The problem

I am a successful businessman approaching the end of my career but haunted by a sense of failure and unfulfilled potential. About five years ago, I was in the running to be CEO of my company, a well-known, mid-ranking multinational. I missed out but stayed on and worked with the new man. Now, as I get closer to retirement, I can feel myself getting sidelined. I fear that nobody pays much attention to me any more and nobody will remember me when I’m retired – certainly nobody outside the company. I once read that “all political careers end in failure”. Do you think is true of all business careers as well? Director, male, 57 Lucy's Answer Yes, nearly all business careers end in failure. They can end in big, spectacular failure – like, say, the career of Tony Hayward – or they can end in little anonymous failure – like yours. Even if you had become CEO things might not have ended much better for you. In fact they might have ended a lot worse. If your company had started doing badly, as so often happens, your failure would have been public and bruising, and would have eclipsed any previous successes that you had had along the way. Even if the company had flourished, your successor would have claimed all of your success as his own. At best you might have got a sterile suite of meeting rooms named after you. But as you never made it to the top, the failure is all inside your own head – no one else will care one way or another. Given that the problem is thus entirely of your own making, most readers seem to think you’re pathetic to be entertaining such self-indulgent thoughts. But I’m rather more sympathetic. The more ambitious one is, the more painful failure seems, because the gap between what you hoped for and what you got is unmanageably large. You have worked for the best part of 40 years at something that you thought was important at the time. But now you find that none of it matters because no one remembers and it doesn’t amount to anything anyway. That hurts. You could deploy various mental tricks to help you feel better. Compare yourself to really unsuccessful people. Think of how much money you’ve earned. But I doubt you’ll succeed in fooling yourself. Instead I suggest you force yourself to stop thinking about success altogether. Asking yourself if you are a success or a failure is as bad as asking yourself whether you are happy or miserable. Such thinking always ends in tears. The only way to deal with these horrid truths is denial – to distract yourself with other thoughts. I imagine this will be hard: if every day you are being shunted further into a siding, your feeling of failure will only grow. I’m aware this isn’t what you were asking, but I think you should retire now, if you can afford it. That way you prevent yourself from spending your last years in this company in increasing obscurity. And you may well find that starting doing something new at 57 is easier than it will be five years later.

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