The shape of the pivot
Adjacent move, sector change, contracting, business, study. The four shapes and which one fits the inventory.
Adjacent move, sector change, contracting, business, study. The four shapes and which one fits the inventory.
Once the inventory is written, the next question is what shape the pivot actually takes. Most men jump to "I'll start a business" because that's the LinkedIn-shaped story, and most of those men would have been better served by one of the three less glamorous shapes.
There are four real shapes. Plus study, which is rarely the right answer at forty-five and gets a paragraph at the end.
The shape you pick determines the runway you need, the people you tell, and the first ninety days. Pick wrong and the pivot becomes a slow correction back to where you started.
You stay in the same industry, broadly the same function, but at a different company or in a different team. The role uses most of your existing skills with maybe twenty percent new.
Examples:
This is the shape that gets dismissed because it sounds like "the same job somewhere else". It often is. That's the point. If your honest reason from module 0 was "the ceiling" or "redundancy risk I can smell", an adjacent move can be the entire pivot. You don't need to reinvent yourself. You need a different chair.
When the adjacent move is right:
When it isn't:
Same broad function, different industry. You take what you're good at and move it to a sector with different problems and a different pace.
Examples:
Sector changes work because most senior functions translate. Finance is finance. People management is people management. What changes is the domain knowledge, and you absorb that in the first six months on the job, not before.
When the sector change is right:
When it isn't:
You stop being an employee. You sell your skills by the day or by the project, to one or several clients, on your own ABN.
Examples:
This is the shape most senior men quietly want. You keep doing the work. You stop attending the all-hands. You charge more per day than you used to make per day employed.
The trap: contracting is a different game from employment. You eat what you kill. You spend twenty to thirty percent of your time on sales, finance, and admin you previously had a department for.
When contracting is right:
When it isn't:
You start something. A product, a service, an agency, a small business with employees. The shape that has the highest variance, the longest runway need, and the most LinkedIn theatre around it.
A short, unromantic truth: most successful business builds at forty-five are not heroic startups. They are senior men leveraging an existing network and an existing skill into a small services business that does one thing well, charges properly, and makes the founder more money than his previous job within two to three years.
When the business build is right:
When it isn't:
Going back to university at forty-five, full-time, is rarely the right answer. The exceptions are narrow:
If you're considering an MBA, the question is harder. At forty-five, the ROI calculus rarely works on cash terms. The argument for doing it is usually network and identity, not the curriculum.
A simple test. Look at the inventory you wrote in module 1. Look at your honest reason from module 0. Then ask:
The shape that fits all three is your shape.
Don't pick the romantic one. Pick the one your runway and your reason both support.
Pick the shape. Build the plan. Skip the theatre.
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