It is hard to say when I started wanting to write. Many years ago, on vacation, I fooled around with writing a novel, but I never intended to publish it. I never gave it another thought. Writing is something you’re encouraged to perfect in the foreign service, and I had a natural aptitude. So when I decided I would change careers, it seemed a promising possibility.

I started by asking myself how I could take natural interests and convert them into a career. I established a link with two small companies, a car retailer and hi-fi company that I patronized. I became an unpaid consultant and have remained so. In my darkest hours of banking, I took solace from ringing them up and just chatting about what was going on in their worlds. It was quite a good way for me to learn what it felt like to work with them, to understand their pressures, their cash flow problems, their staff problems.

By the time I found myself in front of this astrologer, I had already had three to four years of explaining my predicament to friends and family. It was always, “On the one hand this, on the other that,” with no clear view emerging. They would tend to say, “I can see why writing might be interesting, but you’ve got a very good job and do you really want to jeopardize that?” All their advice had just added up to a fog.

Then, suddenly here was this astrologer who after ninety seconds said, “This is mortal combat. The one that will win is. . . .” She probably didn’t pause at all, but it felt like one of those moments when time freezes. I had clarity after four years of fog. Before she said the next word, suddenly a voice on my shoulder was saying, “Oh please, let it be the artistic side,” knowing that if she said, “By the way, it’s the other one,” I would have died a little. Anyway, she said, “The answer is the artistic side.”

After forty-five minutes, we stopped the astrology and just talked. I admitted my true situation, including the fact that I would like to write a book. I talked about my earlier, nonserious attempt at writing and after about three minutes, she said, “Stop, I can’t stand this. I wish you could hear yourself. You are saying, if I have an idea for a book, which is most unlikely, even if I get a good idea, I’ll probably never get around to starting it, and if I do, obviously I’ll never finish it. If I do, of course it will never get published, even in the wildest chance that it got published, of course it will be unsuccessful. What are you doing? You’re trying to protect yourself from failure, and it won’t work.”

This session was, by far, the most significant hour of my life. I left her house and went for a little walk in a public park. I devised two questions for myself there and then. It’s so simple that it’s ludicrous, but my God, it worked for me. I was forty-four. I fast-forwarded to an age at which I thought, fundamentally, it’s all over. I picked seventy-five. My first question, starting from the vantage point of the seventy-five-year-old looking back at the forty-four-year-old, was, “If the forty-four-year-old identified something that he really wanted to do and it was really risky and he tried it and he failed—possibly fell on his face very publicly, with dire economic consequences—can the seventy-five-year-old cope with that?”

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

Filed under: Generate Money

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!