CHAPTER NINE

What’s Next?

IF YOU’VE BEEN engaged actively with this book, by now you’ll have given some real thought to your aptitudes and passions, to your attitudes and your current situation. Where do you go from here?

In planning your way forward, it’s important to remember the three core principles that are at the heart of my argument. First, your life is unique. You can learn from the experiences of other people, but you cannot and should not try to duplicate them. Second, you create your own life and you can re-create it. In doing that, your greatest resources are your own imagination and sense of possibility. Third, your life is organic, not linear. You can’t plan the whole of your life’s journey and you don’t need to. What you do need to plan are the next steps.

There’s an old joke about someone driving through the countryside looking for a village. He stops and asks a local man for directions. The man frowns and says, “If I was trying to get to that village, I wouldn’t start from here.” If you’re looking for your Element, you have to start where you are. You’ll find your way as long as you tune in to your own true north and follow your energy. Many people started their lives moving down one path only to move in an entirely different direction later.

Moving Forward by Going Back

As a writer and speaker, I get all sorts of unexpected invitations. In 2011, I was the guest speaker at the hundredth anniversary meeting of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathologists (USCAP) in San Antonio, Texas. I know nothing about pathology, by the way, and fortunately the organizers were aware of that. I was there to talk about innovation and creativity, which is as important in the field of pathology as in any other.

This was the largest gathering of physician pathologists in the world, with an attendance of almost four thousand professionals. My invitation to give a keynote to the conference as a non-professional in the field was unique in the history of the academy. It came about because the planning committee believed that creativity and discovering one’s passion are essential to selecting and training pathologists for a future that we cannot imagine.

I was originally invited to speak to USCAP by Dr. Jeffrey Myers, a leader in the field of pathology. After first getting a degree in biology and qualifying as an MD, he held appointments at Washington University School of Medicine and the University of Alabama. He then went to the renowned Mayo Medical School where for two years he led a team effort to promote innovation, and then relocated to the University of Michigan in 2006 where he is now a leading member of its own Medical Innovation Center. He speaks around the world to specialist scientific and medical conferences, is a leading member of professional societies, has published widely in scholarly journals and has received numerous awards and honors for his outstanding work and contributions to his field.

Dr. Myers didn’t have any of this in mind when he was in high school. As a teenager, a career in medicine in general and pathology in particular couldn’t have been further from his mind. His passion was rock music and his plan was to be in a rock band. And for quite a while he was. He played guitar and sang, partly because it was what he loved to do and partly because it filled a vacuum in his life, which at that point had no other direction. He did well at school, but often felt disengaged from the whole process.

He told me that he was “hardly a ‘rock star’ but definitely a directionless kid who did well in school but whose heart and head were elsewhere. If you had said to any of my classmates or rock and roll peers that I’d someday be a Mayo Clinic doctor they would have laughed hilariously.”

He eventually decided that he wasn’t likely to make it in music and applied to study biology at college. He went on to a career in pathology that he loves and in which he’s had an enormous impact.

“If I pause long enough to reflect on how the early knowledge of my calling in pathology expresses itself today, I see a rich blend of intimately associated experiences that keep me grounded in my Element. I discovered in my sixteen years at the Mayo Clinic that linking my passion for diagnostic pathology with opportunities in leadership and innovation is my moon shot! In 1992, I assumed a leadership post and served for ten years as Chair of Anatomic Pathology. It turned out to be a time during which I learned by making lots of mistakes. I was hotheaded and impatient. During that time I became a passionate advocate for patient safety and reducing errors in our discipline. Ultimately I calmed down and was able to change practice in ways that directly impacted the quality of the care and the service experience we offered to our providers and patients.

“After a decade I stepped down as Chair of Anatomic Pathology and into a new role as Chair of the Innovation Work Group that was charged with ‘expanding the culture and fostering an environment of clinical innovation at Mayo Clinic Rochester.’ Being able to influence the future of my discipline, at least locally, is part of what keeps me in my Element. To some extent I’m always looking for the next big thing, unsatisfied with today’s solutions. As long as I can combine diagnostic pathology with opportunities for continuous improvement, service excellence, and innovation in healthcare, I’m in!”

