I used to be a restaurateur. Now I’m a teacher. I’m a writer. I’m a mentor. I create. You work in a career, you focus solely on it, and all of a sudden you live and breathe one thing. It makes you a boring person. A lot of people think it’s about either/or; I think it’s about both/and.
—Alex von Bidder, managing partner of The Four Seasons Restaurant/yoga instructor/author/model
Career change used to be a cataclysmic event in a person’s life. Now it’s standard practice, something many people do, usually a few times, over the course of a working life. But this isn’t a book on career change; it’s a book that seeks to change the way you think about your career.
The major difference between changing careers and slashing is that slashes don’t abandon their primary vocation. They enhance or reconfigure it, building on it or adding to it in some way. When they’re done—if they can ever be said to be done— they end up with custom-blended careers.
One concern I often hear when talking to people about slash careers is, “It’s hard enough building one career at a time. How do you expect people to build many at once?” My reply, inspired by a friend in the venture capital business, is to suggest thinking about your career in the way a venture capitalist thinks about her investment portfolio: If you plant a lot of seeds, some will die and others will blossom into thriving plants. The same is true for the various slashes you cultivate in your life. This chapter will give you some ideas of where to find the seeds in the first place and how to determine if they’re worth nurturing.
Everyone starts somewhere when building a career, and often those beginnings have something to do with their career path. Those foundational careers—or starter professions—are much like a starter home that helps you get to the next, more desirable one. They might be brief stints or long immersions, but whatever form they take, starter professions can provide a foundation, a knowledge base, and a professional network, all things that are useful when reorienting a career.
Unlike a starter home, however, a starter profession doesn’t have to be left behind. Even if you modify the way you are involved in your starter profession as you take on slashes, often your background will inform your next move. In some instances, you might choose to retain your starter profession as you venture on to something new. Here’s an example of how that’s done.
Sanjay Gupta, the popular medical correspondent on CNN, was a neurosurgeon long before he found his way into television. It was his stature as a surgeon that made him qualified for his job in television—who better to advise American viewers on everything from how to avoid the flu to how to keep your weight down during the holidays than a real live physician? Viewers believe him because they know he’s not just reading the news, he understands it. And with his friendly, upbeat demeanor, his bedside manner couldn’t be better. Even more intriguing, he’s still saving lives week after week in addition to delivering health news to his viewers.
How did he get there? I asked him this question during a telephone interview squeezed in between his reporting from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and his vacation.
While still a medical resident at the University of Michigan, Gupta was selected to be a White House Fellow in the Clinton White House. The program, created by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, brings together people from different fields and gives them exposure to the workings of the federal government with the goal that the Fellows will return to the private sphere and contribute in some way to national affairs. Through the White House Fellows Association, Gupta met Tom Johnson, then CEO of CNN, who had been a Fellow some years earlier. The two of them had a lot of discussions about how healthcare information was being delivered by various news outlets. That relationship led to his current job at CNN.
Gupta’s CNN post has him tackling stories that range from the offbeat—such as a series about the safety of NASCAR racing—to the superserious, like when he was stationed as an embedded correspondent with a U.S. naval unit in Iraq, where he performed brain surgery five times. His CNN gig could easily be full-time employment for someone else, yet Gupta continues to perform surgery, though on a much-reduced schedule. He says that working as both a correspondant and a surgeon actually makes him better at each.
When I talked to him in the fall of 2005, he was working about half-time in each of his endeavors, performing surgery on Mondays and every other Friday, and seeing patients on Wednesdays. At CNN, he has his own weekend morning show, House Calls. He’s also a frequent guest on other CNN programs and is dispatched to cover medical situations around the globe. He says that his commitments to his patients come first, and if there is an emergency, he rearranges his television schedule. “In medical journalism, someone can usually step in,” he explained.
Gupta doesn’t view what he does as so unusual. In fact, he sees it as a return to a way of thinking that used to be common among doctors, before the pressure to hyperspecialize took over the profession. “I’m not that unique,” Gupta told me. “Many doctors do and want to do other things. Years ago, it was commonplace that doctors were also good writers, interested in politics. That’s just the way it used to be. We have become a more specialized society. This change didn’t happen in a moment, but over a hundred years. And it happened because of insurance and regulations. Today, you’re not only a doctor but you’re a pediatric otorhinologist. You get accepted into medical school for your diverse interests and now, for the rest of your life, you’ll focus on one small area. But putting blinders on is dangerous. What I’m doing is going from a microscope to a telescope.”
