If you want to suffer the slings and arrows, be an actor in a rock band. The reaction is constant eye-rolling before anyone hears anything. People just fucking hate the idea of it. But they don’t leave the show going, “There’s no musical talent there.” And it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
—Interview with Kevin Bacon, Breathe Magazine, September/October 2005
A life pursuing multiple vocations is not without times of stress, overwork, and deep inner questioning. In fact, during my interviews, subjects often asked me whether the periodic doubts or overload they felt were common among slashes. They confessed that at times they didn’t have what it takes to be at the top of their game in multiple fields at once. They spoke about instances when one vocation suffered because things were heating up in another part of their life. And a few specifically declined interviews with me because they were just too busy.
Yet even when slashes admit to bouts of hard times, they tend to see such periods as a necessary byproduct of the life they’ve chosen, not something that makes them question their fundamental choices. When I asked Deborah Rivera what she had given up to pursue the three careers she was managing at the time—executive recruiter/chef/hotelier—she replied, “It required enormous sacrifices. We mortgaged our home and leveraged my business. I wake up every morning with the bizarre combination of being excited and also being scared to death.”
Rivera needs to be at the hotel and restaurant every weekend, but because she works with her husband in the business, that is time they spend together; they often blend work with socializing, seeing friends over dinner or a glass of wine at their restaurant. Rivera’s weekdays are consumed with her other work as an executive recruiter, but there’s plenty of social time in that sphere as well. “My work sends me all over the world,” she explained, “and I’m always meeting the most brilliant and interesting people. It’s all really fun for me or else I wouldn’t be doing it.” That idea—of creating a work/life that suits you so well that it doesn’t feel like “work”—is a sentiment many slashes share. It’s also why even though they are often putting in long hours, they tend to say that they do not feel overworked.
After my visit with Oscar Smith, the personal trainer/cop, he invited me to stop in for a workout any time. Clearly, people dropping by to see him at work is a common practice. Smith’s schedule—the overnight shift at the precinct, followed by morning training sessions with clients—sounds like it would be exhausting, but it’s clear that managing his gym puts him in an atmosphere he’d choose for himself even if he didn’t have to be there. He says he has a bit of a reputation for being hard to reach, but if people know him well, they make an appointment or catch him at the studio, where he gets his social fix from chatting with friends and clients. He’s also the type of person who manages to return calls within an hour or two, never failing to apologize that it took so long.
Slash careers often involve this kind of blurring of business and professional, work and social. When you take pleasure in your work, something inevitably happens—it stops feeling like work.
Getting to that place of comfort usually involves overcoming some hurdles. Whether it’s a fear of failure, others’ expectations for you, or even your expectations for yourself, most people go through some sort of inner turmoil before developing an unconventional career.
Karl Hampe, the consultant/cartoonist, was starting to feel beaten down after twenty years of intense hours and travel. Though his work was stimulating, he could no longer keep up with the pace of it and was finding himself in a physically dejected-looking posture. “I knew I looked beaten down,” he explained. “And I didn’t want to be a person who looked like that—the partner stuck in the corner office until 8 p.m., fat, and on his third marriage. It’s exactly why our profession is suffering a brain drain. The younger associates think ‘there must be more than this,’ and then they change firms, but that doesn’t solve the more specific issue of finding something that will make them happy.”
Hampe began to explore options in other industries. “I tried to find a more ‘meaningful’ job at a not-for-profit,” he said, “but I had some experience in that arena and then my research confirmed that it can be just as much of a grind and I wasn’t interested in starting all over from scratch in a field or in proving myself to a new employer.”
Hampe says it took falling in love for him to realize that there were other ways to live. When he met his partner, Alan, he got a close-up look at a new way of structuring a working life. Alan is a registered dietician who has built a stable and satisfying career out of a collection of part-time and consulting arrangements. Hampe says he always associated part-time or temp jobs with people who weren’t serious or were semi-skilled. Before meeting Alan, he never realized that highly skilled professionals might end up with a multiple-job approach by choice, not because of a lack of commitment. “Alan gets a benefit in each of his slash jobs from the others and he gets a mix of primary care, private practice, and nonprofit agencies, so he sees clients at different parts of the healthcare continuum,” he explained. “It keeps him from getting burned out or jaded and he has control over his hours if he plans far enough in advance. And he’s much less dependent on any one employer to make him happy or keep him on the payroll. It seems more like he is in control over his career in his early thirties, when people are usually still working at the mercy of others and hoping to be noticed so they can someday have quality of life.”
