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After 40 Years in Business, Am I Still Relevant? · Beyond Expertise

• 0:01
  Eric Dickmann: Welcome to Beyond Expertise, a podcast about identity reinvention for professionals ready to explore who they are beyond their titles and careers.
• 0:11
  Eric Dickmann: I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
• 0:13
  Eric Dickmann: Let's get ready to go beyond expertise After decades of building experience, judgment, and professional credibility, why does it sometimes feel harder to establish my value?
• 0:25
  Eric Dickmann: Is experience becoming less relevant, or are the ways I demonstrate and measure relevance changing?
• 0:33
  Eric Dickmann: I left the corporate world in 2019 to start my own fractional CMO consulting business.
• 0:39
  Eric Dickmann: And I think about when I come into a company they honestly don't know me.
• 0:43
  Eric Dickmann: They may have seen my LinkedIn profile, a resume, a proposal that I sent them, but what they really count on is my years of experience, my discernment, my expertise, my knowledge.
• 0:55
  Eric Dickmann: All of that becomes relevant to them.
• 0:58
  Eric Dickmann: And my relevance is tied to that professional identity as an independent consultant.
• 1:04
  Eric Dickmann: If I was just some guy off the street, I would have no relevance to this organization because I wouldn't be tied to any kind of professional identity.
• 1:14
  Eric Dickmann: And I think the challenge is that as we grow older, as we grow in our careers and our lives, with so much of our relevance tied to that position, tied to the companies that we work for, when we decide at some point in life that we wanna focus on other areas of our lives, all of the sudden that relevance can start to evaporate, and that's certainly something that I've seen turning 60.
• 1:41
  Eric Dickmann: I think about my early career.
• 1:44
  Eric Dickmann: Fresh out of college, I had a lot of enthusiasm.
• 1:47
  Eric Dickmann: I really wanted to be a contributor, but I simply didn't have the experience, I didn't have the knowledge, I didn't have the expertise that I would need to be a valuable contributor.
• 1:58
  Eric Dickmann: I didn't have the relevance to the organization because I was a new hire.
• 2:03
  Eric Dickmann: I was somebody who was at the very bottom of the ladder working my way up.
• 2:08
  Eric Dickmann: And with each promotion, with each new assigned task and area of responsibility, my knowledge began to grow.
• 2:16
  Eric Dickmann: And I can certainly remember sitting around a conference table early in my career wanting very much to interject, to give my opinion, to share my thoughts, but knowing that I simply did not have the expertise, the discernment, the knowledge to be a valuable contributor.
• 2:33
  Eric Dickmann: I didn't have the relevance to others in the room because I simply hadn't earned it yet And as my roles continued to increase and I was given more responsibility, more access to information, more ability to make decisions, my relevance within the organization started to grow.
• 2:50
  Eric Dickmann: And that relevance is really tied very closely with those professional identities.
• 2:55
  Eric Dickmann: And I think about that now as I'm a consultant.
• 2:58
  Eric Dickmann: Look, I have a successful consulting business.
• 3:00
  Eric Dickmann: I work with clients today, and I think I bring a lot of value to the table, but I can see that I'm an outsider.
• 3:08
  Eric Dickmann: I know that my relevance is tied to a package of expertise and experience that I've gained over the years, but it's not about me personally.
• 3:17
  Eric Dickmann: And I think as I've gotten older, I've really had this hunger to have more of my relevance tied to who I am as a person, not to my professional identity.
• 3:27
  Eric Dickmann: And I wonder whether you've struggled with that as well.
• 3:30
  Eric Dickmann: I've talked to people who have been laid off suddenly from a job, something that they were very proud of, a company that they were very proud to work for, and all of the sudden they're sitting at home wondering what to do next, and they're feeling this real lack of relevance in their lives because so much of their identity had been tied up in the job, in the company that they worked for.
• 3:52
  Eric Dickmann: And I understand that.