A job as a neurosurgeon is not one many people would give up, so it’s not surprising that Gupta has chosen to continue in it even as he’s garnered the kind of celebrity only a few news anchors achieve. (His wedding was covered by In Style magazine, and he’s been named one of People magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive.” When I teased him about this last honor, he down-played it. “That’s just the power of television. When I lived in Michigan, no one other than my wife, then-fiancée, thought I was too sexy.”) I believed him when he said he loved his work as a surgeon, but I couldn’t help thinking he was also prudent to keep his hands literally on his scalpel. Television can be a fickle business.
Gupta, thirty-six, may be atypical in that his first career as a neurosurgeon puts him among the highest achievers of the workplace. But how many doctors, even among those with the intellectual heft to become surgeons, take advantage of a chance to embrace something new without giving up practicing medicine? Probably very few. “The hardest thing when doing something totally different is the risk. It’s a gamble, in a way, when you are already well established in your field and successful” he says. “When doctors say ‘I’ll be on television once a week,’ that’s dabbling. When you say ‘I’ll move to a new town, cut my practice in half,’ that is not.”
Gupta says he doesn’t feel like he’s given up anything by adding a slash to his career, but he is more realistic about what he can accomplish. For example, before accepting the job at CNN he spent much more time on clinical research, but because he is affiliated with an academic hospital, he is still at the forefront of developments in his field. Figuring out which parts of your job you can give up while remaining at the top of your game is an important step in making room for something new.
Gupta is not alone in his desire to do more than what the traditional path seems to offer. His story is an example of the way opportunities present themselves when you amass knowledge and experience. And it is replicated often among people in all kinds of occupations.
In the late 1990s, as a lawyer working part-time so that she could also care for her young children, Deborah Epstein Henry was feeling isolated and frustrated. She had a hunch that other women lawyers were struggling with the same issues affecting her: how to manage the daily logistics of their lives, the stigma against part-timers, law firms’ dismal track records in promoting women, even disdain from stay-at-home mothers. So she sent out an e-mail to a handful of friends who also worked part-time asking if they’d like to get together to trade ideas about how to manage both work and family. About 150 responded.
Henry knew she was on to something. She began holding these meetings regularly, with the support of her law firm, Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis. In three years, those informal meetings turned into a business, Flex-Time Lawyers, which now has a mailing list of more than 1,600 lawyers in Henry’s native New York and in Philadelphia. Henry runs her meetings like the Oprah of lawland, inspiring her members to negotiate for what they are worth and supplying them with the data and arguments to make persuasive cases for why law firms need to retain women lawyers.
Because she is in touch with so many lawyers, she knows their gripes and regularly plays the role of “Dear Debbie,” giving out advice on everything from “what to do when you’re called out of a deposition because your kid’s stuck a bead up his nose” to “how to create some boundaries at work while still being thought of as a go-getter and team player.” Law firms began to figure out that she was plugged in, and soon they started hiring her as a consultant on retaining and promoting women.
As Henry became recognized as an expert on work/life issues for lawyers, she collected more slashes. She now writes articles for magazines, and has become a popular public speaker. She has even started to dabble in recruiting. Recruiting wasn’t something she really wanted to do, but after the umpteenth placement of a part-time lawyer looking for a job, she decided it was time to charge a fee for her time and effort.
For the first couple of years, Henry, now thirty-eight, kept practicing law for a few reasons. She needed the income while building her business. It also gave her credibility with the lawyers and law firms she worked with because she was still representing clients while dealing with the struggles facing her members. Eventually, Henry shifted her focus at her law firm, spending more time on business development and less on serving clients.
Staying connected to her law firm was a smart move for Henry, while also being good for her law firm. She gained credibility and the firm enjoyed the positive publicity her work generated. The idea of keeping one foot in a starter profession to stay in touch with issues while launching a related venture is another common slash technique.
Robert Alper e-mailed me a few years ago after my first article about slash careers and introduced himself as a rabbi/stand-up comic. Over coffee, he told me his story, interspersed with one-liners. Billing himself as the “only practicing clergyman doing stand-up comedy . . . intentionally,” Alper says he knew he was funny from the time he was two, when he made his older sister and her friends laugh with a pun that had something to do with the family code word for the posterior. “I can recall thinking, ‘I’m one funny toddler,’” he beamed. As a teenager, he lived for the talent nights organized by his Jewish youth group. He memorized the routines of Bob Newhart and Shelly Berman, delivering them with little twists of his own to receptive crowds.