Hampe says he was envious of Alan at first but gradually came to realize that he could do something similar. When he came to the idea of sticking with his current work but doing it on a flex-time schedule, he said he had a Wizard of Oz moment. “The answer was inside me all the time,” he explained. “It was really very liberating, with almost giddy moments. Admittedly it’s been a slow transition and the liberating moments were initially less frequent, but they became more and more consistent and the giddiness wore off as soon as I was able to recognize the multicareer/slash option as something that would work for me.”
After a process that took more than a year, Hampe has now condensed his consulting work to a manageable three days a week to make room for his creative goals. He is settling into a rhythm for his new life. Because he announced to his firm that he was going to try to become a cartoonist, he gets the occasional “So where are the cartoons?” comment from a colleague, but Hampe knows he is pursuing a creative goal that is pretty elusive, so he has an “instant sense of the inappropriateness” of the question. Choosing a field in which success is such a long shot has also been very freeing, according to Hampe.
Hampe is working on his art, but just as often he is working on things that he would have classified as leisure in his prior life. “Part of what I needed to do was just slow down,” he says. Before cutting his hours, he barely had time to think about how people go about making changes in their lives. “I had time to read the snippets available in in-flight or business magazines and a lot of that is superficial. Finally, I was able to read critically, to internalize the thoughts of some smart people, and to decide what was going to work for me.” By stepping away from a paradigm in which success was tied to measurable output, he also learned to enjoy the process of self-discovery.
Michael Melcher became a career coach/writer/speaker after hitting a serious rough patch in a career that was off to a very impressive start. He earned a combined graduate business and law degree from Stanford University and then traveled to Calcutta and Taipei, where he worked for the Foreign Service. On his return, he joined Davis Polk & Wardwell, a white-shoe law firm. When he left the firm, he worked briefly for a hedge fund and then, after what he called a “timely layoff,” launched an Internet startup. It’s right out of the early-nineties playbook, including the inevitable crash when his brilliant idea for an Internet company (performing immigration services online) went belly up.
His life hit a low point. Debt. Insecurity. Doubt. “I was treading in quicksand,” he told me. It was 2001 and the job market was abysmal. Even if he went back into the field where he had the greatest employability—the law—it wasn’t apparent to him that he’d find work easily.
Melcher knew he had the raw material for a career reinvention and started working with a life coach to figure out how to go about doing that. Inspired by how valuable he found the experience of working with that coach, he started toying with the idea of becoming a coach himself. But it wasn’t something he could just plunge into. Coaching didn’t carry the prestige of his earlier identities and that troubled him. Yet when he announced the idea to his coach, he got the answer he anticipated: “You’d be a fantastic coach!” Next, he had to convince himself that he was okay with the idea. “I had a lot of issues,” he told me. “And the funny thing is that the label part was the hardest. With coaching, the label was just not good. It didn’t fit with my sense of what I was supposed to be. It had this whistle-on-a-string-around-neck kind of quality, the whole rah-rah thing. I thought it wasn’t measurable. And it didn’t seem to require all the years of elite education.”
Interestingly, Melcher overcame his doubts by using what is basically a self-coaching exercise. He created a written questionnaire that he submitted to about fifteen friends, basically asking them to mirror back to him how they perceived his new plan. The questionnaire included questions like, “Do you think I’d be weirded out calling myself a coach?” and “Do you think I could make enough money coaching?” As he went through this process, he was surprised that a few of the people who knew him best came up with a variation of the same thought, which was that he would grapple with the concept until he began doing it and started getting results and positive feedback from clients. “And that is exactly what happened,” said Melcher, who now regularly uses this exercise with his coaching clients. “From the beginning of my coaching work, I knew that the activities were coming to me very naturally and I was having an impact on people. It was something very true for me.”
People get there in different ways, but when they hit a point of feeling authentically connected to their life, doubt seems to melt away.