• 3:54
  Eric Dickmann: And while I'm still working, while I'm still trying to provide value as an independent consultant, I also feel that lack of relevance that comes from not working for a big company anymore and not having my identity tied up in that kind of a career.
• 4:11
  Eric Dickmann: As I'm recording this, we are in a tremendous time of change.
• 4:16
  Eric Dickmann: AI is taking the world by storm.
• 4:20
  Eric Dickmann: It seems like we're getting new tools released every day.
• 4:23
  Eric Dickmann: And I think in every situation that I've been working in recently, I can see how AI is completely changing how companies are working and how they're thinking about work.
• 4:36
  Eric Dickmann: This is supposed to be the pinnacle of my career, the high point when I have put in years and years of work.
• 4:43
  Eric Dickmann: I have developed lots of experience, lots of expertise, lots of discernment in my field, which is marketing.
• 4:51
  Eric Dickmann: Yet I'm watching all around me where the tools and the landscape are changing dramatically.
• 4:57
  Eric Dickmann: And I'm a technologist.
• 4:59
  Eric Dickmann: I love this stuff, and I try very hard to keep up with it.
• 5:03
  Eric Dickmann: But not only do I have to keep up with what's changing, but the work itself is changing and how people view the work.
• 5:11
  Eric Dickmann: And that becomes complicated when my experience, when my discernment, when my relevance is so tied up into 40 years of career history, and now we're seeing tools and technologies that some people feel can replace that for the cost of a monthly subscription.
• 5:29
  Eric Dickmann: And that's a real challenge.
• 5:31
  Eric Dickmann: And I think if you're anything like me and you're still navigating the workplace, this is something that you've been thinking about too.
• 5:39
  Eric Dickmann: It can be a tremendously unsettling time.
• 5:42
  Eric Dickmann: I've spent so much of my career helping companies adapt to new technologies, and now with AI, we're living through this enormous shift, and part of me finds this incredibly exciting.
• 5:53
  Eric Dickmann: But it also raises a serious question.
• 5:56
  Eric Dickmann: If technology can increasingly do things that took me decades to learn, what exactly is the experience I've accumulated worth?
• 6:05
  Eric Dickmann: These are questions that I struggle with Because if so much of my relevance was tied to those years of experience and the knowledge that I accumulated, and now maybe some of that is not worth what it was in the past, how do I then find relevance in this next phase of my life?
• 6:21
  Eric Dickmann: You know, I was recently reading something by Arthur Brooks, and he talks about fluid intelligence and the ability to solve novel problems, whereas crystallized intelligence draws on accumulated knowledge and experience.
• 6:34
  Eric Dickmann: Brooks argues is that learning to rely more on that accumulated wisdom and then teaching it can help people navigate the second half of their professional lives.
• 6:44
  Eric Dickmann: And I really like that idea because it suggests that maybe the goal isn't to keep proving that I can do everything like I did or needed to do at 35.
• 6:54
  Eric Dickmann: Maybe it's to figure out how to use what I've learned in ways that make more sense at 60.
• 7:00
  Eric Dickmann: But honestly, I also have some resistance to this idea that he introduced because I've spent my life solving problems and building things, and I'm not sure I'm ready to just sit on the sidelines and become the old wiser guy dispensing advice So I think that Brooks has an interesting framework, and it does raise questions about the next phase of my work I can see how all of this plays out in my work as a fractional CMO.
• 7:25
  Eric Dickmann: You know, I once was responsible for influencing decisions because I had organizational authority.
• 7:32
  Eric Dickmann: I had teams.
• 7:33
  Eric Dickmann: I had budget responsibility.
• 7:35
  Eric Dickmann: I was the decision-maker.
• 7:38
  Eric Dickmann: But now, as a fractional CMO, what my knowledge, what my experience, what my discernment is most valuable for is really mentoring less experienced leaders.
• 7:48
  Eric Dickmann: They might use tools that I'm not familiar with.
• 7:51
  Eric Dickmann: They may try techniques that I don't know.
