What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How successful people become even more successful

by Marshall Goldsmith

There’s no denying that money matters in everyone’s career calculus. But at some point, the top performers achieve a level of financial comfort, however tenuous, when other considerations begin to dominate. As economist Lester Thurow pointed out in Building Wealth, free agents must wrestle with the paradox that the economic value of their experience falls rather than rises in the course of a career. The shelf life of knowledge, especially technical knowledge, is continuously shrinking. And so free agents respond by moving on to new challenges that enhance their knowledge and let them outpace the shrinking value of their experience—and in turn reward them with more satisfaction and, quite possibly, more money.