There’s an interesting coda to Jeff Myers’ story that was partly driven by our meeting in San Antonio. A few months after I spoke at the convention he went to a Jeff Beck concert. Shortly afterward he picked up a guitar for the first time in thirty-seven years. He realized that there was no reason not to return to the Element of his teenage years, and he drove to a regional guitar store and bought an Eric Clapton signature Stratocaster (“Blackie”) and a Marshall amplifier. “An advantage of the path I chose,” he told me, “is that I can now afford the guitars and equipment that were out of reach in my youth!” Together with two equally aged members of his department, he has laid the foundations of a band playing seventies and eighties rock/blues, including Cream, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. “For now we’re calling ourselves Lost in Processing. I decided I no longer had to choose between medicine and music—perhaps I could do both. So far I’m learning that it doesn’t detract from my career in medicine, while also discovering that I’m no better a musician than I was before!”

Jeffrey Myers’ experience confirms that you may have more than one Element and love them both equally. It also shows that sometimes the next step forward is to retrace a path that you thought you’d left far behind you. As I say, life is not linear.

Follow Your Spirit

Whatever your circumstances, you always have options. As many of the stories here have shown, you may be in the most extreme circumstances, but you can always choose to think, feel and act differently. The critical factor is to make a move—to take the next step. To do that you need to look inward as well as outward. You need to tune in to your self and be open to where your spirit may be pointing.

One of the clearest ways of knowing that you are not in your Element is if your spirit is constantly heavy. This is how photographer Chris Jordan once felt. There was a time, when he was a corporate lawyer, when every day felt “like sitting down and doing pages of long division, which is something I dread.” As soon as he started practicing law, he told me, “I had this horrible realization. I probably had it much earlier, but I wouldn’t allow myself to go there.”

The irony in Jordan’s case is that he found what he was truly passionate about while in law school. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the legal profession. Making a decision all too many make, he buried his desires so he could get his degree. “I had this whole series of false starts and failures up to then and I wanted to show myself and the people around me that I could stick with something. I chose the worst possible thing to stick with. I spent eleven years in a state of something very close to clinical depression as a corporate lawyer. From the very beginning it was totally unfulfilling to me. Not only did I feel I wasn’t contributing anything to the world, but in many cases it was directly contrary to my principles.”

Jordan’s work life was miserable, but his life outside of work was becoming increasingly meaningful. He started exploring what he could do with large format cameras in the evenings and weekends, and he found himself more and more drawn to it. He placed some of his photos in his office, and his law firm hung some of his pictures in their conference rooms. “Every now and then, people would come into my office and say, ‘Chris, why are you doing this? You could be having a kick-ass career as a photographer. Why are you a lawyer?’ I would laugh as though they were joking because I was scared to take the risk.”

Ultimately, though, Jordan realized that he was taking an even greater risk, one that finally pushed him out of the false comfort of quiet desperation. “As I got closer to forty, I began to fear not living my life. I feared becoming old and being filled with regret that I didn’t take the risk of living. That fear, instead of being a wall in front of me, was like a giant cowboy boot kicking my ass from behind. The thing I realized was that if I didn’t take the risk of living, I was guaranteed to fail. In the law firms I was working at I could see guys who had taken that route. They’d sit around having bitter conversations about how awful their lives were. I could hit the fast-forward button and see that I was headed there. I figured if I left the practice of law, I had at least a fifty-fifty chance.”

Jordan left his firm at the end of 2002 with a commitment to succeed in the field of photography. To make sure that he couldn’t go running back to law the first time things got difficult, he resigned from the Bar in January 2003. Living on his five-year-old son’s college fund (assuming he would be able to replenish that fund long before his son needed it), he set out to make a career of his passion. This would not prove to be easy. Shooting with an eight-by-ten camera was extremely expensive—“$25 every time you click the shutter”—and other equipment costs were terribly high. The college fund was gone by the fall, Jordan’s 401(k) didn’t last much longer, and his wife’s 401(k) money was gone by the summer of 2004. Certainly, someone more timid about making the most of his Element would have been seeking paralegal work or at the very least a part-time job at Starbucks by this point. Jordan, though, continued to believe that something was going to happen.

