Our society worships achievement and we’re programmed to think it comes early. We make a few mistakes on the way to arriving at the midlife career and success rut. Here are some of those:

• The rate of learning & drive falls precipitously: Remember at the start of your career you understood your lack of experience and what it meant to become an effective contributor — you learnt about your environment and developed skills at a furious pace. Till your mid-20s the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for complex functions such as planning and organizing, problem-solving, memory, attention and inhibition is yet to fully develop fully. Did you know that skills, creativity and talents develop later in life through the 30s but more through 40s & 50s? Have a look at yourself – the skills you acquired in the 40s are they at the same pace? What about your drive? 
• The belief that success & time are a straight line, with compounding interest: We believe that time is a straight line on which money, success, interest everything compounds. So if you were successful at 20, you will be that much more successful at 30 at the rate of 10% pa. This is because for most of us success is mostly the equivalent of money. It sounds stupid but that is how companies hand out raises, that is how employees evaluate their own performance. 
• Decision & risk avoidance peaks: A study by Laurence Minsky & Julia Tang Peters shows that we are most susceptible to making decisions that lead to less-than-successful outcomes between the ages of 40 and 48. One big reason is that you now want to stay in your comfort zone rather than setting new directions. As you got into your 30s and 40s there was a shift in personal and family responsibilities. With higher positions and incomes — you have more to lose if you make a mistake. So essentially you are making decisions that play it safe and where you still feel in control. You have begun to overestimate the risks of change and underestimate the risks of preserving the status quo. 

One day without warning midlife arrives and you start feeling undervalued and overworked. You have years of hard work behind you in managing and producing results. You want to be seen as successful but are consumed by the taint of failure.  This feeling causes a large proportion of very talented, and experienced, individuals shunted out from the best opportunities in professional life. It sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy amplifying and deepening the mid-life crisis. But we forget that people acquire different skills throughout life. Motivation and drive vary. At mid-life you are focusing on maintaining status quo and bringing incremental change. We forget different people quite simply peak at different times. The danger is not realizing this shift in your own mindset.