We all have periods when the pressure is on—a deadline is approaching, a show is opening—but for slashes, there are additional challenges. What if the final exam is scheduled for the same day as an important presentation to a client? Or your child’s school play falls on the same night as the law firm partners’ dinner?
Of course you can’t be in two places at once. But there are a few things you can do to minimize the chances of feeling you need to be. Stay on top of your schedule. Delegate when possible. Build relationships with colleagues who can cover for you in crunch times. Geoff, the lawyer/actor-director had some interesting thoughts on this subject. “Sometimes you can’t tell when a case will blow up for some reason,” he said. “When that happens at the same time as I’m busy doing something in the theater, it can be very stressful. I guess there are two ways to deal with it. One is trying to pass the work on to someone else on the case. The other is that I just get really busy. I’ll get home at 10 p.m., make a cup of coffee, and work for a few hours. Or I’ll get up at 6 a.m. and work till noon on the law and then head right to rehearsal. Luckily, every date in the law world changes. It’s scary when they say it’s May 3 and you know you have a conflict on June 3 because you realize that things may get put off and it might actually not happen until June 3. So far, I’ve just been lucky. In six years, I’ve dodged a few bullets.” Like Geoff, many of the slashes I talked to said the dread of conflicts was often worse than the reality.
Geoff’s description of just working through the stressful times is something I heard a lot when talking to slashes. “If I can only make it through June, when school break hits,” “Until April, when tax season is over,” “Until January, when work on the annual report is finished,” “Until the summer, when the kids are at camp.” Are these pressures really so different from the ones that exist for people with only one career?
While you can’t manufacture more time, you can identify techniques to make the best use of the available time you have. Mary Mazzio says the focus techniques she learned as an Olympic rower have been an essential tool for her in balancing the competing demands of being a lawyer/filmmaker/parent. “I used to be an easily distracted person,” she said. “I would look up whenever anyone would pass my office at work—always up for a chat.” Mazzio says that for quite a while, she was very inconsistent in athletic competitions—either very fast, winning easily, or slow. She went to see a sports psychologist, who had her do some focus exercises, the kind that were being done in the Eastern European countries. For example, she practiced doing math in front of a television with blaring music and people running around. Her focus and concentration improved so dramatically that her racing performance became consistently fast. “Later on, that translated into my work and home life,” she said. “It’s about committing to something in an unwavering fashion and dedicating your attention to it.”
Successful athletes are known for their ability to focus, so it’s no surprise that another athlete slash had some good advice about improving focus. In The Dark Side of the Game, Tim Green’s book about life inside the NFL, he explains how he made use of idle time while sitting in strategy meetings that lasted far longer than it took him to learn what he needed to know:
After battling boredom for several weeks during these long interludes of darkness, I conceived an idea that would enable me to occupy my mind and be free from reproach. I began writing, not with a computer, but by thinking about the material I would put down that night when I was back at home. I would jot notes in the margins of my game plan and on the backs of pages in my playbook, tearing off corners or even entire pages where I had scribbled ideas and scenarios in the weak light of the film projector. My desk at home was constantly piled with scraps of paper that I would consult late into the night while composing newspaper articles, radio commentaries for NPR, or pages and scenes of whatever was my current novel.1
Among his many slashes, Green has worked in television, another career with lots of down time. And in perfect slash fashion, he manages to use that down time productively, just like he did when he was playing in the NFL. I interviewed Green while he was getting made up to go on air as the host of A Current Affair. During his stint on that show, hired cars took him to and from the airport and studio. During those car rides, and pretty much whenever he has a gap of fifteen minutes, he said the laptop was out. He’s written parts of his twelve books this way.
Green is married with four children and told me he rarely works on weekends, which are off-limits for anything other than family time. He’ll often decline a barbecue invitation from another family because that would water down the time he spends with his own family. “Basically, I know how to say no and I do it any time something would upset the equilibrium of life,” he said. “For example, I live where my kids go to school. This show [A Current Affair] was willing to work with me and my needs. But I’ve said no to a lot of opportunities in television that would have required me to move my family.”
Sreenath Sreenivasan, the journalism professor/television reporter/speaker among other slashes, takes this concept to another level. I once saw him respond to his e-mail on a giant screen during a presentation to the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He does this often, taking advantage of the time while people are trickling into the room where he gives his popular “Smarter Surfing” workshops. He’s careful to open e-mails that don’t have any private information. And for someone who responds to over a hundred e-mails a day, it’s the perfect way to use a scrap of time.
