The ability to craft an accurate and coherent life story is yet another vital skill we don’t teach people in school. But coming up with a personal story is centrally important to leading a meaningful life. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story. You can’t have a stable identity unless you take the inchoate events of your life and

give your life meaning by turning the events into a coherent story. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of.

Finally, when I’m hearing life stories, I’m looking for narrative flexibility. Life is a constant struggle to refine and update our stories. Most of us endure narrative crises from time to time—periods in which something happened so that your old life story no longer makes sense. Perhaps you dreamed all your life of becoming an architect.

A working identity, however, is not merely what we do and with whom; it lies also in the unfolding story of our lives. Throughout a career transition, the narratives we craft to describe why we are changing (and what remains the same) also help us try on possibilities. June’s attempts at explaining herself—why she wanted to make such a seemingly “crazy” career change, why a potential employer should take a chance on her, why she was attracted to a company she had never heard of a day before—were at first provisional, sometimes clumsy ways of redefining herself. But each time she wrote a cover letter, went through an interview, or updated friends and family on her progress, she better defined what was exciting to her, and in each public declaration of her intent to change careers, she committed herself further.

But such insights on their own cannot drive a career transition to its culmination. They have to be worked into a compelling story. Why? Because we define who we are by our life stories. And stories about change, by definition, require a “before” and “after.” Events are merely occasions for retelling, reworking, and reassembling our experiences. We are literally reinventing the past so that it flows into a future we desire. In John’s case, the astrologer episode gave him a dramatic moment around which he could construct a story that would explain his actions as he left the bank. Knowing the story gave him motivation and purpose. Our stories are not only for private consumption. They also help others make sense of what may seem like nonsensical actions, such as quitting a prestigious job instead of hanging on for early retirement.

Conclusion: Becoming Yourself

“The reinvention process challenges us to redefine ourselves. But, contrary to popular belief, working our identities is not an exercise in abstraction or introspection; it is a messy trial-and-error process of learning by doing in which experience in the here and now (not in the distant past) helps to evolve our ideas about what is plausible—and desirable. The most typical problem at midcareer is not defining what kind of work we find enjoyable and meaningful. Rather, it is figuring out how to transfer old preferences and values to new and different contexts and how to integrate those with changing priorities and newly blooming potential. It is a problem of recombining and reanchoring. And the “solution” is never the job change itself. Self-creation is a lifelong journey. Only by our actions do we learn who we want to become, how best to travel, and what else will need to change to ease the way.