has the career capital needed to obtain this autonomy.
Lurking in this story, however, is a hidden danger. Though Lulu’s career was satisfyingly self-directed, the path to acquiring this freedom generated conflict. Almost every time she invested her career capital to obtain the most control, she also encountered resistance. When she leveraged her value to obtain a thirty-hour schedule at her first job, for example, her employer couldn’t say no (she was saving them too much money), but they didn’t like it. It took nerve on Lulu’s part to push through that demand. Similarly, when she turned down a major promotion to take an ill-defined position at a seven-person start-up, people in her life didn’t understand.
“You had just bought a house,” I reminded her. “To turn down a big important job to go work with an unknown little company, that’s a big deal.”
“People thought I was nuts,” she agreed. Leaving this start-up after it was acquired was similarly difficult. Lulu was hesitant to get into details, but the subtext was that her value was so high at this company that its new owners tried every tactic they could to keep her on board. And finally, her transition to freelance work came with its own difficulties. Her first client really wanted to hire her full-time to work on the project, but she refused. “They really didn’t want a contractor,” she recalls, “but they didn’t have anyone else who could do this type of work, so they eventually had no choice but to agree.”
The more I met people who successfully deployed control in their career, the more I heard similar tales of resistance from their employers, friends, and families. Another example is someone I’ll call Lewis, who is a resident in a well-known combined plastic surgery program, which is arguably the most competitive medical residency. Three years into his residency, he was starting to chafe under hospital bureaucracy. When I met him for coffee, he gave me a vivid example of the frustrations of life as a modern doctor.
“I once received this patient in the ER who had his chest cut open because he had been stabbed in the heart,” he told me. “I’m on the gurney, massaging his heart with my hands as he’s brought into the operating room. We get to the room, and obviously this guy needs a blood transfusion because he has a hole in his heart.
“ ‘We can’t give it to you,’ the tech replied. ‘You skipped registration when you came in’—remember, I literally had this guy’s heart in my hand when we came through the door—and I was thinking, ‘You got to be freaking kidding me.’ ”
That patient died in the OR. He probably would still have died even if he had been given a blood transfusion, but the point is that this was exactly the type of autonomy-demolishing experience that was eating away at Lewis. He craved more control in his life, so he did something unexpected: He took two years off from his residency program to start a company that builds online medical education tools.
When you ask Lewis why he wanted to start a company, he paints a compelling picture. “One thing a lot of people struggle with in my field is that they have a lot of ideas, but don’t know how to get them turned into reality.” In his vision, he would become a doctor, but also be the cofounder of this company that would continue to run without requiring his day-to-day supervision. As he came up with ideas around medical education, an interest of his, he could then hand them over to the team at the company to be turned into reality.
“Let’s say I have this idea for a game that could help premed students learn some sort of new concept,” he told me when I asked for an example. “I could turn to my team at the company and say, ‘Go make this happen.’ ” To Lewis, there’s a great sense of satisfaction in “creating something that actually works,” and this company would provide him that opportunity.
As with Lulu, however, once Lewis had enough medical expertise to successfully raise the funding to begin this company, he had become valuable enough to his employer that they didn’t want to let him go. He was the first person in the ten-year history of his combined plastic surgery program to request time off in the middle of his residency. “They were asking me, ‘Why would you do this!?’ ” he recalls. It was not an easy transition to make. When I met Lewis, however, his two-year break was almost up. During this time, his company had progressed from an idea into a well-funded organization with a popular flagship product (a tool that helps med students prepare for their board exams) and a full-time staff that will keep things rolling as he returns to finish his residency. Lewis was clearly happy about his decision to push for something different—but it hadn’t been easy.
This is the irony of control. When no one cares what you do with your working life, you probably don’t have enough career capital to do anything interesting. But once you do have this capital, as Lulu and Lewis discovered, you’ve become valuable enough that your employer will resist your efforts. This is what I came to think of as the second control trap:
The Second Control Trap
The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.
On reflection, this second trap makes sense. Acquiring more control in your working life is something that benefits you but likely has no direct benefit to your employer. Downshifting to a thirty-hour-per-week schedule, for example, provided Lulu freedom from a working environment that had felt increasingly stifling. But from the point of view of her employer, it was simply lost productivity. In other words, in most jobs you should expect your employer to resist your move toward more control; they have every incentive to try to convince you to reinvest your career capital back into your career at their company, obtaining more money and prestige instead of more control, and this can be a hard argument to resist.