Of course, in some instances, two careers may not actually be compatible, or at least not compatible in the way you’ve currently configured them. Amy Bloom, fifty-two, the author of several award-winning books of fiction and nonfiction, was a psychotherapist for more than ten years before she began writing fiction. Once her fiction started to take off, she saw the difficulties of running a big practice with patients who required a lot of attention. “The first time I had to do a book tour, it was phenomenally disruptive both to me and to my patients. So I said this kind of practice is just not going to work so well,” she said.
Bloom still maintains a small practice, limiting it to patients whose needs she knows well. “It’s mostly couples and people I’ve seen before who need a tune-up. I’d just feel terrible taking someone on and then telling them, ‘You’re sicker than I thought. You’ll need to go elsewhere,’” she explained. “But I just can’t be in the emergency room once or twice a month.” Bloom also makes sure to confine her patient work to one day a week. “It’s hard enough to write, and it would be even harder if patients were scattered throughout the week.”
Checking in with yourself from time to time to see how things are going is essential for anyone living a slash life. Karl Hampe says his experience using business plans for twenty years at work gave him the idea to do some formal planning as he embarked on his slash life. He sets goals—some very easily achieved, others that will take more work—roughly four times a year, along with the changing of the seasons. Some recent goals include getting a drafting table, finding a low-cost, out-of-the-apartment workspace (he ended up renting a storage locker), and studying how many characters existed in his favorite comic strips. Most important, when he reviews his progress, if he hasn’t accomplished A, B, or C, but has done D, E, and F instead, he recognizes his achievements. “One of the easiest ways to get yourself into trouble,” he said of his method, “is to set very specific goals, because the world doesn’t usually unfold as you expected.”
Michael Melcher also does a version of this. He makes a point of periodically doing what he calls “strategic planning for myself.” It’s the time of year when he looks at the various things that he does—teaching, one-on-one coaching, workshops, speaking, consulting, and writing—and evaluates how everything is going. Sometimes these planning sessions happen when he is alone in his office or apartment, but on occasion, he’s turned them into the equivalent of the corporate retreat, booking a week’s vacation in Hawaii and bringing along a friend who’s game for a joint goal planning session.
Wherever it happens, the process is about reviewing all the activities he’s currently doing, assessing the purpose for each, and figuring out what stays, what goes, and what gets tweaked. “With any business, you have to constantly prune to see where growth occurred,” he said. Inevitably, he learns something surprising. One year, he counted all the coaching appointments he did in the course of a year and analyzed the distribution of how many people he saw on a given day. In the end, he realized that he could do the same number of appointments during only two days a week, restricting his appointments for coaching to Tuesdays and Thursdays. “You really have to look at the data. One of the fascinating things I learned is that about seventy to eighty days a year I had just one appointment, yet I perceived myself as completely booked all the time.”
That revelation was crucial in his becoming more productive. “The different things I do require different kinds of energy,” he explained. “On my writing days, I’m internally directed and I don’t want to be responsible to other people. I may be at home or in the office. I might be casual or dressed up. But I limit all external things. I don’t have lunch. I don’t check e-mail. I avoid phone calls. Coaching needs a different kind of energy. And when I was switching from one to the other in the same day, I just wasn’t as effective. There were days when I felt resentful with a client coming in because I was rushing to get something done. That is not good if you’re a coach. Once I created this structure, it was a relief to just focus on clients those two days. Even administrative work has its own energy and needs its own space.”
For Dan Milstein, the computer programmer/theater director, the answer to time management was coming up with a tentative daily schedule. Milstein has a life where a good chunk of the work he needs to do each day—programming for his clients and troubleshooting for his theater company—can be done at home. But home is loaded with distractions—the dog, the pile of bills screaming to be sorted, every last section of the newspaper, the laundry. The bulk of his work also involves the computer, but after losing untold hours online reading about baseball statistics and obsessively hitting the “get mail” button, Milstein decided it was time for some order, and a schedule.