For years, though, being funny was a characteristic of Alper’s personality rather than his career. After college, he followed his commitment to his faith and prepared to become a rabbi, studying for six years in the seminary and then earning a Doctor of Ministry at Princeton University. After years as a rabbi serving congregations, first in upstate New York and then in Philadelphia, he decided he wanted a life with more autonomy, so he left his congregation and opened a counseling practice. He also presided over “life-cycle events”—baby namings, weddings, and funerals—for unaffiliated people of any religion (“what we call hatching, matching, and dispatching,” Alper told me, quickly adding that he can’t take credit for coining that one). The counseling practice never got off the ground, but he quickly became busy with bookings for life-cycle events.
Just a few weeks after taking this new direction, Alper answered an ad in a Jewish newspaper to enter a Jewish comedy contest at a comedy club. The night arrived and Alper was nervous, but it was exhilarating to perform in a real club and in front of a receptive audience. That experience was enough to give him the confidence to seriously try his hand at stand-up comedy. Alper says a key ingredient to his transition was his wife, who worked full-time and is completely unmaterialistic; the couple eventually sold their house in Philadelphia and moved to Vermont, turning their vacation home into a full-time residence. Within four years, he was so busy with comedy gigs that he had to turn down wedding requests. “It was simply a matter of economics,” he explained. Once in a while he still performs a wedding, but generally he leaves the weekends open for his comedy bookings.
Though Alper has largely given up being a traditional rabbi, he still presides over once-a-year High Holiday services at an independent congregation he convenes in Philadelphia. And his identity as a rabbi very much informs his act—he’s the guy to call if you want humor that’s “100% clean.” It has also been his greatest marketing tool, since he’s frequently booked for events at Jewish Community Centers and synagogues around the country. These days, he spends a lot of time touring college campuses with Ahmed Ahmed, a Muslim comedian from Los Angeles, in a performance billed as “One Jew. One Arab. One Stage. Two Very Funny Guys.”
After our coffee, Alper sent me an essay written by Maurice Lamm, a well-known rabbi who left his congregation at age fifty-five to explore new vistas. This bit from Lamm’s essay captures the essence of why many people feel the need to shake things up:
As a fledgling rabbi, I asked an old, recently widowed Russian Jewish butcher how life was with him. As he sat in the back of the empty store swigging a cheekful of hot soup and nibbling black bread, his answer was quick: “What is this life? Another pumpernickel. Another pumpernickel. Another pumpernickel.” Is that what it’s going to be for me at 55— just another pumpernickel?1
In the previous examples, starter professions evolved naturally into slashes. Gupta, Henry, and Alper all found their slashes while doing the work they considered their primary professional identity. And in each case, their slash is related by content or subject matter to their initial career. In other instances, a starter profession helps you get to a place that is very different from your original work. In these cases, starter professions provide the economic security, confidence, or capital to explore something completely unrelated to a primary career. Aileen Bordman fits into this camp.
Bordman, forty-eight, has been a financial planner for more than twenty years. She finds her work gratifying and is extremely good at it, managing a portfolio of bonds worth over $100 million. I met Bordman through my cousin Marcia, who was one of her clients. “Bordman knows more about bonds than anyone,” is the way Marcia, a savvy investor herself, described her.
Months after meeting Bordman, I noticed her name on the program of the Cape May NJ State Film Festival. I would not have been that surprised if she had been listed as a contributor, but she was listed as a filmmaker. I called my cousin in disbelief—“Your money manager is a filmmaker?” She confirmed it was true.
I met up with Bordman at the film festival, where her documentary, Monet’s Palate, was being shown. After the screening of the film, she told me how she arrived at this place. “For some time I’d been feeling like my right and left brain were at battle,” she explained. “My work was very gratifying, and not only from a financial point of view. Yet I was always passionate about the arts. I’m self-taught at guitar and piano and always had a passion for film. I was just not able to express that part of myself in the financial world. Some days I’d think the most visually creative thing I did in my work was decide what colors to use in a pie chart. Should the money market section be in fuchsia? Could I go that far?”
The urge to bring more creativity into her life continued to creep up. On a trip to France, that urge met up with an idea. While sitting at the dining room table at the estate in Giverny were the artist Claude Monet had lived and worked, Bordman was struck by what she called the “palette to palate” connection between Monet’s appreciation for the colorful food of his native Normandy and his paintings. From that moment on, Bordman saw the concept as a film. She slowly shrunk her business down to a loyal collection of clients to make room for a new, and very consuming, project.