“I was pretty much on the mat and the referee had counted to two. But then I got a call from a gallery owner named Paul Kopeikin down in L.A. He said he’d seen my work and he wondered if I was going to be in L.A. anytime soon. I booked a flight that day.” Kopeikin loved Jordan’s photography and said he wanted to exhibit it the first chance he could. That turned out to be February 2005, which wouldn’t have been a terribly long wait if Jordan weren’t completely broke. The opportunity was too good to ignore, though, so Jordan and his wife signed up for a number of credit cards. “I just kept going. I knew I was going to have an audience for my work, so I really stepped it up. I flew all the way across the country to take one photograph of cell phones. By the time February came, we were something like $80,000 in credit card debt.”

The break Jordan envisioned arrived with the gallery showing Kopeikin arranged. He sold enough photographs at that February event to pay off everything he owed the credit card companies. Then a New York gallery did a show that gave Jordan a bit of a financial cushion, though he sank most of that into a benefit series and book about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

With the validation that came with the big sales and critical acclaim Jordan was now regularly receiving, he decided to follow his instincts and push his work in more ambitious directions. In the fall of 2006, he started on a series he called “Running the Numbers.” As Jordan describes it, “‘Running the Numbers’ looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone.”

This work was entirely different from anything Jordan had ever done before and, to his consternation, his inner circle was not impressed. “The first few people who saw the images gave me horrible responses. One of my most trusted advisors said, ‘This is not photography. It’s certainly not art. It’s a road to nowhere.’” Still, following a path that those who are truly in their Element so often follow, Jordan went with his gut. He released these photographs online and this was the first time his work went viral. In the spring of 2007, he was getting hundreds of thousands of hits on his website. He had to hire an assistant just to answer his e-mail. The series completely changed his profile as a photographer, reaching a far wider audience than he’d ever reached before.

“I’ve made it my practice to notice when I’m starting to feel comfortable doing a certain kind of work. That’s when all the alarm bells go off and I realize it’s time to strike off into territories unknown. I’m in that place again. My ‘Running the Numbers’ series is beginning to feel like my day job. I still want to do more because there are more issues I’d like to portray, but it doesn’t feel like a creative risk anymore. One thing I’ve done is go to Midway Island to photograph dead baby albatrosses filled up with plastic. That’s a creative risk—the art world isn’t exactly clamoring for pictures of dead baby birds. When I put that art on my website, though, it went way more viral than any of my previous work.”

Chris Jordan found his Element when he decided that risking everything was better than the alternative. He stays in his Element by continuously pushing himself. It has led to a richly rewarding life, though not necessarily a comfortable one.

“There are a lot of anxieties that go along with this. If there’s one thing I would say to someone who wants to take the risk of doing what they love, it would be to learn to bear anxiety.” It’s the price of allowing yourself to answer the question, “What’s next?” But paying that price can lead to a completely different level of fulfillment.

As Chris Jordan’s story shows, there can be risks in taking the high road to your Element. But there are other sorts of risks in ignoring the call of your spirit. If you know what your Element is, you can only ignore it by damping down the parts of you to which it appeals. The result can be a dull spiritual ache that holds you back where there should be an impulse of energy that drives you forward. Like Jeffrey Myers’, Jordan’s story illustrates the principle that your starting point does not determine your eventual course in life.

Exercise Fourteen: Your Initial Action Plan

If you’ve been keeping up with them by now you’ve accumulated materials, images, ideas and feelings from thirteen exercises and more than fifty questions throughout this book. It’s impossible for me to know, of course, what stage you’ve reached in your own reflections on finding your Element. You may be completely clear by now about the direction you want to move in, and the place you want to get to. Equally, you may still be sorting through a range of possibilities and feel surer about some things than others. You may feel you have a clearer sense of your aptitudes than your passions, for example, or vice versa. Whatever stage you’ve reached, take some time to review all the exercises that you’ve done so far and to take stock of what you think you’ve discovered. To do this:

One important reason for keeping your options open is that you’re not limited to one Element for life. Some people find they love several things equally; others that their passions shift and evolve. Finding your Element for now doesn’t mean that you’re locked in to it forever. In fact, when you ask, “What’s next?” the question can easily become, “What else?”

