A Future Thinker Takes a Look at Mid-Life Career Change, #5: Walking the Walk – a Personal History

During the past four weeks I have taken a look at career change through the filter of history and through the filter of disintermediation, one of the most powerful forces affecting the marketplace today. In future columns I will suggest the other dominant forces or flows that are reshaping the world, what the work landscape might look like in the next ten years, and the changes that are already underway. This week, though, I thought it might be a nice break to go personal, and share my path of career change. While I have been given credibility as a future thinker, I want you, the reader, to know that I have gone down the path of career change.

If I have a flaw when it comes to work it is that I get bored easily. There are people who can happily do the same thing all their life, even work at the same company or in the same profession all their life. I am not one of them.

I have always felt that life was much more of an adventure, an unfolding process of discovery. Since work is such a major part of a life, I saw work through this filter of necessary change. Comfort zones are fine for a while, but they can easily become prisons that, after a number of years, will be hard to escape. A century ago, when the life expectancy of an American male was under 50, it made sense that you had one profession and one spouse. Now that we live decades longer, it is reasonable to decide that having more than one profession in a lifetime is absolutely fine and normal (... I leave discussion of multiple spouses to others).

I have had somewhere between three and five professions in my life. My first was media advertising sales. That lasted a decade. After stints at NBC and CBS, I had the good fortune to be part of the executive team that launched MTV, CNN Headline News, VH1 and Nickelodeon. It was a wonderful ride during a wonderful time, and I made a lot of friends that I have to this day.

When I found myself out of a job due to corporate politics, I decided that being an entrepreneur was something very appealing. Since my then wife and I owned a restaurant company at which she was working full time, I joined her and spent 6 years building a restaurant chain. It was in that job that I found out about the concept of ‘psychological fit’. The restaurant business was not a good psychological fit for me because I was and am a creative, forward thinking marketing guy and I was stuck in a day in and day out operations business. While I was successful in the restaurant business, I grew to hate it as it only partly involved my strengths and mostly was about operations, not a strength or interest of mine.

After selling the restaurant business, I went back to media and entertainment as an entrepreneur. As an agent, producer, executive producer I found something that I could live with and success was the result. Winning two Emmys, a Peabody and being nominated for an Academy Award, while satisfying to the ego, was really more a validation that I was doing the right thing. Then the boredom factor combined with the fascination with the new kicked in, and I left the television world for the wonderful new world of the Internet. Four years and then the dotcom bust left me incredibly knowledgeable about this new transformative media but in need of a career evaluation once more.

Now we come to the first message of this column. When taking stock of my work life I looked at my successes, at the things I loved, at the things I was really good at, and the things and situations that I did not like. I liked being an entrepreneur, so I turned down job offers. I isolated what it was that I was as good at as anyone I had known, high level sales strategy, and decided to make that my entrepreneurial business. So I became an independent sales strategy consultant. I was able to convert some job offers into client relationships and I trade on the past successes of having launched successful brands. This business proved to be lucrative, and it still is.

So the first message is to really look at what you are good at, as good as anyone you have known. The reality is that if you are that good, you can find people ready to pay you for your talent and expertise.

The other part of this message is that if you are really good at something, you probably enjoy doing it. Life is too short to do something you don’t like, or doing something people don’t really need you for. That is a definition of unhappiness and failure.

All the time I was doing this consulting, I gave occasional speeches about the future. As someone who had been ahead of the curve on cable television and the Internet, I had enough cache, and enough of a message, that from time to time people paid me to keynote conferences. One night, while giving a speech in Berkeley, I had an "aha moment." After my 30 minute speech I lead a 45 minute Q&A session that was exhilarating for everyone in the room. All of a sudden I realized that my highest value to the world was being a catalyst for getting people to think about the future and then facilitating discussions about the future.

That night I decided to focus on being a futurist, write a book, work on speaking as a business and writing a blog about the future.

This leads to my second and final message of this column. I chose, as my last profession, something that I had been good at all my life, but hadn’t seen it that way. Simply put, all my life I had been slightly ahead of the curve: helping to launch MTV when only 20% of the country had cable, creating series of single subject award winning primetime documentaries when there were none on television, jumping into the Internet in the mid 1990s, and doing a number of other things in my life where people called me an innovator, a trendsetter, a visionary. So now I am a future thinker, a futurist, utilizing the talent I have had all my life to sense the ‘next big thing’ what was ‘around the corner’ what was going to happen in the near future. I love what I do. I love it when people tell me that I have opened their minds to new ways of thinking, and of course I love to get paid for it.

So, based upon my own life experience I say two things to you: First, pick as your new career something that you are very good at, that you enjoy doing and that people will value. Second, drill down into the trend lines of your life to see how you have shown up and see if there is any pattern that could be molded into a career. Look inward first.

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Noted futurist David Houle blogs at Evolution Shift.