The Power Pause: What Highly Accomplished People Wish They'd Known
I spent months on my Stanford application. Rewrote my essays probably ten times. Thought about what it would mean to leave my job, my city, my savings and to upend everything for grad school.
Then I got in, and my first reaction was: wait, do I actually want to do this?
It's a strange thing when you get what you worked for and your immediate instinct is to find reasons not to take it. I went anyway, of course. I'm glad I did. But the transition was harder than I expected, even though I'd chosen it.
I think about this a lot now because I see it constantly at Movi. We work with highly accomplished people at major inflection points; leaving corporate, becoming parents, launching ventures, retiring early, relocating, taking time off. The specific transition varies, but the underlying experience is remarkably similar: you choose to leave something that's working, often really well, and you're surprised by how disorienting it is, even when you wanted it.
So I asked the brilliant people in the Movi Collective: what do you wish you'd known before your Power Pause?
Here's what they told me.
30, left Goldman Sachs for Stanford GSB
"Don't try to maintain your pre-grad school productivity, social life, and fitness routine. Something has to give. I tried to keep everything going in my first quarter and I was completely underwater by week 4. The workload is real, the adjustment to being a student again is real, and you might be older than most of your classmates like I am, which adds its own layer. I finally had to accept that I wasn't going to work out five days a week and see all my friends and ace every class. Pick two, maybe. The rest will come back after you graduate."
50s, left big pharma to scale multiple healthtech startups
Startups are amazingly hard. Sorry if this is news to anyone.
I would have liked to have known:
- A successful startup will not look like one at first. It is messy.
- It is lonely, so a co-founder or at least a community of other founders is incredibly important. Your friends are unlikely to understand.
- You need to be passionate about the mission and understand that success doesn't necessarily mean becoming a unicorn, but rather learning, growing, and ideally having an impact.
- A startup is like a marriage. Everyone shares their wedding photos and videos (like your startup announcement or funding round), and we hear the stories of the couple who died in each other's arms in old age (the unicorns or the acquisitions). But the work is in the mundane middle, where there is daily sacrifice and hard work, and no cheering fans.
- Finally, if you don't have your spouse's full support, stop. Your marriage is more important than any startup.
Hope that helps.
39, relocated from NYC to Austin for family, still working remotely
"The loneliness hits around month three, not month one. Be ready for it. Month one you're excited, unpacking, exploring. Month two you're settling in. Month three you realize you don't have friends here yet and it sucks. My advice is say yes to everything in the first 90 days, even the things that sound boring. You need reps. You need to see the same people multiple times before real friendships form and that only happens if you show up repeatedly to things with built-in repetition."
40s, left NCB News to start her own PR firm
My advice is to make sure you continue to nurture your relationships with past colleagues. You may be leaving your old company but don't let those hard won relationships go by the wayside. You never know when you may need their advice or how you may be able to help them, in the future. I started my own PR firm 4 years ago and some of the best referrals I've had are from former coworkers who are seeing what we are doing now and recommending clients check us out. Life is about relationships and the stronger yours are the better you are!
42, left McKinsey when his first kid was born
"The career dip is real and that's okay. It's a season, not forever. I went from 70 hour weeks to being home every day and honestly it messed with my head for a while. You feel like you're falling behind, like everyone else is sprinting past you. But here's what I know now after two kids: this phase doesn't last. Your kids won't always need you this much. The work will still be there. Give yourself permission to be in this season fully instead of trying to keep one foot in your old life."