What Else?

Earlier in the book, we talked about David Ogilvy’s dramatic transition from farmer to ad-man. There are many others. Martha Stewart, for example, began her career as a model, a job she took to pay for the part of the tuition to Barnard College (where she was studying art, European history and architectural history) not covered by her scholarship. She continued modeling after graduation, appearing in print and television ads for Breck shampoo, Clairol and even Tareyton cigarettes. Her skills as a lifestyle guru didn’t come to the fore until she moved to Westport, Connecticut, with her husband many years later and renovated the 1805 farmhouse they’d bought there. This led her to a catering business that capitalized on her love for food and then to a series of books combining the two that served as the springboard for the lifestyle empire she now oversees.

Janet Robinson (no relation) was a public school teacher in New England when she decided to move into the business world, taking a sales management position with The New York Times Company. While she may have been an extremely dynamic teacher, her skills outside of the classroom have also proven to be considerable. She moved from sales management to senior vice president for the advertising sales and marketing unit of The New York Times Company Women’s Magazine Group to President and General Manager of the New York Times newspaper, and now serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of The New York Times Company. She is regularly ranked as one of the most powerful women in media, and she’s still teaching people a thing or two.

Unlike Jeffrey Myers, Taryn Rose had a career in medicine mapped out from the time she was young. Her father actually was a pathologist and it was generally assumed that she was going to follow his path. She went to USC Medical School and completed her residency as an orthopedic surgeon. The long days on her feet while wearing heels, and the multitude of female patients she’d seen whose maladies were related to the shoes they were wearing, led her to an epiphany: there had to be a way to make shoes that both looked good and felt good—and she was the right person to figure this out.

Over the next three years, she worked on the business plan for her eponymous shoe company, one that quickly became a prestigious and hugely popular label. Fast Company magazine named her number one among “25 Women Entrepreneurs Who Are Changing the Game.” There were no other orthopedic surgeons on the list.

Breaking Your Mold

The fact is that we all have a tendency to categorize and label each other, by age, accent, appearance, gender, ethnicity and especially occupation. When people meet socially the most common question they ask is, “What do you do?” and then they adjust their attitude to you accordingly. We can easily typecast ourselves in the same ways. The reason I resist suggesting particular “types” of people in this book is that there is rarely a complete fit with any given individual. Even so, people tend to play into them once the label has been applied, as with the Barnum effect.

A business consultancy I know in the United States has a successful process for enabling groups from different companies to work together on priorities and strategies. One feature of their process is that members of the groups don’t wear job labels. You could be working with the CEO of another company, or the head of finance, or with a junior salesperson, and you wouldn’t know. The reason is to focus the group on the qualities of each other’s contributions rather than on their roles or status.

Exercise Fifteen: Letter to a Supporter

With that in mind, try this exercise:

Imagine you are not you but someone who has met you and has spent time getting to know your interests, attitudes, hopes and aspirations. Imagine that person is writing about you to someone else who is interested in supporting your future plans. This person has no preconceptions about who you are but would like to know more.

Write about yourself in the third person: i.e., “Ken (or whatever your name really is) particularly enjoys . . .” Don’t mention your age, gender, ethnicity, social background or current situation. Do mention your interests, capabilities and aspirations and what you feel you have to learn and would like to experience next. Describe your personal qualities, the achievements you value most and the opportunities you hope to have in the future.

Write the letter as quickly as you can, using the techniques of morning pages and automatic writing. Make as many points as you want. Don’t worry about editing it. As you do this, look back at your SWOT analysis in chapter seven for ideas and inspiration. Remember to write as someone else might see you who doesn’t have the preconceptions that close friends, family or people you currently work with might have of you. Try to see yourself fresh as someone else might.

