The recent departure of the columnist Charles Blow from The New York Times op-ed pages was a disappointment to many who, like me, appreciated his heartfelt approach born of personal experiences rather than the conventional mandarin pundit route. Blow’s career reminded me of one of the great unsung 20th-century inventors, Marius Mignol, who developed the model for the first steel-belted radial tire for Michelin in the 1930s.

Mignol, like Blow, was a graphic artist who advanced through creative work. He invented a circular slide rule for currency calculations that management considered so ingenious Michelin transferred him to R&D. Blow, for his part, was the Times’ top data graphics specialist who originally proposed to write graphics-enhanced opinion pieces but was instead offered a conventional text column at which he excelled without formal preparation — as Mignol did in engineering.

In his final column Blow wrote that he “never wanted to be a writer. I was an information designer. Becoming a columnist, like so many things in my career, was a bit of a fluke.” As was Mignol’s in becoming an engineer. Each brought an outsider’s eye to his respective field, yet each proved to be well prepared by unconventional experience.

Filling Structural Holes

The sociologist Ronald Burt has explained this kind of creativity: filling a structural hole. According to Burt, organizations have needs of which they are not aware — opportunities that people with fresh eyes may be best able to seize.

Take Otto Bettmann, a German contemporary of Mignol, who was a cultural historian and Bach scholar who earned a Master of Library Science degree and rose to be head librarian of the Prussian state museum system before losing his position in a Nazi anti-Semitic purge. Emigrating to the United States with trunks of photographic images of artworks (thankfully considered worthless by Nazi customs officials) and a classification system he had developed, Bettmann arrived just as the burgeoning world of illustrated magazines (think Life and Look) urgently needed pictures. Bettmann shifted readily from bureaucrat to entrepreneur, founding the first important American stock photography service, the Bettmann Archive, which was acquired by Bill Gates’s image company Corbis in 1995 and is now part of Getty Images.

As a science editor I saw that some of the most brilliant researchers had pivoted their way through several careers. Seymour Benzer, a Caltech biologist is one of the best-known examples. The subject of Jonathan Weiner’s prizewinning book Time, Love, Memory, Benzer received his PhD in solid-state physics and had become one of the most promising young researchers in semiconductors when he encountered the great physicist Ernest Schrödinger’s moonlighting classic What is Life? and took a leave to retrain himself in molecular biology at the leading laboratories of Europe and the United States. After a decade in the field, he abandoned his research program and turned to the work that made his reputation in a second career, the molecular genetics of fruit fly behavior. 

Excel, Then Start Over

Working with established scientists, I noticed a pattern. Each new generation of PhD’s has a set of skills honed with their mentors and begins to publish enthusiastically. In the first five years (often as postdoctoral fellows) they get to know their fields thoroughly. In the next five years, they take their work to the cutting edge.

Some fields can fruitfully occupy researchers this way for many years beyond that second five. But in others, the value of their contributions slims even though the number of papers they publish may even accelerate because institutional science rewards the volume of citations — a trend the historian Jerry Muller has called the tyranny of metrics.

And with the growth of laboratories as science infrastructure comes the unwelcome responsibility to push around ever more paper. I recall a visit to a West Coast geophysicist in 1980s. He had written a provocative paper outside his silo that I thought could be expanded as a book. He said he would like to, but had to think of the graduate students dependent on his attention to assure a flow of grants supporting his laboratory.

Without realizing, I was amid a series of pivots of my own. I had begun my career as a historian of modern Germany, with interests that proved uncompetitive in the brutal academic humanities job market of the 1970s. Leaving teaching, I worked on projects in pandemic history and health care policy, which in turn led to a career in publishing. After my encounter with the geophysicist, I saw that I was in that second five-year stage myself and had to pivot. My history background plus my science and technology publishing experience helped me launch a new phase as historian of technology. And in autumn 2024 I returned full circle to teaching history.

Reimagining Careers

Three lessons emerge from stories of pivots. The first — represented by Blow and Mignol — is that organizations would be wise to scout internally for employees who have excelled in their fields but have limited further prospects for growth and could help fill structural holes from within. The second, exemplified by Benzer, is that universities should return to the once-common enlightened policy of encouraging self-motivated researchers to follow their passion, unfashionable as that overused phrase has become.

The third is that we may have been imagining retirement all wrong. Maybe one should think of the default career as successions of pivots at 10- or 15-year intervals — or even shorter in a fast-moving field like information technology. The essential thing is to think of the pivot not as a radical shift, but rather an extension of the previous stage. 

Creative people, for their part, should emulate the 19th-century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, best known for his prints of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and a believer in regular changes not just of style but of name and residence.

When I was 50, I had published a universe of designs, but all I have done before the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75, I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80, you will see real progress. At 90, I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create — a dot, a line — will jump to life as never before.

While Hokusai did not live past 88, he had no need to challenge Methuselah for lasting renown. One of his Great Wave prints, which originally cost the price of a bowl of noodles, sold recently at auction for $2.75 million.