Pivotal Moments
Last weekend, I was chatting to some pals of mine and the topic turned to the idea of Pivotal Moments. At some point, they said, there must be a clear dividing point where your life turns on a single point decision. The point in the movie of your life where you know your character’s defining arc has kicked off. My friends offered plenty of examples - switching out of a career track you’ve spent your life training for, moving overseas, quitting your job and deciding to walk the length of the country.
But when the question came to me… I couldn’t think of one.
Life has been a linear track for me, almost embarrassingly so. I’ve lived in the same city all my life. I got an Engineering degree at the same university as my dad. I got an internship, then a full time offer at the same place I had the internship, and I’ve stayed there ever since. Beyond familiar life milestones like graduating university (the ceremony delayed a year because of the pandemic) and moving out (to a place about a 30 minute drive away), nothing pops out as an archetypal Pivotal Moment. Everything I can think of seems so painfully mundane.
The metaphor I used was a Sankey diagram1 . This is a graph showing changes in state between one moment or another, showing the outcomes of particular actions or events. The idea I was getting at was the choices you make early in your adult life, right when you get your first real taste of agency, end up defining (if not dictating) the path of your future choices as well. Essentially, I’m sitting on the ’top’ of the Sankey diagram, always taking the highest probability route and ending up without any obvious place to define as a pivotal moment. Everything just seems like an predictable and obvious byproduct of the predictable and obvious things I’d done before then. Of course saying all this out loud makes it all sound quite fatalistic. Nothing’s telling you that you need to make the highest probability action just because that’s what you did before.
Speaking of not doing the most predictable thing.. I’ve been reading a book all about that recently2. The most valuable idea in there I think is that agency isn’t about picking out one pivotal action that will change your life completely once you do it (and then if it fails, permanently thinking of yourself as the Type Of Guy who can’t do pivotal things) but rather trying a lot of things, taking whatever shortcuts you can, and knowing when to fold and pivot when necessary, realising that things don’t need a greater than 99% chance of success to be worth doing. Will I be able to act upon this advice? I think so… Watch this space, and perhaps in a year’s time I’ll have a proper Pivotal Moment to look back on.
I actually didn’t know the specific name for this type of graph at the time but the people I was talking with were able to figure it out just from my description, which gives you an idea of the sort of people I was hanging out with. ↩︎
There’s a great interview with the authors that covers some of the angles the book (good and useful as it is) doesn’t cover which is definitely worth reading, especially if you’re a little leery of the way Agency is used as a social media buzzword. ↩︎