When you’ve finished the letter, read it through and make a list of the main points you’ve made. Use them to create a mind map of steps you would like to take now to learn more about your interests and aptitudes and the next part of your own journey. Look at each of them and ask yourself how you can make them happen.

When “Next” Is the Only Option

Often, one of the most significant reasons for avoiding finding out “what’s next” is that you don’t need to. What you’re doing right now might not be lighting up your life, but it’s good enough. More important, it’s safe—you’re getting a good income from it, your peers respect you, the community defines you as successful. The impetus simply isn’t there, as much as you’d love to find out if you could make it knitting scarves, running a spa or teaching English as a second language. If your world were turned upside down . . . maybe. But things are good. Why mess with them?

Perhaps there’s something to be learned from those whose worlds were turned upside down. Mark Frankland, for example, might never have discovered his true passion if he hadn’t suddenly found himself without a job. Mark had once written a song for his wife that included the African proverb, “Life is like eating an elephant; you need to do it one mouthful at a time.” He didn’t realize it at the time, but this lyric captured the essence of his search for his Element.

“I think that part of the process of overcoming a big hurdle,” he said to me, “is not looking at how big the problem is, but just trying to find out the next step you should take. Sometimes it’s drastic, and sometimes it’s very little. Sometimes a little thing can make massive changes to your life.”

Music had a key place in Mark’s world from a very young age. Unfortunately, so did the big hurdles. “I was always singing. When I was on the stage I always found myself in a singing part. When I was in primary school there was a competition called the Muir Cup. Each year, the silver and the gold medals would go to the people in the grade in front of me. Then, in my last year of primary school, it was my year to get the gold, because I’d won the bronze the year before and the two people ahead of me had moved up to secondary school. Then my teacher decided to discipline me for not doing my homework or something and didn’t allow me to go into the competition. I still remember it as quite a significant moment in my life.”

Another complication was that Mark came from a broken home. He found himself endlessly seeking his father’s approval, and this included his choice of careers, which took him far away from making music.

“I spent several years trying to pursue a career that my father would be proud of. He’s a surveyor and he was building private hospitals up and down the country. I tried to find a career that would have a tick of approval from the old man. I was just trying to be the good boy, but I wasn’t the good happy boy.

“I went into all different occupations. The last thing I did was television production, which most people would think of as a really exciting job. When I was doing the creative side of the business, it was good, but very quickly the finances of the company I was working for declined to the point where they weren’t going to make programs anymore, and I went into sales. I did it for eight years because it was good money, and by this point, I had a wife, kid, dog—the whole thing. It seemed like a good niche for me to be in, but there’s always that kind of nagging disappointment in the back of your mind. I didn’t have a sense of purpose. When the situation at work came to the point where I began to lose myself, I was faced with the options of staying in a job I wasn’t enjoying or finding alternative employment in the same industry. Neither one floated my boat.”

Then the options became even more limited, as it became clear that Mark’s job was about to be cut.

“Things started to slowly unravel, but I had started to sing again. When I was drunk, I’d sing a song at the local pub about a garden gnome. That was the extent of my musical career. But I always used to write songs for my families for their weddings and bar mitzvahs. I would happily perform sober in front of my family, but not in front of a crowd I didn’t know. I wrote a song for my sister’s fortieth birthday and sang it at her birthday party, which meant that I had to sing in front of some of my peers. They all responded very favorably to the song. Later on, when I’d gone to an open mike night and I was drinking my way to the garden gnome song, someone said, ‘Why don’t you sing that song about your sister?’ When the situation with work started to go wrong, I remembered that I’d spent my youth dissecting records. Now I thought I’d see if I could try to pursue that a bit further.

“My wife suggested that instead of going to evening classes in music production, that I should take a degree. I live about twenty miles south of London, and locally there’s The Academy of Contemporary Music, which is billed as Europe’s leading rock school. I took my fourteen-year-old daughter with me as backup when I went to take a look around the school. That’s when I discovered that they had a business school there as well. There was a bit of happenstance about it, but you have to make your own luck.”