• 7:54
  Eric Dickmann: But learning when to offer a recommendation and when to ask a better question is oftentimes, I think, where I really have the most relevance in the organization.
• 8:04
  Eric Dickmann: When you think about consultants or outside experts, what are they usually brought in for?
• 8:09
  Eric Dickmann: They're usually brought in to challenge the status quo, to bring in an outsider's opinion, to look at things maybe through a different lens because biases can develop inside an organization.
• 8:21
  Eric Dickmann: And I really believe that these years of experience that I've had and the relevance that I've built are being able to ask those better questions, to be able to challenge ideas and really help mentor people along.
• 8:34
  Eric Dickmann: Maybe I'm not the execution person that I once was, but that doesn't matter because my experience can be applied in a new and different ways.
• 8:43
  Eric Dickmann: And that's really what Beyond Expertise is all about.
• 8:46
  Eric Dickmann: That's why I started this channel because I really wanted to talk through these issues with people like you, maybe others who are experiencing these same kind of challenges in their own life, in their own career.
• 8:58
  Eric Dickmann: Because I think in this particular case, our old measure of relevance, having authority, making decisions, controlling outcomes, being needed, is really changing.
• 9:09
  Eric Dickmann: I understand that relevance in this next chapter of life may require the willingness to become a beginner again, even when I'm accustomed to being an expert.
• 9:20
  Eric Dickmann: That's tough.
• 9:21
  Eric Dickmann: But it's a challenge that I'm willing to take on in this phase of my life because I want to remain professionally engaged, but I'm not assuming that every opportunity must resemble a previous executive role.
• 9:33
  Eric Dickmann: I know that's not my future, and so I don't want to set up my identity to expect that.
• 9:39
  Eric Dickmann: I want to continue to learn, particularly with AI tools, but I don't want to make the assumption that my accumulated knowledge and experience is somehow obsolete because I don't for a minute believe that it is.
• 9:52
  Eric Dickmann: I just believe that it's going to be applied differently going forward.
• 9:57
  Eric Dickmann: And one of the things that I really wanna do is create different kinds of relationships and conversations and influence outside traditional corporate structures.
• 10:07
  Eric Dickmann: So much of my professional life has been confined to the four walls of a corporate environment that I'm really looking to branch out into new areas to build new relationships, to meet new people, and to explore things beyond that professional identity inside a corporate structure.
• 10:23
  Eric Dickmann: So the question I'm left with, am I still relevant at 60?
• 10:26
  Eric Dickmann: Maybe it's not whether I'm still relevant.
• 10:30
  Eric Dickmann: Maybe it's whether I'm willing to change how I define relevance.
• 10:34
  Eric Dickmann: You know, for most of my career, I could measure my contribution through the work that I was doing, the responsibilities I had, and the results I helped produce.
• 10:43
  Eric Dickmann: Now I just turned 60, and I'm trying to figure out what contribution looks like when those familiar measures aren't necessarily the right ones anymore.
• 10:52
  Eric Dickmann: And look, I don't think that means abandoning ambition or pretending that professional achievement no longer matters.
• 10:59
  Eric Dickmann: It absolutely matters to me.
• 11:01
  Eric Dickmann: But perhaps there's more than one way to be valuable, and that's what I'm curious about, and I'm wondering if you've experienced something similar.
• 11:09
  Eric Dickmann: If you've stepped away from a leadership role, changed careers, or you've simply started thinking differently about work as you've gotten older, do you miss the work itself, or do you miss the sense of importance that came with it?
• 11:22
  Eric Dickmann: I'd really like to hear what you think because these are the kinds of questions that I'm pondering, and honestly, it's the reason that I started this channel.
• 11:32
  Eric Dickmann: Thanks for listening to Beyond Expertise.
• 11:35
  Eric Dickmann: You can find show notes, resources, and links mentioned during this episode at podcast.ericdickman.com.
• 11:43
  Eric Dickmann: If this conversation resonated with you, I hope you'll join me again next time as we continue exploring what it means to reinvent ourselves beyond our careers, titles, and expertise.