After 40 Years in Business, Am I Still Relevant?

Welcome And The Relevance Question

Eric Dickmann 0:01

Welcome to Beyond Expertise, a podcast about identity reinvention for professionals ready to explore who they are beyond their titles and careers. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. Let's get ready to go beyond expertise After decades of building experience, judgment, and professional credibility, why does it sometimes feel harder to establish my value? Is experience becoming less relevant, or are the ways I demonstrate and measure relevance changing?

When Identity Depends On A Title

Eric Dickmann 0:33

I left the corporate world in 2019 to start my own fractional CMO consulting business. And I think about when I come into a company they honestly don't know me. They may have seen my LinkedIn profile, a resume, a proposal that I sent them, but what they really count on is my years of experience, my discernment, my expertise, my knowledge. All of that becomes relevant to them. And my relevance is tied to that professional identity as an independent consultant. If I was just some guy off the street, I would have no relevance to this organization because I wouldn't be tied to any kind of professional identity. And I think the challenge is that as we grow older, as we grow in our careers and our lives, with so much of our relevance tied to that position, tied to the companies that we work for, when we decide at some point in life that we wanna focus on other areas of our lives, all of the sudden that relevance can start to evaporate, and that's certainly something that I've seen turning 60.

Earning Relevance Early In Career

Eric Dickmann 1:41

I think about my early career. Fresh out of college, I had a lot of enthusiasm. I really wanted to be a contributor, but I simply didn't have the experience, I didn't have the knowledge, I didn't have the expertise that I would need to be a valuable contributor. I didn't have the relevance to the organization because I was a new hire. I was somebody who was at the very bottom of the ladder working my way up. And with each promotion, with each new assigned task and area of responsibility, my knowledge began to grow. And I can certainly remember sitting around a conference table early in my career wanting very much to interject, to give my opinion, to share my thoughts, but knowing that I simply did not have the expertise, the discernment, the knowledge to be a valuable contributor. I didn't have the relevance to others in the room because I simply hadn't earned it yet And as my roles continued to increase and I was given more responsibility, more access to information, more ability to make decisions, my relevance within the organization started to grow. And that relevance is really tied very closely with those professional identities. And I think about that now as I'm a consultant. Look, I have a successful consulting business. I work with clients today, and I think I bring a lot of value to the table, but I can see that I'm an outsider. I know that my relevance is tied to a package of expertise and experience that I've gained over the years, but it's not about me personally. And I think as I've gotten older, I've really had this hunger to have more of my relevance tied to who I am as a person, not to my professional identity. And I wonder whether you've struggled with that as well. I've talked to people who have been laid off suddenly from a job, something that they were very proud of, a company that they were very proud to work for, and all of the sudden they're sitting at home wondering what to do next, and they're feeling this real lack of relevance in their lives because so much of their identity had been tied up in the job, in the company that they worked for. And I understand that. And while I'm still working, while I'm still trying to provide value as an independent consultant, I also feel that lack of relevance that comes from not working for a big company anymore and not having my identity tied up in that kind of a career.

AI Disrupts How Value Gets Measured

Eric Dickmann 4:11

As I'm recording this, we are in a tremendous time of change. AI is taking the world by storm. It seems like we're getting new tools released every day. And I think in every situation that I've been working in recently, I can see how AI is completely changing how companies are working and how they're thinking about work. This is supposed to be the pinnacle of my career, the high point when I have put in years and years of work. I have developed lots of experience, lots of expertise, lots of discernment in my field, which is marketing. Yet I'm watching all around me where the tools and the landscape are changing dramatically. And I'm a technologist. I love this stuff, and I try very hard to keep up with it. But not only do I have to keep up with what's changing, but the work itself is changing and how people view the work. And that becomes complicated when my experience, when my discernment, when my relevance is so tied up into 40 years of career history, and now we're seeing tools and technologies that some people feel can replace that for the cost of a monthly subscription. And that's a real challenge. And I think if you're anything like me and you're still navigating the workplace, this is something that you've been thinking about too. It can be a tremendously unsettling time. I've spent so much of my career helping companies adapt to new technologies, and now with AI, we're living through this enormous shift, and part of me finds this incredibly exciting. But it also raises a serious question. If technology can increasingly do things that took me decades to learn, what exactly is the experience I've accumulated worth? These are questions that I struggle with Because if so much of my relevance was tied to those years of experience and the knowledge that I accumulated, and now maybe some of that is not worth what it was in the past, how do I then find relevance in this next phase of my