The film explores the relationship between Monet’s art and the food of the Normandy region through cooking demonstrations with famous chefs and interviews with art collectors and scholars. From the start, Bordman conceived of the film not only as a piece of art, but also as a marketing vehicle for a line of products from the Normandy region of France. Being a complete novice meant figuring out how a film is made and financed and securing the participation of talents like Meryl Streep (who narrated part of the film) and casino mogul Steve Wynn (who went on camera to talk about his art collection) as well as the involvement of well-known chefs like Daniel Boulud and Alice Waters. She researched the trademark issues, prepared a Web site, and handled all of her own public relations. The skills and confidence she built up in her original business let her assume so many roles in the filmmaking process. “I think the fact that I was already a seasoned professional gave me the security to tackle something new and different,” she said. “Had I tried to do this twenty years ago, without the business background, I would not have been able to do it. I was one of the first women bond traders on Wall Street. I think it all prepared me.”
Bordman says that she made her film through sheer will and passion, along with some “direction from above,” but with little formal training other than what she learned on the job. “I was a student of film as an observer from a very young age,” she told me. “I would sit, eyes glued to the television, watching classic movies, and even at age twelve I would look at the lighting, and staging, everything about how they did this thing called film. I was mesmerized.”
Through business, she knew the importance of finding the right partners. In the case of her film, her producing partner Steve, an entertainment lawyer, was a great help. “Steve has been around the filmmaking process for years as a lawyer,” she explained. “Neither of us went to film school. We just learned the steps we needed to use our editing system, the sound, the camera, and lighting issues. He consulted with people about what kind of camera and editing system we should buy. In Steve, I also had someone to bounce ideas off of. Still, it was a first-time film for both of us, which means that many interviews couldn’t be used because of poor sound or poor photography or both. With each interview, I got better. And with each phone call I made to cast the film or set up location shoots, it became easier and easier as I learned what to say or had the talent now connected to the project to help doors swing open faster.”
Bordman’s story teaches us a few things. First, her starter profession gave her the confidence to know that she could make her film if she set her mind to it. Second, any new identity you take on is very much affected by where you come from. So many people have the creativity and inspiration for a film or other artistic creation, but they often lack the practical business skills that are necessary to pull it all together. When Bordman talked to me about making her film, she described it as if it were a business deal as much as an artistic creation. Managing a team of people, keeping to a schedule and budget, and arranging financing were all parts of the process, in which her professional background served her well.
Because Bordman was established in her money management business, she was able to figure out a way to keep that going even as she reduced the hours she spent on it. Thus, she could venture into something new without abandoning a career that still turned her on. Finally, the battle between her left and right brain arrived at a truce.
The next story shows another way an established career can be a help in acquiring a slash.
On a spring day, with forsythia and cherry trees in bloom, I visited Robert Childs, a psychotherapist/violin maker, at his gray clapboard house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At fifty-two, Childs has the enviable situation of moving between two work-spaces within the confines of a private home. His three-story house is a fitting metaphor for the layers of Childs’s life. The second floor, which holds a kitchen, bath, and study, is where his patients go when they arrive on a Tuesday or Thursday and take a seat on the leather chair for a session. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Childs heads up to the third floor, where he enjoys the quiet setting to make his instruments in a fully stocked woodshop overlooking the treetops. He even has a dress code for each vocation: jeans and a T-shirt or flannel shirt signal a woodworking day; slacks and a tie signal that he’s planning to see patients. As we climb the stairs, he points out the paintings on the wall, all done by him.
Childs had an unusual career even before he acquired a slash—making violins the way people have made them for hundreds of years. He apprenticed for six years with two master craftsmen, first in his native Maine (where, he points out, having multiple jobs is a way of life) and later in Philadelphia. All along, he also played the fiddle, which he now does with Childsplay, a group of about two dozen fellow fiddlers who all play instruments made by Childs. His career in building instruments could easily support him in the lifestyle he enjoys. He makes about six instruments a year, selling each for about $15,000 to customers like Bonnie Bewick of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Hanneke Cassell, a national Scottish fiddle champion. New customers wait at least a year for one of his custom-crafted pieces. As Childs told me about his passion for his craft and how he can even recognize the sound of one of his own instruments, I thought about how few people I’ve encountered who enjoy their work as much as he does. So why—at the height of his renown—did he add a completely new profession to his life?
