742: How to Find Meaningful Work at 50 or 60 Without Starting Over (Even After 20 Years of Being Comfortably Unhappy in a Successful Career)

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: Finding meaningful work at 50 or 60 isn't about starting over, and it's also not about taking a pay cut. It's about admitting that something's been off for a while and then actually doing something about it.

[00:00:12] Scott Ingham: I was right in the thick of throes of where my kids were in elementary and middle school. And so I just kept working and raising a family and, you know, paying the bills. But I knew there was a burning thing where I wanted to do something different, and I didn't know exactly what that was.

[00:00:28] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's Scott, and he spent 18 years in the same industry before deciding to make a change.

[00:00:33] Glenn Strecker: I'd been doing the same thing for almost two decades, so I've had a lot of really high highs, extremely well-performing years in my career, but I also realized there were times when I performed extremely well, and things seemed to be in alignment and synergy, and then there were other times where there just seemed to be missing elements, so missing pieces of the puzzle that weren't in play.

[00:00:57] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's Glenn. And after 20 years in healthcare sales, an executive level title, and a track record that most people would call a career very well-built, Glenn actually called it missing pieces, and he was 61 when he finally decided to take action. Now, both of them spent years doing work that looked fine from the outside, but it had stopped fitting on the inside.

[00:01:18] Both of them found that the thing that they were waiting for was not a new opportunity. It was getting very specific about what they actually wanted, building out a picture of the life that they wanted to build. Now, today's episode is all about that picture, the actual process, their actual words answering very specific questions. What does meaningful work actually look like for me?

[00:01:40] Introduction: This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is, but a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your work to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so that you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.

[00:02:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, before we go further, I want us to define meaningful work. Because the term gets used so often, it's started to take on other meanings. It's started to become ambiguous. Now, according to researchers, meaningful work is defined as work that holds personal significance, that serves an important purpose, and connects back to something beyond the task itself.

[00:02:25] It's not work that's easy or comfortable or free of stress. It's work where what you're doing and why you're doing it feel connected, where the contribution you're making is one you actually care about, and where the role uses enough of who you are that at the end of a hard day, you still feel like yourself.

[00:02:42] Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged in their work last year. A separate Gallup study found that workers who experience genuine purpose are significantly more productive and report better outcomes across every workplace measure. Not one, not two, but every workplace measure.

[00:03:04] And yet, only a minority describe their work that way. Meaningful work, it's not rare, but it's also not the default, and by 50 or 60, you have more information about what that looks like for you than you ever have had. This comes from your life experience. This is the advantage.

[00:03:20] Now, here's how Glenn and Scott used that advantage. I mentioned earlier that Scott had spent 18 years in pharmaceutical sales, and he was great at the job, but around year 15 or so, the job really just stopped being interesting.

[00:03:33] Scott Ingham: I knew about 15 years, I was just like, gosh, this is getting really boring, mundane. There's gotta be something else out there, and I just didn't know what that was.

[00:03:43] Scott Anthony Barlow: That role had stopped challenging him in the ways that made it feel like his.

[00:03:48] Scott Ingham: I had friends that were in the business, and they would move every few years, and it's because they just kept changing the therapeutic areas that they were in, and they were learning new products every time, so they were challenging themselves. Now that I think about it, talking with you, Scott, is it started to become less challenging as time went on.

[00:04:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: When work stops requiring the parts of you that make you feel most alive, it changes how you look at work. It changes the experience. Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale published research in 1997 that reshaped how psychologists understand the relationship between people and their work. People orient toward work in one of three ways: as a job, as a career, or as a calling.

[00:04:29] Those who see it as a calling report significantly higher life satisfaction and work satisfaction. The key finding, it's not about the industry or the title, it is about alignment between what the work requires and who the person actually is, and that's what Scott was describing, not the absence of success, the absence of purpose, alignment, and growth through challenge.

[00:04:53] Scott Ingham: I don't want to exit out of, you know, whatever working years I have left and not second guess myself and be like, "Why didn't I make that change?" I didn't want to go down like that. I wanted to be swinging.

[00:05:04] Scott Anthony Barlow: Glenn's story was a bit different.

[00:05:07] Glenn Strecker: I got diagnosed with something called an ependymoma, which is a extremely rare spinal cord tumor, and that was just like a holy cow moment. I think when you go through something like that, again, it puts you in a present moment like nothing else.

[00:05:21] Scott Anthony Barlow: After facing that healthcare, Glenn's perspective of work became centered around purpose and time.

[00:05:27] Glenn Strecker: I just started to realize that you don't know day to day how much time you'll have on this earth.