A cornerstone of his system is getting out to a local coffee shop each morning, where the semi-public space and white noise help him to focus. He also builds in a certain amount of goofing-off time every day, when he’s allowed to watch television or just lie on the couch and read a book. Giving himself license not to get any work done at certain parts of the day was a huge step in his becoming more productive, especially because he’s usually working nights as well. His schedule varies, but according to Milstein, some variation of the following is the weekday standard:
8 a.m.: Head to the cafe, where a big cup of coffee fuels the next several hours of intense working time. The first hour is spent going through a hailstorm of e-mails about theater matters—scheduling rehearsals and logistics, communicating with the press, working with designers, and managing everyone’s mini dramas. Check out the baseball scores, read the morning news, answer personal e-mails. I end up with a very fuzzy line between the personal and the various kinds of work. It’s all personal, sort of. That’s part of what keeps me charged up, and part of what I enjoy. I tend to think more about dealing with the outside world versus dealing with the abstract world.
10 a.m.: Shift to the programming work for a focused few hours. The caffeine-induced sense of omnipotence is at its peak and I feel excited about tackling the interesting problems of programming. I’m happily solving problems, adding features to the system, fixing bugs, and the like. When I’m in this sort of programming binge, I enjoy the calmness of not dealing with anyone else. The music is turned up loud on my headphones, and it’s very satisfying.
2 p.m.–6 p.m.: Head home to have lunch and read the paper. Recognizing that I never get any good work done in the semi-groggy post-lunch part of the day, this is the time to take a nap. Read a book. Run an errand. Deal with phone calls. Take the dog for a long walk. Squeeze in a run. Most important, the computer is off limits. I think I set up this “time off in the afternoon thing” because I was just wasting so much time online and it was making me hate myself. So now I understand that I simply don’t have the willpower to have it on all the time, and I try to be more effective when it is on.
6:30 p.m.: Most of the year, this means heading to rehearsals. This is the social part of the day when I need to be “on” and able to lead, which is why I give myself license to goof off all afternoon. Rehearsals are a huge amount of fun, but everyone looks to me and asks “What next?” pretty much at every step. That’s why it’s so complementary to the morning time. I like leading things and feeling out how a group is working, and giving people precise, detailed feedback in person—all of which feels completely different from the sort of intensely abstract world of writing code.
Milstein confesses that this schedule is somewhat aspirational, as most schedules tend to be: “That’s my basic plan, and it’s all sort of variable. Some days I’ll be at the theater at ten a.m. to pick up the keys, and the whole thing is a wash, with other things entering the mix. But it’s a good basic plan so I don’t have to think about how my day will work in general. As Annie Dillard says somewhere in The Writing Life, ‘A schedule is a scaffold so you can stand and work unhindered for great blocks of time,’ or something like that.”
Hampe, Melcher, and Milstein used similar processes to set up a structure for a slash life. At the core of each was a healthy shot of self-awareness. Hampe knew that the only way he could keep his workaholic tendencies under control was to put himself on a reduced schedule at his corporate job. Melcher had to structure his week so that he had the necessary time and space to give to his different kinds of work. Milstein had to get out of the house with its distractions. Once they settled on some goals, each had to look at the calendar and come up with some kind of a plan, whether in increments of days, weeks, months, or quarters. Equally important, each built in a system for falling off the plan, which inevitably happens. Rigidity has no place in a slash life. These are but a few examples of how it can be done.
One theme that plagues a good number of slashes (especially the ones with incongruous combinations) is whether to be open about the various parts of their life in all settings. Chapter 7 touched on this in terms of thinking about your introduction and other ways of presenting yourself when meeting new people. But the issues are a little different when you are dealing with deeper relationships.
Aileen Bordman, the money manager who made a documentary film about the painter Monet’s relationship with the culinary delicacies of Normandy (and launched a related line of products), says she felt she had a fiduciary duty to her clients to be up front about her new venture. “What if they stumbled on an article about Aileen Bordman, the filmmaker, in the Newark Star-Ledger?” She also felt that she’d be missing out on opportunities by not being open about her new business venture. “Why close off half your network?” she asks. As it turns out, one of her money management clients has expressed interest in investing in her new business.
