Work That Works for You

Thinking About Tomorrow: Reinventing Yourself at Midlife
by Susan Crandell

Midlife is a time for spreading your wings, not clipping them. In Thinking About Tomorrow, Susan Crandell profiles forty-five women and men who have re-imagined and reengineered their lives. A banker who left a thriving career to buy and run a small-town zoo. A woman who gave birth to her first child at fifty-one. A former TV cameraman who says losing his job at forty-eight was a gift because it motivated him to launch a business building race cars. A woman who, after turning forty, dropped ninety pounds and became a triathlete. A forty-three-year-old homemaker who built her own airplane. These gutsy people made their fantasies come true, and their profiles offer specific lessons to help anyone conceive and realize their dreams.

Thinking About Tomorrow is much more than a guide to second careers or getting a job after fifty-it's a blueprint for life reinventions of all kinds. This is a book about possibilities, encouraging all of us not to define ourselves by what we've done but to move forward with excitement into a future we make for ourselves. With fifty quick tips for jump-starting a life reinvention and a list of the best resources available, Thinking About Tomorrow provides all the tools necessary to create a more exciting and fulfilling life at any age.

Chapter 1

THE FIRST GENERATION to go to college en masse, we baby boomers had an unprecedented opportunity to choose rewarding work. So it may seem surprising that at midlife so many of us are dumping career number one and moving on to career number two. Of course, some of this migration can be credited to restlessness: Even in a fulfilling profession, twenty years on the job can ignite a craving for something new. But many of the career changers I've spoken with tell me that their first profession simply never thrilled them.

Problem was, back in our twenties when we were starting out, a lot of us just didn't know how to find work that works for us. I'm a prime example. Like many of my college buddies, I drifted into a profession almost at random. I adored college, but was no student. Thrilled to find myself living on my own for the first time, in a dorm filled with smart, funny women, I majored in friendship, with a minor in jug wine. Remember Almaden? I loved the lazy afternoons when half a dozen of us would gather in someone's room and talk for hours. Or the all-nighters we'd pull, not studying but playing hearts. I knew that when college ended, I would go to work, but somehow I never formed anything remotely resembling a plan. I majored in history, for no reason except that there were some terrific professors in the department.

What Should I Do with My Life?

My senior year, the reality hit - Ohmigod, I need a job, maybe even a career. My first impulse was a delaying tactic. I applied to law school. This was less about law - I had only the dimmest idea of what an attorney did all day - than about extending the pleasurable lifestyle that was school. I would have made a terrible lawyer. I aced the English portion of the LSATs and failed miserably at reasoning out the sample legal cases the test presented. This fact, along with my middling GPA - let's say I did a lot worse than Bill Clinton, a little better than George Bush - underwhelmed the three law schools to which I'd applied. I can't say I was crushed; in my heart of hearts I knew law school was a holding action, not a life plan.

A job was inevitable. But which job? On what possible basis would I choose? Like the thousands of other liberal arts majors graduating that year, I had no professional training, nothing that would point me in any direction. My roommate's father said the one thing that gave my search a point of view. Robin's dad was one of the most accomplished people I knew, a senior VP at a big textile manufacturing firm in the South. We were having dinner at their country club one evening after graduation while Robin and I were holed up at her family home in North Carolina, postponing the inevitable. The conversation turned to careers, in a desperate attempt by Robin's parents to jump-start our lives. When her father remarked that his job was routine, I was stunned. The daughter of a small-business owner and a schoolteacher, I had always figured that anybody who had an important, high-paying position like his must rush off to work every morning filled with enthusiasm for the fascinating things he would do that day. But he said that one week was largely like another, his work a matter of making the same kinds of decisions over and over again.

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After that conversation, I had one goal: Don't be bored. I'd been told by my professors that I had some talent for writing, and I knew I loved to read. So I set my sights on a job in magazine publishing, figuring it couldn't become repetitive since there'd be a new issue along every month. And that's largely how it turned out. Every time I edited an article, I learned something new. For me, the creative work never stopped being satisfying. Until I was fifty-two, I never considered any job but magazine editor, and I still haven't considered any industry but publishing.

The Career Ice Age: Before Counselors Walked the Earth

I got lucky with my career choice, but it was really a fluke. When we boomers were in college, nobody was giving us much advice. At my college, career counseling was conducted out of a single office in a building I visited exactly once. Many of us just stumbled into the next phase of our lives. After graduation, a lot of my friends moved to Boston - the next best thing to college is a big college town - and got jobs, whatever was available (one of them, who'd scored 740 on the law boards, handed out pirate garb and gorilla masks at a costume store) and would pay the rent. Nobody was giving us Myers-Briggs personality tests that would reveal what kind of job would play to our strengths. There were no life coaches or self-help books to point the way. We just flailed around. The fortunate few happened upon something they were good at and enjoyed.

Whether we loved our job or hated it, time marched on. Our lives got busy and complicated, rich and full. We married, had babies, and the spotlight shined on our families. We were preoccupied with our relationships, or with bringing up our kids. For many of us, work took a backseat; if it wasn't perfect, the dissatisfaction was relegated to background static that we lived with. Then one morning, we'd wake up and think, Wait a minute, there's got to be more. The trigger might be a raise or promotion denied, a landmark birthday or the realization that this life isn't eternal, so we'd better optimize our activities while we're here.

Over the years, the size of the shadow work casts across our lives can make a merely humdrum job seem intolerable. Our generation spends more time working than doing just about anything else. Hours at our desks easily eclipse family time, and unless we're champion sleepers, we probably log more hours at the office - and getting there - than we do in bed. Work occupies a majority share of our days, and yet a surprising number of us are not enchanted with our jobs. When we did a survey at More magazine, I was stunned to find that nearly three-quarters of the forty- and fiftysomething women in our upscale, educated audience weren't crazy about what they did for a living. These were people with options, people who'd had the benefit of college and even graduate school, along with a fair share of authority and flexibility in their chosen work. I expected them to be thriving. But the majority were just doing it for the dough. A study by a division of Ajilon Professional Staffing, in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, came to a slightly brighter conclusion, finding that 40 percent of the men and women they surveyed loved their jobs - which still leaves the majority less than enamored.

What's going on? Why isn't work working for us? We were the generation with the education, the opportunity. Did we all choose the wrong profession, or are there other issues at play?

Copyright © 2007 by Susan Crandell

About the Author

I got my first job after college not because I was the smartest applicant - I wasn't - but because I was the only one with a pilot's license. I'll be grateful forever to Bob Parke for hiring me at Flying magazine because that's where I met the love of my life, Stephan Wilkinson (the author of two wonderful books, The Gold-Plated Porsche and Man and Machine). Thirty years later, Steve and I are still working together, both freelance writers with offices in our little Hudson Valley farmhouse. Our daughter Brook, who's an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, is the only one with a real job.