[00:05:32] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, there was one fear that stopped both of them from doing anything, and it turns out it wasn't financial risk. It wasn't a bad job market. It was overcoming the limiting beliefs around their age.

[00:05:44] Scott Ingham: I'm getting towards, you know, an age where people don't normally switch jobs unless they're forced out the door, and so he was a great help in always redirecting my mind on that because you could easily get frustrated doing the legwork yourself and then be like, "Nah, I'm too old to do this. I might as well just stick it out."

[00:06:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, that one thought, I'm too old to do this, keeps more people over 40, 50, 60 in the wrong role than almost anything else. Not because it's true, but because nobody has shown them otherwise.

[00:06:18] Scott Ingham: My thought process was I had X amount of runway left. Whatever change I made, I need to make it the right one and the very last one. I was putting my toe in the sand, creating that line. That is the wrong way to think.

[00:06:32] Scott Anthony Barlow: And here's Glenn at 61.

[00:06:33] Glenn Strecker: I may be aging, but I'm not growing old.

[00:06:35] Scott Anthony Barlow: In the book From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks documents this directly. Two types of intelligence drive career success. There's fluid intelligence, or solving new problems fast, processing information at speed, which that peaks out in your 20s and 30s.

[00:06:50] And then there's crystallized intelligence, or accumulated wisdom, pattern recognition, the judgment that comes from decades of experience, and this increases through your 40s, 50s, and 60s. It does not decline. By 50 or 60, you're not starting over.

[00:07:06] You're starting with an asset that somebody in their 30s typically literally cannot have, the self-knowledge to know precisely what you need and the evidence to back it up, and additionally, a set of assets from how your brain develops as you pass through your 40s.

[00:07:21] Scott Ingham: I thought I was like a one-trick pony. I'm like, I have a lot of skills that could be utilized, you know, with a finance background and a sales background and help building sales teams. I could do a lot of different things that were out there.

[00:07:33] Scott Anthony Barlow: That realization, that what you've built is transferable and more valuable than you assumed, it breaks the too old or too late belief right open. So how do you get from, "I know something needs to change," to, "I finally found purpose doing work that actually fits me"?

[00:07:50] Well, most people, they tend to start with job boards. They filter by title, they filter by salary, and they apply to things that look close enough, and then months later, they realize that close enough lands them in the exact same misalignment wearing a different company's name badge.

[00:08:03] Scott Ingham: One of the worst things you could probably do is comb through LinkedIn and look at job titles and descriptions and stuff. That was probably the worst thing to do because it created more confusion, and it created a lot of disappointment 'cause everything I read, I was like, "Oh, I'm not qualified for that. I'm not qualified for that. I'm not qualified for that."

[00:08:22] Scott Anthony Barlow: No good, right? At least if your goal is meaningful work that also pays you very well for how you contribute. So the right starting point here is not the job description. It's using a tool that we invented called your Ideal Career Profile. What is it? Well, the ICP is a tool that turns decades of accumulated self-knowledge into criteria that you can actually use for decisions. It's built around what we call minimums and ideals.

[00:08:49] Your minimums are the non-negotiables, or in other words, the things that you know from experience that you cannot function well without, whether that is your certain level of salary, whether that is a level of flexibility or autonomy, a certain type of culture, whatever it is. It's very different from person to the next.

[00:09:09] We all know that we need a salary. We all know that we need the right culture, but it's dramatically different from person to person. Specificity matters. Now, the ideals, those are what your personal version of extraordinary actually looks like for you specifically. Okay, but why does this matter so much?

[00:09:26] If you're at a place where you're in a role that doesn't quite fit you, whether it's way off or just a little bit, then you're at a risk of chasing the antidote to your last job. Maybe you got micromanaged, so your now new minimum becomes autonomy. You felt unheard, so your minimum becomes being valued.

[00:09:45] Those reactions are real, but they're reactions to the past and not a designed picture of the future. People tend to overreact and flip-flop towards the antithesis of whatever they experienced that was negative in the past. But here's what happens when you do this work. Glenn actually did this work, but what it revealed surprised him.

[00:10:04] Glenn Strecker: Really good in the right sales environment, representing the right product at the right company with the right mission, vision, values. Which again, I didn't realize how critical that was. I guess I did at some level, but I didn't to the level I do now.

[00:10:22] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, now Glenn hadn't specifically defined values alignment as a hard line before. He knew that he cared about culture. He knew that he wanted to believe in what he was selling, but he really hadn't gotten much more specific than that. And without specifically defining it, he crossed those lines repeatedly.