In his thirties, Childs started to feel like he needed to make sense of his past—he was adopted as a child and never knew his biological parents. While he loved the parents who raised him, he spent some tumultuous years searching for his birth parents and began a course of intensive psychotherapy to work through his issues. During his therapy, he had a dream that he says helps explain what roles the violins and his therapy work would come to play in his life. In his dream, his search for his parents took him to the border of an unknown country. At the border, a guard took him into a quiet, windowless room where he discovered an engraved violin sitting on a table. The engraving was of a small boy crying. Childs’s interpretation of the dream is that making violins gives voice to his childhood pain. “When I had that dream, I knew not only why I was a violin maker, but what was drawing me to psychology as well,” he explained.
During Childs’s training as a psychologist, his violin making supported him through eight years of clinical work and licensing. And as he built up his practice—he focuses on adoption issues, among other things—he saw no reason to give up his first love. He says the violins keep him grounded. “One of the dangers of psychotherapy is to end up living vicariously through your patients,” he explained. “That really doesn’t happen for me since I have a whole other vehicle for self-expression. Plus, I’d done this for thirty years and it takes so long to master a craft. My instruments are an artistic expression. Now that I’m here, I’d never give it up.”
Like Bordman with her investment business, Childs used his violin making to support a foray into something new. But unlike career changers, these two had no desire to abandon their first careers. So many people reach a point in their careers—often around the ten-to-fifteen-year mark—when they realize there is a certain amount of repetition in their work (recall Rabbi Lamm’s encounter with the butcher—“Another pumpernickel”). In some types of work, they also realize that what used to be challenging now comes with ease. These are some of the reasons why midlife career change is so common. What people like Bordman and Childs realize is that leaving a career behind isn’t the only way to reinvigorate after reaching a plateau; they instead choose to shake up a career by adding a new one, rather than replacing an old one.
Sometimes slash careers are built by design, to plan ahead for the types of careers—like in sports and the performing arts— that are not known for respecting their elders. Early talent can peter out. Tastes can change. Athletes can suffer career-ending injuries. Even successful actors know that fame can be fleeting. According to a New York Times article in September 2005, the latest accessory for young actresses on the rise is a college degree, something that will be useful when they make the increasingly common move to writer/director/producer or whatever slashes lie ahead:
“The career life expectancy of an actress is pretty short,” said Janice Min, the editor of Us Weekly. “It’s still true that actresses over the age of 40 have an incredibly hard time getting good roles. If they go to college, the skills they learn can enhance their ability to write or produce or direct. It’s almost like an investment, one of the better ones they can make.”2
So many athletes and artists confront the realities when they run into trouble. But like those young actresses returning to school to get their degrees, cultivating slashes before you need them can lead to a satisfying career even after the limelight has dimmed. Case in point: Tim Green.
A former NFL football player for the Atlanta Falcons, Green, forty-one, divides his time between a law practice in upstate New York, writing books (several best-selling suspense novels, as well as two works of nonfiction), and radio and television commentating. Green obviously has some innate talents that have made a lot of his career possible, but after spending an afternoon with him, it was clear to me that there was also an awful lot of planning that went into building a life that allowed him to turn so many of his talents into professional paths.
I met with Green at a television studio in Secaucus, New Jersey, where A Current Affair, the tabloid news show he was working for at the time (he has since left the show), was being recorded. Though I’d seen him on television, he has the kind of shocking good looks that take a little while to get used to in person. But his comfort with all kinds of people and his ear-toear grin have a way of putting others at ease. Several times during our time together, people pulled me aside to tell me what a joy it was to have him around the station, mentioning the signed books he brought in for their parents or children, his interest in their careers, or the way he made others forget he’s the celebrity in the room.
It’s clear that humility and self-awareness played key roles in his success. Green worked on every strand of his current career during the period when most professional athletes are preoccupied with acquiring expensive toys and fighting off groupies. Always a family man, Green says he was not distracted by the usual pro-athlete temptations. Instead, he used the off-seasons of football to earn a law degree; it took him about eight years to make that happen. His writing flourished when he realized that football strategy meetings were an ideal time to jot down ideas that he would follow up on later.
