There is a career-change fantasy that goes like this. You do a lot of introspection. You take a personality test or three. You read some books. You think hard about who you really are. And then, with clarity, you plan the move. Announce the change. Execute the plan.
That is not how it happens. Not for anyone.
Herminia Ibarra, a professor now at London Business School, spent years interviewing people going through career transitions — mid-life pivots, academics moving into industry, corporate professionals leaving to start companies, women returning to work after breaks. Her book Working Identity (2003, updated 2023) traces what they actually did.
Her finding is uncomfortable if you were hoping for a plan.
Successful career-changers, she found, did not plan first and then act. They acted first and figured out what they wanted through the acting. Their careers changed the way puzzles get solved by turning them over in your hands — not the way essays get written from an outline.
Three things most career advice gets wrong, going by what Ibarra actually watched people do:
It says: know yourself, then act. Ibarra says: act, then know yourself.
The introspective approach assumes there is a “true self” waiting to be discovered inside you, and that once you find it, you will know what to do. Ibarra found that people who spent months in introspection tended to stay stuck. They developed clarity about their current self — but the next self, the one on the other side of the transition, could not be introspected into being. It had to be tried on.
The people who moved forward were those who ran small experiments. A weekend consulting gig. A night class. Coffee with someone doing the thing they were curious about. Each experiment was cheap. Each one produced data. The data slowly reshaped who they thought they wanted to be.
It says: pick a direction and commit. Ibarra says: hold several directions in mind, and test them.
Career advice tends to prize commitment. Pick a lane. But Ibarra observed that the most successful career-changers held two or three possible selves in mind simultaneously, for years — testing each through side projects, conversations, small commitments. They were not indecisive. They were experimenting. Ibarra calls this holding possible selves — plural on purpose.
Commitment came later, once the data was in.
It says: your past experience limits you. Ibarra says: your past experience is the platform you experiment from.
Many people entering a career transition feel that their existing experience is baggage — the wrong background, the wrong industry, the wrong training. Ibarra found the opposite. The people who transitioned successfully treated their past as a platform — a set of skills, credentials, and networks that made experiments cheaper. Every experiment leveraged some part of what they had built, even when the new direction was quite different.
Your marketing career at a bank is not something to escape. It is what makes it cheap for you to run an experiment as a marketing consultant to a fintech startup on the side.
If you are stuck between “who I have been” and “who I want to become,” Ibarra’s insight is not to think harder about it. It is to run a small experiment.
Two rules for a good one:
- It should be cheap. Cheap in money, cheap in time, cheap in ego. Something you can walk away from without loss.
- It should generate real data. Not opinions from friends. Not internet articles. Actual experience of doing the thing.
Then run the experiment. See how you feel doing it. See how you feel a week later. Then run another one, slightly different.
Your ikigai will not be discovered in your head. It will be arrived at, three or four experiments in.
Further reading
- Ibarra, Herminia (2003). Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Harvard Business School Press.
- Ibarra, Herminia (2023). Working Identity, Updated Edition. Harvard Business Review Press.
- Ibarra, Herminia & Barbulescu, Roxana (2010). “Identity as narrative: Prevalence, effectiveness, and consequences of narrative identity work in macro work role transitions.” Academy of Management Review, 35(1): 135–154.