Ford CEO Jim Farley says his banker father gave him the best career advice he ever got — but it was also a warning

His father warned that one day someone would “tap you on your shoulder” and the career would be over. Farley needed to make sure his identity was bigger than his job.

It may have been difficult advice to follow given Farley’s family history. His father was a banker, but his grandfather was an early Ford factory worker whose job helped put Farley’s mother through college.

Farley was obsessed with cars from an early age, a passion that would eventually shape his career. He could have joined Ford much sooner.

After graduate school, the automaker offered him a financial planning job working on the F-Series, but Farley chose Toyota-owned Lexus instead because the role was in product planning. The decision wasn’t popular with his Ford-connected family, but the Lexus job gave him the chance to work on an entire vehicle rather than a single component.

“My dad fought in World War II, so working for Toyota was, you know, not a very popular move in my family,” Farley told T. Rowe Price’s The Long View podcast. “Actually, it was kind of, you know, a serious thing.”

Farley spent nearly two decades at Toyota before eventually joining Ford. Yet after building a career around his lifelong passion for cars, he said they no longer motivate him professionally.

“I love cars, but that’s not my job anymore,” he told Rolling Stone. “What I’m passionate about is the sustainability of the company.”

His path suggests he took his father’s advice without giving up on his passion for cars. Work didn’t have to define him, but he could still build a career around something he cared deeply about.

Outside of work, Farley said some of his favorite moments are spent with family, cooking or even doing laundry. He also spends 30 to 60 minutes a day building racing-car models, which he described as a way to disconnect.

Switching off may actually help at work

Farley’s example suggests that creating some separation between work and other parts of life doesn’t have to come at the expense of professional ambition. In fact, switching off from work may actually help people perform better when they return.

There’s research to back it up.

In a 2017 meta-analysis, researchers Johannes Wendsche and Andrea Lohmann-Haislah of Germany’s Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health examined data from more than 38,000 employees to understand what happens when people detach from work during their time off. They concluded that this “psychological detachment” was linked to less exhaustion, better sleep and better recovery. They also found a small but notable link to better work performance.

Disconnecting has arguably become even more difficult since then. A 2023 review of 159 studies by Temple University researchers Anastasiia Agolli and Brian Holtz described contemporary workplaces as being characterized by “increasing job demands, extensive use of communication technologies, blurred boundaries between work and private lives and growing uncertainty.”

Even under those conditions, the researchers found that psychological detachment remained important for employee health and well-being and could also affect job performance.