Thrown into this environment because the work he’d been relying on was no longer available, Mark found the inspiration he’d been lacking for most of his professional life. He was facing an enormous challenge at a critical point in his life—much like facing the prospect of eating an elephant—but because he was doing something that mattered to him so much, he found the drive, determination and attitude to accomplish it. He matriculated in school full-time with the complete support of his wife—which was critical, since paying the mortgage was going to be a lot tougher than it had been when he had his sales job—and he came away with a degree in both the creative and business ends of the music industry. His final dissertation gave him his clearest sense of direction yet.

“My dissertation was about why creativity and believing that you could be anybody you wanted to be was so prevalent in the primary schools and how they slowly work it out of you. The next opportunity you have of fulfilling some of your hobbies full-time is when you retire. I couldn’t figure out why that was. I knew, looking at the lines and lines of people who would queue up to be on “The X Factor” and “Britain’s Got Talent” that there was an appetite among people to find a sense of purpose.”

This inspired Mark to found Good Gracious Music, a label dedicated to helping people fulfill latent dreams of recording and releasing songs. “I set up my company to try to encourage people that you didn’t have to become a rock superstar to enjoy making music and releasing albums, especially in today’s self-publishing Internet world. Good Gracious Music is now focused on finding people over the age of thirty who used to be in a band when they were kids and getting them back into the studio and back into writing.”

When he was younger, Mark didn’t have the disposition to try to make it in the music business. He let his sense of obligation to others overwhelm his desire to explore his greatest passion. Faced with unemployment and the loss of his safety net, though, he decided the time was right to make a meal of the elephant. His wife lent her financial acumen to make sure they could pay the bills, and he found support from everyone in his family—including his father, who Mark had tried to please for so long by staying away from music.

Many years after a teacher took away his dream of turning music into gold, Mark Frankland is making a living in the field he loves. Good Gracious Music is now in its fourth year and is growing annually. Yet if things had been just a little bit better in his old job, he might have never done the thing he was meant to do.

I think there might be a message here for all of us. While there are often risks associated with moving from your current pursuit to one that more closely aligns to your passions, very few enterprises come without risk these days. The Chinese refer to a job that you’re guaranteed to have for life as an “iron rice bowl.” But how many of these really exist, especially in an era of global economic uncertainty?

At the same time, I regularly hear stories of people like Mark Frankland who, when suddenly finding themselves out of “safe” jobs, discover a way to navigate through the financial uncertainty to create something new and significant for themselves.

While I would never advocate your giving up any sense of security, if you feel that what’s next for you might be much more satisfying than what you have now, maybe you should consider a leap and trust the safety net will appear. It’s a bit like the philosophy of living every day as though it were your last. This is, of course, a ridiculous argument. If I were living every day as though it were my last, my lifestyle would probably hasten the arrival of my true last day. Even so, necessity can generate unexpected creativity. It can give you just the push you need, not only to ask, but also to answer the question, “What’s next?”

The Malleable Mammal

In chapter two, I suggested one way in which human beings are distinctly different from the rest of life on earth. Here’s another that you might not have considered. We are virtually alone among mammals at coming into the world when we’re simply not ready to deal with it. We’ve all seen images of foals, just hours after being born, standing on toothpick legs and galloping around. Puppies seem bent on chewing up the furniture (and getting their close-ups on YouTube) from the moment they leave the womb. On the other hand, newborn human babies don’t do much of anything. We may gaze on them in wonder, but this is decidedly a one-way interaction. Most significantly, left on their own, most newborns wouldn’t survive more than a couple of days.

“In many ways, your new baby is more a fetus than an infant,” Dr. Harvey Karp says in his book, The Happiest Baby on the Block. “Had you delayed your delivery just three more months, your baby would have been born with the ability to smile, coo and flirt. (Who wouldn’t want that on their baby’s first day of life!)”

Dr. Karp realizes, of course, that delaying delivery three months is a physical impossibility. He is, after all, a doctor. He’s come to believe strongly, though, that all babies, and especially those who suffer from colic, would benefit from a “fourth trimester” in a situation that resembles the womb as closely as possible. To ease the transition from the uterus to the outside world, he recommends five procedures that activate the “calming reflex”—swaddling, shushing, swinging, laying babies down on their sides and allowing them to suck. Millions of parents have embraced Dr. Karp’s advice and have used it to ease the path for their children—and themselves.

