Has your career peaked?
What a horrifying question—but it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past week in the wake of Taylor Swift’s latest release, The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, the extended version of her 2025 album.
Like many of Swift’s releases, Encore received, let’s say, violently mixed reviews. Some fans love her recent glitter-gel-pen bops. Others yearn for the lyricism of her earlier releases. And a fair number of critics feel very comfortable claiming the singer-songwriter has peaked.
Frankly, I find the latter to be such a strange and loaded thing to say about someone else’s career, let alone the career of one of the most decorated artists of all time. But it’s also an opportunity to reflect on how we talk about success—other people’s and our own.
We’re all familiar with peaking, I believe; the insult is commonplace enough. “They peaked in high school,” for instance, is the fastest way to dismiss a person you don’t care to compare yourself to. The term also carries some heavy undertones: They stopped achieving. They settled. They’re past their prime.
And most of us, when we hear “peaked,” just accept the premise, even though it relies heavily on speculation. To claim someone has peaked is to essentially say, I looked into a crystal ball, and they’ll never do better than they already have.
Wild, if true.
But more than that, the concept of “peaking” requires us to accept that life is linear, which it isn’t. If you’ve ever been sick for a long time, been in a long-term relationship, or trained for a marathon, you know this. You’ve experienced how everything—health, love, fitness—rises, plateaus, falls, and sometimes gets back up again.
Our existence is a summation of peaks and valleys, but all of it, even the low points, is part of the larger story.
Our careers work like that, too, even if we often approach them through a ladder-climbing mindset. When you look back over a decades-long career, it’s common to see career changes, projects that flopped, layoffs, breaks, and other seasons that don’t quite align with peaking’s central question: Why aren’t you higher yet?
And that’s not because everyone peaked before their messiest era. It’s because there was a blip, a downcycle. Then, lo and behold, things ramped up again.
I think it’s interesting to view careers as a body of work rather than an upward trajectory. If you’re interviewing for jobs right now, you’re likely experiencing that anyway. When a hiring manager says, “Tell me about a time when…,” you don’t pull your answer from one job. You pull from everywhere. Whatever fits.
Everything you’ve touched, built, or created is part of your career narrative.
Perhaps the best way for me to explain this is through my own career. As a writer, I’m sure there’s a world where I could get hung up constantly trying to elevate my writing. I could worry that 2024 Beth wrote more beautifully than 2026 Beth. That I’ve somehow “lost” my voice along the way.
But my goal is never to produce my next best thing. Aiming for that kind of perfection is a pretty reliable path to writer’s block.
I’m always just writing to get the thought out—sometimes badly. Sometimes in ways that make me cringe on edit or, worse, after publication.
And then I do it again. And again. And again.
And guess what? Again.
All of it, even the bad stuff, is part of this larger body of work: who I am, what I’ve made, what I’ve learned, and what I might make next.
The thing about “peaking” is that it falsely leads you to believe you’ll know when you’ve done your last great thing, before it all goes downhill.
But you won’t. And you won’t be able to spot when someone else has either.
It’s kinder—and perhaps more accurate—to assume the universe has a few surprises left, and that whatever you’re doing right now matters, even if it isn’t a step up.
