dan’s story: practical expression of life’s passion

When we spoke, Dan was deep into his job search.¹ With college graduation looming only a few months away, he had been thinking hard about the “what next” question and was coming out in a place that neither he nor his friends might have expected four years earlier.

Dan has always been passionate about music. In high school, he played the piano, composed music, and developed his knack for organizing things by founding a concert series. He took a gap year after high school, working for City Year, an organization in which young people work as tutors and mentors, running afterschool programs and leading youth leadership programs. His role there as operations director for large-scale service days further developed his capabilities for organization and business productivity. As he says, “On the heels of City Year, I was more confident as an organizer than as an artist.”

In college, Dan continued to explore the link between his love of music and his skill in running things. In the spring of his freshman year in college, Dan joined the founding team of an independent record label associated with a musician who had been one of Dan’s favorites growing up. “I’d always wanted to produce—working in a studio, being part of the writing and recording process,” he says.

After a year of not doing any of his own music, Dan felt that he had lost his edge as a performer: “I knew that I was now a small fish in a big pond.” But as a member of the Songwriters and Performers Society (SAPS) at NYU, Dan had the opportunity to meet lots of musicians, becoming good friends with a few. “I was witnessing the potential of a few of my friends. We’d get together for coffee once a week, and I turned into a sort of career counselor. As a songwriter/producer, I could empathize with them as artists.” At the same time, Dan was becoming disillusioned with the values of others at the record label, and eventually he decided to leave.

Dan wanted to start his own management company, building on the network he’d established in the music community. From June to December 2005, he was a go-getter, laying the groundwork for his entrepreneurial venture—filing a business certificate, starting a bank account, and launching a Web site. He went on a tour with one artist and recorded a successful full-length album with another. Things were going very well.

Then in December of his sophomore year, Dan saw the movie Brokeback Mountain. Although he’d been openly gay since high school, he found that watching the film and reading the story were deeply personal experiences. As he talked about the film with friends, he started to see it as a story of escapism. The everyday lives of the two men seemed superficial, an act, but the mountain itself was real—it symbolized not only their love for each other but also of each man for himself. Dan realized that the film had hit “a nerve of loneliness within me”—a strong desire to get back to doing things that were more authentically “him.”

As he got deeper into his work as a manager, Dan felt increasingly disconnected from himself. He wasn’t writing—fulfilling his own emotional needs. Instead, he was doing promotional and administrative work for other writers. He remembers thinking that he had once known the feeling of being “on the mountain” but was no longer sure where or when it was. “I wanted to rediscover that feeling.”

The event that galvanized him was attending a huge independent media conference. From Dan’s perspective, every panel might as well have been called, “How Do I Generate Cash Flow?” Folks who were once focused on the art were now scrambling to provide for themselves and, even worse, their families. Dan’s conversations with the people he met there were disappointing. He found himself missing the kind of intellectual challenge that he had enjoyed during high school English classes or while writing music.

On his flight home from the conference, Dan reflected on the mottos of schools he’d attended and organizations he had worked with:

• ✓ Honesty, Compassion, Respect
• ✓ Work Conquers All
• ✓ Virtue Always Green (or Fresh/Alive)
• ✓ Putting Idealism to Work

His conclusion was simple: those values were important to him, and they wouldn’t work in the music business he’d come to know. He needed to find a career in which he wouldn’t have to sacrifice his values—and one in which his sense of self, his “mountain,” would be something he would be living daily.

The idea of teaching had always lingered in his mind. Dan credited his high school experience at a top boarding school as a major influence on his teen years. Boarding school “provided a community in which I could be myself and discover myself.” Everyone on campus knew that he was gay, but they “saw me as a musician, newspaper writer, ropes course instructor, and good student.” Dan had built close, long-term friendships and strong relationships with his teachers.

As he thought about a career in teaching, he realized he felt excited by the idea of serving as a role model—as someone who didn’t narrow his life—to students from different backgrounds. He was also attracted by the diversity and tolerance that are typical in such environments. As he says, “I’ve felt torn between two worlds. I’m gay but don’t feel comfortable in the gay scene. In straight culture, I often feel like the exception. I love hip-hop, but also folk music. It’s hard to find friends who will dance to one, but also drink beers to another.” He wanted to be part of a diverse community.

Dan got back to New York, closed the recording company, enrolled in summer courses, and dove in to study the classics and Latin. He reveled in the feeling of moving forward and returning all at once. Returning to the goal of teaching—one that had been overshadowed by his musical ambitions—heightened his understanding of his own experience as a student. He connected his “mountain” to life in an intellectually rigorous boarding school.

He is passionate about sharing his love of the subjects he will teach. “I want to be a part of students seeing the deep connection between language and self-expression. Language and art are our best attempts as humans to express the elusive quality of our experiences. Greek and Latin capture this beautifully in their poetry. Words have feelings and relationships to each other. Words matter.”

Dan’s also looking forward to teaching skills such as grammar. He says of this passion, “I’m a complete nerd for these sorts of skills. In college, I met many students who didn’t understand grammar at all. The idea of language disintegrating is just terrible.”

