A 60-Year Career Needs a Self That Outlasts Every Job

In The Wall Street Journal, Heidi Mitchell opens with a man who still flies to Amsterdam for research meetings at 82. John Rowe, a gerontologist and former CEO of Aetna, now studies aging at Columbia while living it. In How to Plan for a Career That Could Easily Last 60 Years, Mitchell explains why the familiar three acts of school, work and retirement are giving way to a working life that may run from the early 20s into the late 70s or 80s, with pivots and time off built in rather than treated as failures.

The article is practical and fair. It notes that longer, healthier working lives have arrived mainly for educated, higher-income people, and that many others will keep working because they can't afford to stop. Its advice runs decade by decade: experiment early, build portable human skills like problem-solving and collaboration, reskill and protect your network at midcareer, and stay current with technology later in life.

All of that is useful. But the most important idea in the piece is easy to miss because it arrives as a passing warning.

The Merger That Ends Careers Early

London Business School professor Herminia Ibarra describes a danger she calls work-role merger: the point at which your identity fuses with a single employer or title. Her remedy is a side project or structured pursuit outside the job, so your sense of self doesn't depend entirely on one company.

In my experience, that merger is the real threat to a long career, more than any outdated skill. Skills can be relearned. The article itself shows how quickly the safe bets change: a few years ago the advice was to learn to code, and now it isn't. What is much harder to rebuild is a sense of who you are once the title that defined you is gone.

I have watched talented executives lose their footing after a reorganization, not because they lacked ability, but because they had spent twenty years answering the question "who are you?" with a job title and a company name. When the title disappeared, so did the answer. A 60-year career will force that moment on almost everyone, probably more than once.

Skills Expire. Identity Travels.

That is why I would add one item to every stage of Mitchell's road map. Alongside the skills and the savings, build a clear understanding of what you naturally solve for, and revisit it often, because it will evolve. Ibarra's advice about a side project is one good way to do that, because it shows you parts of yourself the job has never asked for.

A 25-year-old running career experiments should be collecting evidence about what energizes them, not just which jobs pay. A 50-year-old preparing for the next chapter should be asking what has stayed true across every role, and what they are ready to leave behind. A 70-year-old moving into advisory work needs to know what they still want to contribute, not just what they used to do. Each stage is a chance to reclaim parts of yourself that your career had no room for.

The difference between adapting and reinventing matters here. Adapting keeps you employable in the current moment. Reinventing reshapes how you engage with whatever comes next. I described that distinction in Most Leaders Confuse Adaptation With Reinvention. Over 60 years, adaptation alone becomes exhausting.

Where Organizations Fit

Lynda Gratton of London Business School makes a sharp point about how we treat people at different ages: "We encourage adventure at 20, but we discourage it at 40 and 50." The article cites a Stanford Center on Longevity report calling for midcareer internships, reskilling sabbaticals and formal gap years. Structured programs like these would be a real asset, giving every employee the same doorway to a next chapter instead of leaving it to the few who can afford to make one themselves.

Until employers build them, here are a few moves to make now:

For professionals: list three problems you loved solving in three different roles, then look for what they have in common. That common thread is what you carry into every chapter. I wrote about the thread that connects every chapter of a career in The Only Constant in a Multichapter Career Is You.

For professionals at midcareer: start one pursuit that has nothing to do with your current role, and pay attention to what it teaches you about yourself.

For leaders: ask your experienced people what they would want to try if their next ten years at your company were a fresh start. Their answers may reveal talent you didn't know you had.

Rowe's question is whether 82 is the new 82. For many of us, the better question is whether we will still know who we are at 82.

A long career rewards people whose sense of self can outlast every title they hold, so start building yours now.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.