Wisdom Versus Speed Of Thinking

Eric Dickmann 6:21

life? You know, I was recently reading something by Arthur Brooks, and he talks about fluid intelligence and the ability to solve novel problems, whereas crystallized intelligence draws on accumulated knowledge and experience. Brooks argues is that learning to rely more on that accumulated wisdom and then teaching it can help people navigate the second half of their professional lives. And I really like that idea because it suggests that maybe the goal isn't to keep proving that I can do everything like I did or needed to do at 35. Maybe it's to figure out how to use what I've learned in ways that make more sense at 60. But honestly, I also have some resistance to this idea that he introduced because I've spent my life solving problems and building things, and I'm not sure I'm ready to just sit on the sidelines and become the old wiser guy dispensing advice So I think that Brooks has an interesting framework, and it does raise questions about the next phase of my work I can see how all of this plays out in my work as a fractional CMO.

Fractional CMO Work As Mentorship

Eric Dickmann 7:25

You know, I once was responsible for influencing decisions because I had organizational authority. I had teams. I had budget responsibility. I was the decision-maker. But now, as a fractional CMO, what my knowledge, what my experience, what my discernment is most valuable for is really mentoring less experienced leaders. They might use tools that I'm not familiar with. They may try techniques that I don't know. But learning when to offer a recommendation and when to ask a better question is oftentimes, I think, where I really have the most relevance in the organization. When you think about consultants or outside experts, what are they usually brought in for? They're usually brought in to challenge the status quo, to bring in an outsider's opinion, to look at things maybe through a different lens because biases can develop inside an organization. And I really believe that these years of experience that I've had and the relevance that I've built are being able to ask those better questions, to be able to challenge ideas and really help mentor people along. Maybe I'm not the execution person that I once was, but that doesn't matter because my experience can be applied in a new and different ways. And that's really what Beyond Expertise is all about. That's why I started this channel because I really wanted to talk through these issues with people like you, maybe others who are experiencing these same kind of challenges in their own life, in their own career. Because I think in this particular case, our old measure of relevance, having authority, making decisions, controlling outcomes, being needed, is really changing. I understand that relevance in this next chapter of life may require the willingness to become a beginner again, even when I'm accustomed to being an expert. That's tough. But it's a challenge that I'm willing to take on in this phase of my life because I want to remain professionally engaged, but I'm not assuming that every opportunity must resemble a previous executive role. I know that's not my future, and so I don't want to set up my identity to expect that. I want to continue to learn, particularly with AI tools, but I don't want to make the assumption that my accumulated knowledge and experience is somehow obsolete because I don't for a minute believe that it is. I just believe that it's going to be applied differently going forward. And one of the things that I really wanna do is create different kinds of relationships and conversations and influence outside traditional corporate structures. So much of my professional life has been confined to the four walls of a corporate environment that I'm really looking to branch out into new areas to build new relationships, to meet new people, and to explore things beyond that professional identity inside a corporate

Redefining Contribution In Your 60s

Eric Dickmann 10:23

structure. So the question I'm left with, am I still relevant at 60? Maybe it's not whether I'm still relevant. Maybe it's whether I'm willing to change how I define relevance. You know, for most of my career, I could measure my contribution through the work that I was doing, the responsibilities I had, and the results I helped produce. Now I just turned 60, and I'm trying to figure out what contribution looks like when those familiar measures aren't necessarily the right ones anymore. And look, I don't think that means abandoning ambition or pretending that professional achievement no longer matters. It absolutely matters to me. But perhaps there's more than one way to be valuable, and that's what I'm curious about, and I'm wondering if you've experienced something similar. If you've stepped away from a leadership role, changed careers, or you've simply started thinking differently about work as you've gotten older, do you miss the work itself, or do you miss the sense of importance that came with it? I'd really like to hear what you think because these are the kinds of questions that I'm pondering, and honestly, it's the reason that I started this channel.

Listener Reflection And Closing

Eric Dickmann 11:32

Thanks for listening to Beyond Expertise. You can find show notes, resources, and links mentioned during this episode at podcast.ericdickman.com. If this conversation resonated with you, I hope you'll join me again next time as we continue exploring what it means to reinvent ourselves beyond our careers, titles, and expertise.