I ate my career for dinner

My best recent meals out have been at a couple of independent restaurants* serving British ‘plates’. Disrupting the tradition of the three-course dinner, the plates vary in size from a bite to a substantial portion. You make an initial choice and the dishes come out when they’re ready, in whatever sequence and combination that creates. You can make some further choices, if you’ve got the appetite and space for more or different.

As the menus are built around in-season ingredients, your options, too, change with time.

If a dish turns out to be not your sort of thing after all, it doesn’t matter so much – it was simply one among several, and not a single main-course choice that you had to go all in on.

You can be more experimental and less decisive. No need to choose between two options – have both!

You can have fish before, with and after meat, as I did last night. Anything goes.

I haven’t yet tested the system, but I bet you can have your pudding halfway through, if that’s what you feel like doing.

As someone who likes a lot of different foods, struggles with decisions, is somewhat impatient, soon bored, and more than happy to up-end tradition, this way of eating suits me down to the last mouthful.

After last night’s dinner, it struck me that ‘plates’ would also be a good metaphor for my career. I’ve always eaten like this, career-wise, with dishes of varying size, with complementary and competing flavours, chosen according to availability and appetite. And although my ‘plates’ model arose from necessity – and I still wonder whether traditional dining would have been more satisfying – perhaps it actually suited my work appetite.

I was reminded, too, of Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott’s prediction of the death of the three-stage life (education, work, retirement), and its replacement by a ‘multi-stage life’ with ‘numerous sequencing possibilities […] shaped by individual preferences and circumstances’.** As they note, some of us, chiefly women, have been living this kind of working life for some time now.

Is the three-course dinner going the same way as the three-stage life?

If so, that’s fine by me. On both fronts, I feel enriched, agentic, and pleasantly full.

And while I may be enjoying my career pudding now, I don’t rule out going back in for another savoury plate or two before I call it a day and settle the bill.

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What about you? Room for another plate? Wondering what to choose? Ready for dessert? Or another appetiser? Up for a bit of experimental sequencing?

Perhaps you’re slogging diligently through a traditional main course that you got bored with halfway through, and wondering if you have to finish it?

I help people sit up and sort out their career menu choices at 50+

So get in touch if you need some help with that.

* The Goat on the Roof, Newbury, and Belzan, Liverpool

** Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, The 100-year life: living and working in an age of longevity, Bloomsbury, London, 2016.

Photo: Belzan, Liverpool