This fourth trimester concept is a powerful metaphor for living our lives in an optimal way. Just as a baby is not really “done” when it comes from its mother’s womb, none of us have finished the act of growing and evolving even as we head toward physical maturity. No matter how in the zone you might feel yourself to be right now, there’s a good chance that your best and most rewarding work is still ahead of you.

Consider Gandhi. As a lawyer, he’d been doing very good work championing civil disobedience for many years. But he didn’t have a real effect on India and the rest of the world until he was sixty-one and led a two-hundred-and-forty-mile march to protest British rule of his country.

Consider Frank McCourt. He had an accomplished career as a teacher that extended for decades. It was only when he was in his sixties that McCourt became known to the world as the bestselling author of Angela’s Ashes.

Civic Ventures is a “think tank on boomers, work and social purpose.” Recognizing that people who have already had long careers are capable of contributing so much more, Civic Ventures has launched a series of programs to demonstrate “the value of experience in solving serious social problems.” Among these are their website, encore.org, which compiles resources, connections and an inspiring collection of personal stories; a college initiative for retraining boomers for new careers; and fellowships that place experienced professionals in short-term assignments with social-purpose organizations.

One of their most significant programs is the Civic Ventures’ Purpose Prize, a $100,000 award given to five winners annually who are over sixty and “changing the world.” One of the 2011 winners was Randal Charlton. Charlton has seemingly embraced the notion of following his inspirations wherever they might take him. He’s been a life sciences journalist, he’s tended dairy cows for a Saudi sheik, he started a jazz club, and he’s founded several companies. One of these companies had a wildly successful IPO, which allowed Charlton to retire. The only problem was that he found retirement boring. “I wasn’t ready to play golf or shuffleboard,” he told me. “My game wasn’t good enough. I felt that I needed a purpose.”

Rather than finding that purpose in a quiet hobby, Charlton decided to visit the president of Wayne State University in Detroit to ask if the school might have any use for him. As it turned out, the president felt there was a spot that would benefit greatly from someone with Charlton’s varied skill set. Soon, he was executive director of TechTown, a business incubator in midtown Detroit, charged with the mission of helping to turn around the city’s devastated economy. Randal pointed out that, in spite of his wide range of business experience, he had very little that qualified him for such a position. “Never mind,” the president said to him, “you’ll learn.”

Randal not only learned, he thrived—and in the process found a powerful sense of inspiration. “It was probably one of the most rewarding jobs of my career. I’d made lots of mistakes over the course of my career—everyone does. Being able to pass along the benefit of those mistakes to younger entrepreneurs was exciting and very rewarding. On top of that, I was in Detroit where there was an economic meltdown in progress. Here was a city where any new business was celebrated like winning the Super Bowl. It was a tremendous feeling of accomplishment.”

“Detroit had twenty percent unemployment and another big percentage of underemployment, as well as racial problems and—on top of all that—the near collapse of the auto industry. All of which demands that we create a more entrepreneurial culture here in Detroit, and we at TechTown are at the epicenter of that.”

The TechTown Charlton inherited was light on participants and even lighter on resources. Today, the TechTown building has two hundred and fifty tenants, and TechTown has trained thousands of entrepreneurs and helped its clients raise more than fourteen million dollars. TechTown has been an important player in Detroit’s reemergence, and it has served as a model for other entrepreneurial incubators that have subsequently entered the scene.

“I found it very rewarding having to challenge myself late in my career. Once you start to get too comfortable with a job, watch out, because you might be freewheeling and not all using all of your mental and physical assets to your best advantage.”

As all of these examples show, your life doesn’t have to play on a single track. You’re not limited to one Element for life. Some people find they love several things equally: others that their passions shift and evolve. Finding your Element for now doesn’t mean that you’re locked into it forever. Your life can be multifaceted, evolutionary, and in a process of constant growth and possibility.

Some Questions