Hitting Your Actual Ceiling

🛑 𝐇𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐞𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 🛑

One of the nuanced phenomena in academic and research careers occurs when individuals put great effort into developing themselves, persisting against all the obstacles and barriers thrown in their way, landing eventual career success and stability, and then implicitly assuming that they will continue to maintain that rate of career progression and improvement (if that's what they're interested in).

But almost all people will at some stage, after plenty of career progression, start to run into their *actual* capability, skillset and/or intellectual ceiling. This is not an arbitrary "the system screwing you" type ceiling - this is a more organic actual ceiling where you simply don't have the firepower - in whatever it is that you need to - to really be effective at the "next level up" - whatever that means.

Now, this is usually not a hard rigid ceiling but rather a soft fuzzy one: with enough effort, you can continue to push that ceiling up, to stretch the metaphor. But your rate of progress will radically slow down: the slope of the learning curve when first starting is not the same as the slope when you are already highly accomplished and trying to make further gains.

In my mentoring and advising, I see a lot of frustration when people start to slow down or plateau, and assume - quite naturally - that it's just the barriers and competitiveness of the system holding them back. That's a natural instinct - and is often true especially in the early stages of careers - but at some stage, it will actually be just as much about you hitting your limits.

Once they recognize this as a possible explanation - very gently introduced - it's actually quite liberating, because they take the pressure off their shoulders of the assumption of ever-continuing advancement at the current rate, and instead can step back, re-assess, and think a bit more strategically around what they want to do. They can continue to try to progress - but they know progress will likely be slower, often much slower.

Not an issue typically encountered early in careers - it's the usual challenges there - but definitely one that pops up quite a bit in more established careers, especially for ambitious, forward-looking individuals... and today's #HackingAcademia video topic.

💻 Youtube: https://lnkd.in/eHAxwWsH

#careers #progression #development #ceilings #plateau #progress

Transcript

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A lot of the work I do in mentoring and advising people in academia or in research careers is around helping them learn how to navigate and be effective and hopefully happy in the pressure cooker that are research careers, academic careers, and similar types of career paths. It can seem like there are so many barriers and obstacles and challenges that are thrown up in people's ways, some of them sort of rational and understandable challenges, some of them crazy, irrational stuff that you shouldn't have to put up with, but nevertheless have to navigate. So understandably, that is often the focus of a lot of mentoring advice and advisory work, especially for people early in their careers. A successful pathway through this critical formative stage of your career often looks like eventually overcoming these adversities and these challenges, landing your first big wins, perhaps if you stay in academia, landing your first faculty job, and moving on up through the career rungs as you get promoted and move on to leadership responsibilities and bigger and better things, if that's the path that you want to follow. This can be a really exciting, exhilarating part of your career. You can be on a what we'd call a steep learning curve, picking up lots of new things every day, putting those learnings and insights to into practice, and eventually reaping the rewards. One of the challenges is that eventually you will start to naturally hit some of your, I guess what you'd call natural performance ceilings, for want of a better phrase. And what can be really challenging and what I see play out a lot is that people struggle to differentiate between, hey, it's the system beating me down, and if the system wasn't beating me down, if I just overcame these obstacles and challenges, I would be successful in this new endeavor or new position, versus someone who is genuinely starting to hit the limits of their current capabilities and skill set. Now, this is where things can get a little bit controversial. Obviously, for someone who is passionate and hardworking and dedicated to their craft, there is an almost limitless range of things that they can do. But I'm very much of the perspective, not shared by everyone, that different people have different fundamental limitations on their capabilities that whilst you can move the dial a little bit, eventually you will hit fairly hard limits on what you're able to do, especially in fields, for example, that have very specific advanced skill skets or requirements or particular intellectual capability requirements where no amount of work is going to get you easily beyond a certain level. Now there's nothing fundamentally wrong with hitting one of these limits in your career. There's a near-infinite variety of ways you can continue to make progress and make contributions, but it will nevertheless introduce some barriers. And the real issue I see is a lot of people struggle to recognize this as a possibility and get really, really frustrated and often very, very depressed about the fact that they feel like they've hit a plateau and they're no longer progressing, especially in light of people who had very fast, almost meteoric progressions in the previous, say, five years of their career where they've just been kicking goal win after win, kicking a goal after a goal after a goal. So how do you tell when it's still the system legitimately putting barriers in your way that you can overcome versus situations where you are hitting inherent limitations of your current capabilities? Well, it's the same advice as is often appropriate in these situations, which is you need to talk to people who are more experienced than to you, who you trust, and get them to share their perspectives on what you're doing and whether it's just the system beating you down or whether you are starting to hit some actual real limits of your capabilities. Now, what can you do about it? Well, with enough effort and focus, you can continue to improve in these areas that are currently limiting you, but at a certain stage, that progress will be very slow. Obviously, early on as you're developing a skill set or a set of capabilities, your learning curve will often be very steep and you'll make a lot of progress. But as you get closer and closer to what I would say are your natural soft limits, not a hard limit, you can always improve things, your progress will really, really slow down. And again, that in of itself can be really, really frustrating. But if you really want to advance in a certain area that you've identified as holding you back from further progression, you can do it, but your progression, uh rate of progress will be slower. A related concept I've talked about in other videos is the perverse impact of early success in your career when it can feel like you then go five years without any success after that really much lauded initial success. But that's a case of just having an early win, perhaps punching above your weight, and then taking a few years to catch up. The concept I'm talking about in today's video is really about starting to approach those fundamental soft limits on what you're able to do, being able to recognize that that's possibly the reason for some of your slowdown in career progress, and recognize that further improvements in those skill sets will not occur at the rapid race that you're rapid rate that you've been used to when you first picked up a new skill set or set of capabilities. Now, how do you broach this subject with people you're mentoring as a possibility? Well, first of all, you need to be reasonably confident that this is a distinct possibility versus just that they've hit a bunch of random problems and obstacles. Second of all, one way to sort of broach it gently is to remind people of all the successes and the sort of big career progression they've done in the previous few years as applicable, and note that it is expected at some stage that that rate of progress will start to slow down. And assuming that you're going to continue to just naturally advance in your career standing for the rest of your career is not necessarily realistic and indeed would be relatively unusual. Most people will start to plateau at some stage in their career. Once someone realizes they're in this potential position, it actually can be a little liberating because you can take some of that pressure off yourself that you expect this continual incredible rate of career progress and progression, and realize that now it's really more about being a little strategic and deliberate in where you decide to focus your efforts, recognizing that your progress from this point onwards may be a little slower because you're already at a relatively accomplished level, and then deciding to go on with the training or the development activity with all of that known in the back of your mind so that you know what to expect. You know that you're going to make progress but more slowly, and that's indeed what you've signed up for.