[00:10:42] Glenn Strecker: Do not compromise. These things are what make you unique. These things are what make you credible and empathetic in the marketplace when you are selling and representing products. Do not compromise on these core values. Do not negotiate on things that will ultimately cause you strife and misalignment.

[00:11:03] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, so here's how Scott used his knowledge of what creates ideal work for him during the interview process.

[00:11:10] Scott Ingham: I think they were kind of shocked that, you know, this is what I'm looking for, and not like I was this person begging for the job or answering all the questions the way that they wanted. I was just like, "This is what I'm looking for in a position, in a company, in a company culture." And I honestly think that was what sealed it for me.

[00:11:30] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's the ICP functioning in real time, not as a journaling exercise, but as a filter that he used to evaluate every single opportunity he came across, including the people who were interviewing him. But the real question is what about the outcome?

[00:11:46] Scott Ingham: One thing is I wanted to be heard and be part of the decision-making process, and I wanted to switch therapeutic areas where I dealt in mental health, which I have some very strong feelings for. I wanted to be valued. I want the ability to be rewarded for my efforts.

[00:12:04] Scott Anthony Barlow: He got all of it, and he negotiated compensation that blew the previous offer out of the water. Pretty cool, right? But for Glenn, the Ideal Career Profile surfaced something that he had underweighted for years. He needed to believe in what his product was doing for patients intimately.

[00:12:20] Glenn Strecker: With the company I join now, they're all about the patient. They're all about the member experience. I had gone through that with my recovery, so I really relate to the fact that this solution aligns so well with my values of getting to a place of full recovery and being able to lead your fullest life.

[00:12:42] Scott Anthony Barlow: Neither Glenn nor Scott had a straight line path from where they were to where they ended up. Not even close. Glenn went through the same kind of process.

[00:12:51] Glenn Strecker: Looking for a job is similar to recovery. It is not a speedboat ride. It is much more a sailboat ride, right? Sometimes there's progress. Sometimes you're not gonna make progress.

[00:13:02] Scott Anthony Barlow: Both came out describing something that had not been there before, not just a better job, a different relationship with work altogether.

[00:13:09] Glenn Strecker: I have more energy, enthusiasm, and focus because I have less distractions at this point in my life than I maybe did when I was 35 or 45, raising two kids and running back and forth to sports. I'm very focused on my work right now. You're totally worth every amount of energy investment you make in yourself. Don't regret it. Dive in and make the decision to invest in yourself.

[00:13:34] Scott Anthony Barlow: But one more hidden note, here's what Scott Ingham felt on why going through the process of finding meaningful work was worth it even though it was freaking hard.

[00:13:44] Scott Ingham: Even if I decide to make another career change after this, I have really set the foundation work up here. I could call Phillip up, we could meet and continue on in that process.

[00:13:57] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, for context, Phillip's actually been on our team since 2017, and he's been around for a good chunk of it, gotten to meet many of our clients, gotten to work with many of them directly one-on-one. And when he got to work directly with Scott, then what they did together is they went through that ICP type of work and helped build a foundation that allowed Scott to be able to make far better decisions for the life that he was trying to build.

[00:14:22] It really creates a way of knowing yourself clearly enough to find purposeful work and continue to refine that for the rest of your life, whatever you want that to mean, whether it, you know, is part-time going into retirement, whether it is you know, something that is full-time now. Whatever that means for you.

[00:14:40] I think the interesting thing here is that both Scott and Glenn, they didn't actually find a new career. They found what meaningful work required for them specifically, the right mission, the right product, the right values alignment, and they moved towards an environment in a situation that had those things specific to what their needs were.

[00:15:01] And then they used that advantage that you have in your 40s and 50s and 60s that you probably just did not have at 30, the crystallized intelligence, the accumulated self-knowledge, the evidence about what gives you energy, what drains you. But most importantly, your ability to take what you've learned over the years and the skills that you've developed and put them to work in a different way that fits you, is actually more valuable, not less valuable.

[00:15:28] The thing that people confuse here, though, is going through and identifying what creates a great fit, that isn't where you end. That's actually just your starting point. And if you want help with that starting point, or you want help getting all the way to work that fits you, or even refining what your life looks like after you've moved into a phenomenal or extraordinary situation, then those are all things that my team can help with.

[00:15:53] Drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put conversation in the subject line. We'll help you build out a plan that fits where you're trying to go, what your goals are, and then help you get the right support to make that happen in the real world for your real life. It's what we do, it's what we love to do.

[00:16:10] Scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put conversation in the subject line, and I'll connect you with the right member of my team. Until next time, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.