Thomas DeBaggio, a writer and horticulturist, was even able to publish two insightful memoirs about his own early-onset Alzheimer’s before the disease killed him at the age of sixty-nine. But most patients are frightened or mortified by the knowledge of what is befalling them. Some continue to be severely terrified as they lose their intellectual competences and bearings and find themselves in a world increasingly fragmented and chaotic. But the majority, I think, become calmer with time as they perhaps start to lose the sense of what they have lost and find themselves shifted into a simpler, unreflective world.

Kurt Goldstein, studying brain-damaged soldiers during World War I, was moved from his original, deficit-based point of view to a more holistic, organismal one. There were never, he believed, just deficits or releases; there were always reorganizations, and these he saw as strategies (albeit unconscious and almost automatic) by which the brain-damaged organism sought to survive, although perhaps in a more rigid and impoverished way.

At the heart of this book are the stories of dozens of people who changed careers. It analyzes their experiences through the lens of established psychological and behavioral theories. Based on the stories and extensive re- search in the social sciences, the book affirms the uncertainties of the career transition process and identifies its underlying principles. But it does not offer a ten-point plan for better transitioning, because that is not the nature of the process. Instead, it lays out a straightforward framework that describes what is really involved and some tried and proven unconventional strategies that will make the difference between staying stuck and moving on.

The book hinges on two disarmingly simple ideas. First, our working identity is not a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered at the very core of our inner being. Rather, it is made up of many possibilities: some tangible and concrete, defined by the things we do, the company we keep, and the stories we tell about our work and lives; others existing only in the realm of future potential and private dreams. Second, changing careers means changing our selves, reworking our identities. Since we are many selves, changing is not about swapping one identity for another but rather a transition process in which we reconfigure the full set of possibilities. These simple ideas alter everything we take for granted about finding a new career. They ask us to devote the greater part of our time and energy to action rather than reflection, to doing instead of planning. Hence, the unconventional strategies.

All of which brings us to one of the most important points of this entire book: the difference between finding “the” hedgehog and finding “a” hedgehog. If we hold to the idea that each of us has only one hedgehog and much of life depends on whether we find it, then this would be a very depressing study. But if we embrace the view that each of us has many possibilities to potentially discover— that the constellation of encodings within each of us is vast and largely undiscovered— then the challenge changes dramatically from the low odds of finding that one elusive unicorn hedgehog to finding just one out of many possibilities.

Our society has an inherent challenge: Many of its settings still have features that reflect our identity-stratified history and organization. Our schools, workplaces, churches, classrooms, civic organizations, and boardrooms have features that can make it harder for some identities to trust that they are a part of the “we” in the setting. Identity-blindness implies that, along with identity itself, these features don’t matter much— they can, or should, be ignored. But they do matter— to all of us. Think of being the “only one” or “one of only a few” in any important setting— as my hands reminded me, for example: one of only a few whites in a Black History seminar, one of only a few Blacks in a symphony orchestra, or one of only a few women in an advanced math course on Riemann surfaces. But there’s good news: as the Stephens experiment and the 3M company show, when these features are addressed, improvements can happen, sometimes without much effort or cost.