Transitions in Optometry
Everyone goes through many transitions in life. It could be a transition to college, to Optometry school, to residency program, to internship, to employment, to practice associateship, to practice ownership, to career change, or retirement. Perhaps the best book I read about career change by New York best-selling author Jon Acuff, is Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck. In this book, Acuff shows what it takes to make big career changes whether by choice or necessity to escape the terrible mistake and trap of being stuck in the wrong job. He brings out why people spend more than eighteen years studying and preparing to get into college, but later spend little to no time thinking of what their career could be of the change between college and retirement.
Acuff lists four career transitions that every person encounters during life and the corresponding resources required to survive those transitions.
The first transition is when you have been fired. It has been said, “it is not what you know but who you know”. If you have been fired and you have enough connections you will transition to a new job in no time. Each time Acuff has been fired he found someone he knows in less than 72 hours who hired him.
The second transition is if you get to a dead-end job. You hit a ceiling that does not seem to break and further advancement becomes impossible. At this point you best transition into building new skills and awaking new capabilities that prospective employers would value.
The third transition is if you have decided to leap or jump. At this point, you voluntarily jump to a new career. Jeff Bezos leaving his job at Wall Street to sell books online founding Amazon is a good example for leaping. This effort needs resilience, risk-taking, and a bold entrepreneurial spirit in decision-making.
The fourth transition is when you are faced with an unplanned opportunity. This transition Acuff calls “the opportunity” where he also refers to certain types of people like entrepreneurs who hustle and know how to deal with opportunities enabling them to be successful where others cannot.
HBR author Avivah Wittenberg-Cox guides how to make better transitions. She emphasizes the role of planning, knowing in advance when it is time to end, having self-knowledge on how to use your judgment on those around you, and knowing what others think about you and appreciate in you before you make your destined leap.
Network Capital founder Utkarsh Amitabh, before leaving Microsoft to found one of the world’s largest career intelligence communities that serves as a partner to Government of India’s Atal Innovation Mission, asked himself three questions: why do you want to change? What do you want to do? and when will the change happen? In addition to those three simple questions that helped him in his transitions, he always set realistic expectations and had a backup plan.