By the time he retired from football after eight years of play, he had the makings of a new career. He knew that athletes get opportunities when they are at the top of their game, not later, so he took advantage of that by building his career as a sports commentator while he was still in the game. When he went into law, he managed to avoid the early years of grunt work that young lawyers usually endure in order to pay their dues. His work on the field allowed him to bypass these. “Most lawyers work for many years before they get to focus on rainmaking,” Green told me, “but I did the inverse. I started out as a rainmaker and picked up my legal experience along the way.” Today, he manages projects and interacts with clients. Because most male CEOs are eager for the chance to play golf or just converse with a former professional athlete, he knew he could bring value to a law firm.
In a sense, athletes have an advantage in that they know from the start that they will have to reinvent themselves when their bodies give out. If they are smart, they plan ahead. In Green’s case, he realized that his time in the NFL was a prime period to begin developing the pursuits that would become his post-football career. During the years when he could have been collecting material possessions, he instead built some skills that would give him choices in the future. While he had early success as an author, he also knew that writing full-time was not something he could count on, yet another reason he pursued a law degree and worked on his television and radio career. This is a smart way to think even if you’re not a professional athlete.
Having a slash in your back pocket—something you’ve been trained to do, something that gives you joy and pleasure—can be a wonderful luxury if your primary vocation turns out to be anything less than what you’d hoped for.
Todd Rosenzweig, a thirty-two-year-old marketing consultant in New York, is a happy-go-lucky guy who doesn’t look like he works too hard to be that way. Jobs came naturally as he moved from one business opportunity to the next. His charisma and smarts made him a natural marketer. When I spoke to him, he had been working for several years in public relations for a small financial services business he respects. He was making a good salary and had been given a piece of the business. A lenient work atmosphere meant that he traveled often and could work at home a few days a week. But soon into our conversation he voiced a refrain that’s common among people seeking to shake up a career. “It’s not my passion in life. It’s their passion, their company,” Rosenzweig said. “My job is very interesting. And I’m motivated to see this business grow and do well. It’s on the cusp of taking off. And I’ve worked hard to get here, so I don’t want to leave right now. But . . .”
The “but” Rosenzweig got to is one I’ve heard so many times: “But something else showed up in my life that felt more like a passion, a calling, a thing I just had to do.” In Rosenzweig’s case, the thing that arrived was a desire to learn about cutting-edge theories of nutrition and holistic health. His sister’s friend had recently become a certified holistic health counselor and he was intrigued whenever she talked about that program. In many ways, he felt his life had been preparing him for this point. “I’ve always known about the need to eat right and how fucked up our society is in pushing food that’s not really food,” he said. “Even as a kid I knew an Oreo wasn’t really food. A year ago I started eating more fruits and vegetables every day, drinking more water. I was always getting sick. Now I have a lot more energy. I accomplish more. I saw the direct result of treating my body better.”
In pretty short order, he plunked down $8,000 and signed up to do the same program his sister’s friend had completed. Rosenzweig is still not too sure what he’ll do when he finishes, but he’s already gotten his first three clients, one of them his boss. “I’m setting myself up to follow a passion into the future,” he explained. In the present, Rosenzweig will be giving up a lot of weekends and evenings to study and get the most out of his program.
Jamie Donegan, forty-six, is an actor/director who’s proud to say he never waited tables. After studying performance and theater at Indiana University, he decided he was ready for New York City. At twenty-two, he packed up the proverbial van, drove east, arrived, and did what every young actor does: got two jobs—one answering phones, the other in a restaurant. He then went back to his apartment and felt depressed. That same day the phone rang and he got an offer to go on the road with a company that produced musical variety shows used as charity fundraisers. He had applied for the job months before on the recommendation of a friend but had forgotten about it.
Donegan accepted immediately and began a life of traveling from small town to small town, writing, casting, and directing shows. He has been producing these shows—first as an employee for a series of production companies and then for a firm he owns—for about twenty years. Though he never made it to Broadway, he doesn’t regret his choice because it has given him creativity and security, a winning combination for any performer. And it has an added perk: it’s seasonal, leaving summers free. In the early part of his career that seasonality allowed him to indulge his wanderlust. “That’s when I’d take all the money I’d made and travel around Europe and blow everything I had,” he explained.
Once he settled into domesticity, with a house and yard in Philadelphia, the off-season became a time for his hobby— gardening. He offered his services to an old estate near his home that was falling into disrepair. As his handiwork blossomed, he became known by the wealthy Main Line women who worked there as docents. Little by little, they started asking if he was available to landscape their gardens. Soon a business was born and he began doing for a fee what he had been doing for free. Basically, Donegan created an “adult internship,” a way to sample a new vocation, hone his skills, and make contacts in a new field. And like any good internship, it led to a real career.