Long term, Dan has different ideas about where his career might go, but his priorities for right now are as follows:

• ✓ “Location—being near the city that is a hub for my family. But not in the city, just near. I’m done with city life for now.”
• ✓ “Living in a tolerant community. Massachusetts allows gay marriage/adoption, so that majorly figures into my geographical preference.”
• ✓ “Working in a place that will provide a lot of support for me as a new teacher. I want a school to empower me rather than just throw me into a classroom.”
• ✓ “Being able to teach multiple subjects. I want to teach English primarily but would love to teach Latin as well. I look forward to coaching.”
• ✓ “Earning money insomuch as I feel valued by my employer. However, I’d rather balance my life due to financial constraints rather than indulge my life with wealth.”
• ✓ “Having the opportunity to earn my master’s degree in English—either subsidized by my employer or rewarded by an increased salary.”
• ✓ “Owning a cabin in Montana, not an estate.”
• ✓ “Taking the summers off!”

Dan has concluded that “while I have many career goals for the long term, the overarching life goal is to, as Joseph Campbell put it, ‘follow my bliss.’ How corny?! I know . . . Living and working in a balanced community in which I can integrate physical health and creativity might help to balance my own self.” And as he notes, the journey is not over: “Who knows how I will feel about life and my career in a year, two years, five years?”

the practical reality: your carillon curves

Strategy, in essence, is a choice or a series of choices. For a company, having a strategy implies that its management has a consistent and logical basis for determining where and how to invest the organization’s resources, both time and money. The implication for a career strategy is no different. To shape one, you need a basis for choosing where to invest your time, energy, and perhaps money.

allison’s story: practical trade-offs to meet multiple priorities

Allison Blood is highly organized and very busy.³ A senior in college, Allison is a nursing student with a business minor. She is also passionate about horses. She trains young horses, teaches riding, and competes. In between, she runs a major program for the local riding organization and does a variety of other volunteer work.

Allison’s life plans reflect the thoughtful consideration she brings to most aspects of her life. Although she grew up on a farm, she never considered making a career in the horse world. She knows how tough and uncertain the horse business can be. And farm life wasn’t an option either. Allison wants something that offers security, stability, and insurance.

Allison’s love of animals and science initially led her to consider a career as a veterinarian. However, she recognized that the round-the-clock demands of that career would leave her little time to enjoy her own horses and, later, the family she plans to have. She considered becoming a doctor, but the investment of time and money required to go to school for all those years was a drawback.

She chose nursing as the best blend of these practical considerations. Nursing allows her to work in a field she loves and in an occupation that offers flexible scheduling options. For example, it’s possible to work three twelve-hour shifts a week and be considered full-time. Some nurses with younger children work part-time: two twelve-hour shifts.

After one year’s experience in a hospital, it is possible to create even greater flexibility. Many nurses elect to sign on with a nursing agency. This option offers cyclic work (as discussed in chapter 6). Allison knows colleagues who have been at the same hospital for many years, but on an agency basis. These nurses work three months, then take time off, and then sign back on for another three months.

In addition to flexible hours, nursing faces a significant shortage of available staff and, as a result, offers attractive financial incentives. One package Allison is considering includes $10,000 per year to pay off loans. Most offer attractive benefits: dental and health insurance, public transportation passes, free on-site parking, and even gym memberships for the employee and her family. As Allison wisely notes, “The little things add up.” Nursing will provide the money she needs to have a life that includes horses.

After several years, Allison plans to begin studying to get her master’s degree, taking advantage of the hospital’s willingness to contribute to her tuition per year. With a master’s, she will become a nurse practitioner, eligible for even more attractive compensation.

Nursing also offers flexibility of place. Allison will be able to choose a facility that balances access to challenging cases and proximity to rural areas, so it will be easy for her to get to a place where she can ride and teach.

For Allison, nursing seems like an optimum trade-off of money, time to degree, and ultimate flexibility. And it’s one she is sure she loves. Her hands-on experience with horses creates a strong set of caretaking skills. Having been committed to community service throughout her life, she loves the service aspect of the profession: “It’s part of what pushed me toward being a nurse or doctor.”

She would like to get married and have children at some point—no earlier than age thirty. Once she has children, she plans to cut back the amount of time she works, again using the flexibility of her chosen profession to balance her life. Her expectation is that she will work only one or two shifts per week, only when her husband is home to stay with the children.

Allison credits her parents, and particularly her father, with giving her persistence and an appreciation of hard work, of doing chores and taking care of your equipment, and of doing a thorough job in the amount of time you have. She wants to let her children have the same experience growing up that she had—the responsibility of work and the fun of horses and the farm. She has mapped out a practical path that will allow her to pursue multiple passions—medicine, horses, and family.

the process of discovery

The questions posed in this and earlier chapters are not analytical frameworks that will lead you to one answer, but rather what I like to think of as prisms that let the light shine through. Hold up each option you consider against these frameworks to see how each looks against your practical reality.

We know, from sound research, that adults find their way forward by trying new things, evaluating each one as they go—continually searching for the path that works best for them. As expressed by Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, “Identities change in practice, as we start doing new things (crafting experiments), interacting with different people (shifting connections), and reinterpreting our life stories through the lens of the emerging possibilities (making sense).”⁴

Viewing each possibility through the lens of your personal criteria is one way of making sense.

In chapter 8, we look at questions to ask and signals to be on the lookout for as you search for the right position.