The Slash Mind-Set: Begin, Improve, Reinvent. Repeat

One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success
by Marci Alboher

One Person/Multiple Careers reveals how a new breed of workplace trailblazers have combined multiple talents to create the kind of work they've always dreamed of and to enrich their personal lives as well. Filled with inspiring tales of career and financial success and loaded with levelheaded advice, this book will show you how you too can "slash" your way to a flexible and fulfilling work life. You'll learn how to:

• Balance multiple careers, yet find more time for friends and family
• Prepare a résumé, bio and Web site that will present your unique and varied talents
• Use your current career to help cultivate another slash
• Negotiate a customized work arrangement with your employer to free yourself up for other pursuits.

Chapter 1

I'm drawn to computer programming because it involves solving puzzles and the beautiful abstract understanding of complex things. It's what I spend a lot of my free time reading about. But after a while that work can feel arid, and I get really excited to get back to the theater where I work with people, telling stories, bouncing things around. But rehearsals are all vagueness and uncertainty, with all of these egos. And after a while of that, it becomes compelling to go back to a place where things are clean and simple. With the programming, even though I have collaborators and clients, in the end there's a sense that's just mine. There's something really nice about just solving a problem in my head that doesn't depend on if the paint color works, everyone remembers their lines, and the audiences like it. Basically, if I weren't doing both things, I'd get bored and antsy.

- Dan Milstein, computer programmer/ theater director

Dan Milstein, thirty-nine, moves between his work as a computer programmer and a theater director with elegance. By pursuing his multiple passions, his career nourishes him. But like most slashes, he has built his unique career over time, tweaking it as he goes along. When he spoke the words above, he was at a resting place, observing what was working to keep him in balance for that moment in time. Milstein's approach is an appealing way to think about a career, and about a life.

Milstein was always interested in lots of things. As a high school senior he took math classes at Princeton University at the same time as he edited his school's literary journal. When he arrived at Yale, he focused his coursework on math and computer science but gave all his free time to the theater. "Yale was the ideal creative home for me," he said, "the sort of place where all these high achievers would give thirty to forty hours a week above their coursework to some extracurricular activity. And the people who thrived were those who ran things on their own, which turned out to be perfect training for a life where no one gives you a job and tells you what to do."

He toyed with graduate school and was even offered a fellowship that would have paid for continuing his education in math and computers. But the computer department wasn't where his friends were, and such a focused course of study didn't seem like it would be satisfying. "It just didn't feel like a full life," he explained. Milstein also had a hunch that he might no longer be the star performer at the next level and that only the stars in academia had control over their lives. "I guess I didn't love it enough to think that I'd be satisfied doing the work if it meant living anywhere I was offered a job."

For several years after college, Milstein had a period you could easily refer to as floundering. He settled in Boston and got a job in a coffee shop, working the late afternoon shift so that he could devote the mornings to writing short stories. The writing didn't take off. "It was a period of lots of self-doubt," he said. "I wasn't sure if I could consider myself an artist, yet it was so compelling to me to be an artist."

Around the same time, he decided to use his computer background to get a day job that was more likely than his job at the coffee shop to pay off his student loans. He tried his hand at various jobs in the computer field and was disenchanted by a lot of what he saw-people who had become experts in doing one thing and were paid to do just that one thing, and jobs in tech support that weren't at all creative and where the staff looked universally unhappy.

Slowly, the tide began to change. It was the early nineties, the heyday of the dot-com boom, and programmers were sought after. Gig after gig materialized for Milstein, often through his coffee shop contacts. In one instance, he was literally hired off the street when he ran into a friend who brought him aboard a startup. "You know HTML. Come with me," was the basic pitch. Around the same time, Milstein abandoned his attempts to write fiction and turned his attention to the theater, from which he had drifted since his college days. Once he began directing plays, he knew he had found his creative home.

At his day jobs in the technology field, however, Milstein grew tired of worrying that his bosses would catch him on the phone stealing time to manage crises with the plays he was working on. He also realized he needed to work for and with people who valued the end result of what he did enough so that they didn't care how many hours he worked each day or where he did the work. Fortunately, work was so plentiful that Milstein realized he could be employed quite well without a "job."

He partnered up with a buddy and began a consulting business. Fast forward to today. He's working about thirty hours a week on programming (largely dedicated to a business he's helping to create) and up to sixty hours a week on Rough & Tumble, a theater company he founded-although the hours in any given week can vary wildly. The income split between the two hardly reflects the way he spends his time (he makes about $1,000 a year from his theater company and about fifty to a hundred times that from his consulting work). He identifies equally with each.

One of the reasons Milstein's setup works for him is that he is in control of both aspects of his life. In his artistic life he writes, directs, and produces what he likes to call "theater that doesn't suck." On the theory that theater should be accessible and fun, Rough & Tumble's plays involve physical comedy and often employ innovative approaches to language and expression. (One play I saw was an improvised Austin Powers-type caper in which "blah blah" was the only utterance by the actors-it was still possible to understand everything happening among the characters.)

Having two fully developed careers may sound like a recipe for workaholism, but Milstein is as passionate about his time off as he is about his twin vocations. For years, he took summers off to travel, and he's always made time for ultimate Frisbee and other hobbies. His philosophy is that being well-rested and well-rounded is part of what makes him excel at his jobs.

Copyright © 2007 by Marci Alboher

About the Author

Marci Alboher is a writer, speaker, coach who focuses on workplace and career issues. A former corporate lawyer, she became interested in the myriad ways careers are being reinvented when she used the law to springboard into a new career as a freelance journalist. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times where she writes about business travel, small business, and the workplace. Her articles have also appeared in Travel and Leisure, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time Out New York, Legal Affairs, among other national publications. Marci is on the faculty of the New York Writers Workshop and leads writing workshops at the JCC of Manhattan, The Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y, and other venues around New York City. She also privately coaches aspiring writers. Marci is a sought after speaker on workplace issues and nonfiction writing.