Most partners in top City firms do not lack for evidence that they are doing “well”. The work is serious, the clients demanding, and the remuneration – in any reasonable sense – extraordinary. And yet that does not always settle the question many find themselves returning to when the diary finally goes quiet and the laptop stays shut for a few days over the Christmas break.
If you have even a faint sense that something needs to change – whether that means how you work, where you work, or simply how you approach the next phase – it is tempting to do one of two things: ignore it, or try to turn it into something manageable. Both are understandable. But ignoring it rarely helps; and reaching too quickly for a set of next steps can mean you act before you have worked out what is actually wrong. Sometimes the most useful step is simply to name the thing properly.
The Christmas break is one of the few points in the year when you can step back far enough to see the shape of your working life, rather than just the next deadline. With that in mind, the five questions below are a way of taking stock. If you are content, they should confirm it. If you are not, they may help you work out why – and what, if anything, needs to change.
There is a difference between coping and being content. Plenty of high performers learn to operate at speed for so long that “fine” becomes a default setting, rather than a truthful answer. Over the next few days, try to separate outward success from inward experience. When you think about going back, do you feel a steady sense of purpose, or a dull tightening in the chest? Are you looking forward to the work, or bracing for it? If you are functioning brilliantly but feeling strangely absent from your own life, that is worth taking seriously.
Vague dissatisfaction is hard to act on. It becomes easier once you can name the specific irritants. It might be the endless internal meetings that exist largely to prove they took place. It might be the politics of committees, billing targets, performance theatre, or the relentless pressure to be “on” all the time. It might be the sense that you spend more time managing the system than practising your craft.
Write down the three moments from the last month that made you most frustrated, most resentful, or most tired. Then ask what those moments have in common. Often the pattern is clearer than the story you have been telling yourself.
Some things can be fixed. Others are built into the system.
A situational problem is one you can meaningfully change from where you are. If what you need is better delegation, firmer boundaries, a different internal role, a reduction in the work you accept, or a more selective approach to clients, then it may be possible to adjust course without changing firms. The question is whether you are willing to do what the adjustment requires, and whether your environment will support it.
A structural problem is harder to fix. If the issue is the underlying model – the hierarchy, the incentives, the expectation of constant availability, the trade of personal life for status – then no amount of tactical self-help will fully address it. You can be very good at coping and still end up living a life that does not quite feel like yours.
This is where the questions become slightly uncomfortable, because they are not abstract. They are about missed birthdays and anniversaries, about how often you arrive home too late to be properly present, about how much of your week is dominated by work even when you are not working. It is also about relationships with spouses, partners, children and friends, and the slow accumulation of small absences that eventually add up to a bigger one.
Equally, it is worth naming what you are getting in return: the intellectual challenge, the status, the money, the sense of being at the centre of things, the pleasure of working with brilliant people. There is no virtue in pretending those things do not matter to you. The point is simply to ask, with adult honesty, whether the trade-off still makes sense.
This is probably the most revealing question. Assume your next year looks much like your last, with the same cadence and expectations, the same internal dynamics and the same diary pressure. How do you feel when you picture that?
If the answer is broadly positive, you may have your clarity. If the answer is a heavy “I cannot do this again”, then you do not necessarily need a resignation letter. You need to admit that you are open to something else. You need to allow the possibility that the next phase of your career could involve the same calibre of work, but a different way of practising, and a different relationship with your own time.
The point of these questions is not to push you towards any particular conclusion, but to give you the clarity to decide what you want next. Between Christmas and New Year, one of the most important decisions you can make is whether you continue to treat your career as something that happens to you, rather than something you shape.