Landscaping was the perfect seasonal complement to Donegan’s theatrical life, and it created other kinds of benefits too, as he explained to me. “As a Gemini, the two careers have given me balance. Just when I’m sick to death of listening to all of the questions and egos of my production gig, I get to go play in the mud in someone’s backyard. On the flipside, just when I’m sick of manual labor and the toil in the soil, I get to go play dress up with people and make magic.”
Michael Melcher has had a series of what he calls professional “labels”—as an entrepreneur, a lawyer, a diplomat in the Foreign Service, and, most recently, as a career coach/writer/speaker. But it was his early interlude as an accidental novelist that helped him figure out a fundamental part of his career vision. In the late 1990s, a few years out of college, Melcher and three classmates from Harvard collectively wrote a novel, The Student Body, inspired by a prostitution scandal that took place at nearby Brown University during their college years.
Over a period of five years, the group wrote as a team, bunking together in apartments and in borrowed houses for intense writing sessions. When they were apart, they used conference calls, group e-mails, and computer file round-robins. The idea is credited to Melcher, but the group claims equal ownership of the book. Melcher says the experience gave him a new way of looking at himself. “Writing that novel was a highly definitional experience for me. It’s how I started to change my core identity from professional person to creative person. Yet oddly, I didn’t think of myself as a writer until years after the book was published. I didn’t think it really ‘counted’ because I wasn’t like the other people I knew who thought of themselves as writers.”
By chasing a dream—even one as seemingly far-fetched as co-writing an era-defining novel with three friends—Melcher learned something very important about himself. He learned that whatever he did in his career had to involve some amount of creativity. The fact that his experiment was successful gave him confidence about his ideas and made it easier to take other risks in his professional life. Most important, he had a good time in the process. Following your interests usually leads to an appealing destination.
Whenever I talk about the slash concept, people invariably ask me whether a slash has to earn money to “qualify.” Why is it that we call something a career or vocation only if it provides us with income, when very often the things that define us most, the things we answer with when people ask us who we are and what we do, are not just the things that pay the bills? Is Dan Milstein, from the beginning of chapter 1, any less an actor/director because he supports himself with his programming work?
Joseph Weilgus, twenty-eight, founded Project Sunshine, a nonprofit organization that provides resources to children with severe illnesses and their families, well before he even had a paying job. As an undergraduate at Yeshiva University in New York, Weilgus started spending time in local hospitals, where he would visit sick children. He noticed that many of them were alone and awake in the evening hours. “How do you not want to spend time with the fourth child of a single mom splitting her time between the hospital and the other three at home?” he asked me, implying that anyone would have thought to do what he did. One day, on a lark, he put on a clown costume, and soon he was “booked” by kids who were requesting visits. Weilgus started recruiting friends and classmates to join him in “spreading the sunshine” in any way they could think of, and before long, he was basically running a matchmaking service out of his dorm room between volunteers and local hospitals. Within a year, he’d amassed more than a hundred volunteers. By the next year, the number exceeded a thousand.
Meanwhile, Weilgus graduated and started out doing tax audits at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Within a few years, he jumped to American Express, where he focused on structuring business deals for institutional and individual clients. Then on to Geller Holdings for more of the same. But he never gave up on Project Sunshine, giving all his free time to recruiting volunteers, raising money, getting press, and doing whatever else the organization needed. In 2002, Weilgus was named Nonprofit Entrepreneur of the Year by Harvard Business School. By the time Project Sunshine received a grant that would allow it to bring on some paid management, everyone looked directly at Weilgus. He flatly refused, explaining that he could do more for the organization by continuing his climb in the world of money, where he’s somewhat of a missionary for directing prominent people and their money toward Project Sunshine. “It was clear I could do more for Project Sunshine by hiring someone else for that job,” he told me. “The more influential I’ve become, the more people I’ve been able to involve at a higher level. Plus, I’m about giving money to Project Sunshine, not taking it.”
Running a nonprofit organization as large as Project Sunshine is clearly something that would qualify as a career for someone. And for the full-time staff of seven that Project Sunshine employs today, working there is their job. Weilgus figured out what made sense for him. The place that something occupies in your life—the paycheck, the gratifier, the giveback, the passion—is all up to you. In a slash career, you can control what goes where.
I met David Jonker a few years ago at a party in Connecticut that was filled with lawyer and banker types. I’m not sure which he told me first—that he was a banker by day or that he was captain of his town’s volunteer fire department—but I know that all we talked about was his firefighting, which was the source of his greatest pride. It was also pretty clear to me that it was work, even if he never got paid for it.
