A young friend of mine called me up the other day. He is in the venture capital business and feels he has reached what young people call “a career plateau.” Maybe he has, though in my experience, people his age — he’s about 30 — have outsize ideas about where they should be in their careers at that point, and how many underlings they should have scurrying around them in fear, and especially what they should get paid.

What young people call a “career plateau” is what a lot of older people call, simply, a “career.” But when you’re young, you don’t always realize that life isn’t just one big promotion after another, either in the career sense or the metaphorical sense.