For others, the rule of too-much-information applies. Deborah Rivera, the executive recruiter/chef/hotelier, says she is cautious about discussing her hotel and restaurant with all her corporate clients. Her recruiting work is very technical and requires such focus that she would never want a client to think she is less than fully committed. But in close relationships she does reveal her other life, and there are occasions when she brings her two worlds together. Each summer, she sponsors a table at a large charity event near the town where her hotel is located. A handful of clients always make the guest list.
Carrie Lane, the Pilates instructor/art consultant/author, follows the lead of the situation, beginning in an all-Pilates or all-art mode of interaction until the timing feels right to bring up her other life. For some of the academics or collectors she deals with in the art world, the right time to talk about Pilates is never. With her Pilates clients, her art business or academic research often comes up. “Many of my clients are collectors or just have an interest in art,” she explained, “and since I’m working with them in a one-on-one setting, often several times a week, we get to know one another, which means we talk about what we’re doing the rest of the day. For me, sometimes I’m heading down to the galleries in Chelsea or to a private library for research, and my clients are interested in hearing about it.”
Not all combinations coexist readily. Certain professions have ethics issues you need to take into account if you’re thinking of adding another career to the mix. That usually doesn’t mean it’s not possible to slash—it just means you have to draw some lines.
Who better to talk about boundaries than a shrink? When I spoke about this with Robert Childs, the psychotherapist/violin maker, he told me that he has drawn very distinct lines between his two lives. “As a psychologist, you can’t be in dual roles with the people you treat,” he explained. “My patients never go up to my shop and I would never treat a patient who’s been a customer. But I do work with a lot of artists, and even a few musicians, as patients.” Amy Bloom, the author/psychotherapist, came to a different decision based on the nature of her practice. Different facts yield different solutions.
Journalism is another field where codes of ethics exist. The profession expects that journalists will be free from conflicts of interests with the subjects they cover, which could rule out certain business relationships. Indeed, most of the journalist slashes I interviewed had pretty clear lines and didn’t find it very difficult to decide where to draw them. When Marty Munson, the health editor at Marie Claire magazine, got certified as a personal trainer, she ruled out working at a health club that could be covered by her magazine. “I’ll be working with individual clients in private clubs to make sure there are no potential conflicts of interests,” she explained. Sreenath Sreenivasan, the journalist/professor/speaker, says it’s simple: he gets paid for his speeches but he would never take a dime from Google or another technology company he recommends in his lectures.
Bob Woodward, one of the most respected journalists in the country, was widely criticized during the investigation surrounding the leaked disclosure of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to the media. Woodward kept his discussions with a journalistic source from his editors at the Washington Post. His sin, as described by the New York Times: “It’s the second time this year that Mr. Woodward’s loyalties to a book seemed to cross with his duty to his newspaper.”2 His paper stood behind him, but many commentators questioned whether his role as an author compromised his duty to the readers of his newspaper.
On the other hand, consider the story of Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who took some flak in journalistic circles by stepping over the line from objective reporter to participant in a news story when he performed emergency surgery on a number of patients during the war in Iraq. Gupta and CNN took the position that humanity comes before the artificial constraints of the journalistic profession.
One lawyer/literary agent I spoke to said that she has to make sure, before taking on a client either as an agent or a lawyer, that she doesn’t have another representation that could present a conflict of interest. For example, she could not represent an author in a dispute with a publisher she deals with in her agent role. She doesn’t see this as an obstacle, but it is something she keeps in mind whenever taking on a new client.
Keeping a blog, an online diary, has been known to get some folks in trouble (or perceived trouble) with their employers. Disclosing confidential information about your employer, bad mouthing your company, or posting inappropriate photos online are good ways to ensure you won’t have a job (other than your blogging) for too much longer.
Taking too much time off from a job to pursue a slash is another minefield. According to an article in the New York Times, high school teacher Matthew Kaye lost his teaching job when he took a few too many personal days to compete on the professional wrestling circuit (where he had a persona based on his background as a teacher).3 Remember, if you’re moonlighting, it’s always a good idea to keep your daylight employer happy.
If you have a footing in one field and are considering getting into another, make sure to give some thought as to whether your profession has any codes of ethics that would prohibit what you’re considering doing. While you’re thinking about these issues, review “Moonlighting Dos and Don’ts” in chapter 8.