Jonker, who is forty-five, has been involved with firefighting his whole life, but unlike the firemen who learn the ropes from their fathers, he fell into it during college when he was trained as an EMT and joined the volunteer fire department. Just like those who inherited the job, Jonker caught the bug. He says that fire-fighting is the ultimate challenge, when you risk your life to save someone else’s house or property. “It’s about situations that would make other people’s hair crawl. You don’t know what to expect when you get there. Four of your five senses are muted. You have no sense of sight in smoke-filled rooms. You have no sense of touch because you’re encapsulated in that suit. You have no sense of smell or taste because of the air mask. You only have your hearing. Your job is to find the fire and put it out.”
So why not do it full-time? I asked him.
“Money is an issue and I like New Canaan, an expensive place to live,” he said. “The firefighting as a volunteer lets me have the quality of life I enjoy. I have everything.” In fact, when he and his wife were deciding on where to live, they settled on New Canaan, Connecticut, in part because its fire department had room for both full-time and volunteer members.
Jonker reminded me of Mike Safris, my mother’s longstanding accountant, whom I’ve known since I was a kid. Safris, who is sixty, has been a CPA for thirty-five years. As a young man, he toyed with the idea of joining the police force, but as he put it, “It’s not something my overprotective Jewish mother could handle.”
He forged ahead as an accountant, earning a comfortable living and riding a motorcycle to feed his hunger for a little adventure. When he learned about the possibility of serving as a deputy sheriff, a volunteer position in his local police department, he realized that there was a way to do police work as a complement to his life, rather than as a primary career.
“I like people and with this work I’m out in the community, working the fairs and carnivals, church functions,” Safris said. “Little kids want to jump on my motorcycle. I don’t do it because it’s a way to ‘give back’—it’s not like I’m going to nursing homes, though I’m sure people get the same feeling from that. Two months ago a woman was beaten up in a park and we responded. We didn’t know if she was dead or alive. We were able to activate EMS and we brought her to the hospital. I’m not even sure that we saved her, but we felt good. I sometimes wonder how it would have been had I done this full-time. I think maybe I wouldn’t feel the same way. Maybe I’d be burned out by now. For regular police officers, they are dealing with the same situations every day, risking their lives. I can’t imagine where I’d be, to tell you the truth.”
For both Jonker and Safris, protecting their communities made more sense as a volunteer activity than as a career. Both preferred to pursue careers that were more lucrative. Safris says he plans to step up his commitment to the police work when he retires from accounting. Different life stages are often natural times to revisit the places slashes occupy in your life.
In January 2002, Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist/poet/playwright, launched what he calls the “Entertaining Science Cabaret” at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, New York. Since then, once a month on Sunday evenings, he’s the emcee of a gathering that celebrates the intersection of things scientific and literary.
Hoffmann, sixty-eight, says he is trying to bring a little science to the cafe scene. “The performers in the series juxtapose science with music, the written and spoken word, art and performance,” he told me. “When it works, science emerges as human, lively, and fun. One came from knowing Kenny Greenberg, a successful maker of neon lights for Broadway productions. I asked him if he would design something for our little stage. And I suggested he include a dancer I knew, Rachel Cohen, as a way of ‘animating’ the lights. He in turn introduced me to Clare Brew, a light artist. The three of them came up with two wonderful pieces; in one of them the dancer affected sensors that controlled the lights. I came into the show (I usually don’t) talking about light and spectra—we gave out diffraction glasses to everyone in the audience. And Oliver Sacks talked about the discovery of the noble gases, a favorite subject of his.”
When I interviewed Hoffmann, I knew of his reputation as a chemist and scholar. I had heard that he “also did some writing.” I had no idea that “some writing” meant three volumes of published poetry, numerous essays, a play (broadcast by the BBC and staged around the world)—all in addition to the scores of books and scholarly articles he writes about chemistry, his major field of expertise. Hoffmann, who did not start writing until he was in his forties, said it was poetry that first sparked his literary muse. He says that writing poetry is a way for him to express things he could not express through science. “In poetry ambiguity was of value—that a word means three things and sounds like ten other words, that’s poetry. Ambiguity has no value in science.”
Sometimes you just have something you need to express, something that doesn’t seem to have a place in the other corners of your life. Or something for which the usual language you work with doesn’t provide the right voice. When you do, why not find a positive outlet for it?
