This broke me of the need to have an institutional affiliation

I did know that I wanted to be part of a community, so I started getting involved in Jewish activities and arts organizations. This broke me of the need to have an institutional affiliation. I learned how to listen more to myself, to reflect on what I wanted to do and what I enjoyed doing. I included being successful and making money in “enjoy doing,” but I had to figure out how to put the pleasure back in to a money-making job.

I thought I wanted to work in education. I volunteered in the public schools. I wanted to see what it’s like to teach, to work with eightand nine-year-olds. An ongoing dialogue with my husband helped me see that wasn’t it. He urged me look at what I did back in my twenties, what I fell in love with when I left school. I had loved being an editor. I remember having enormous discussions with him, often pretty anguished ones. I felt editing was women’s work. I thought it was a submissive, or subordinate, kind of helping work. I really fought that. I was trying to reposition myself as a kind of market maker.

He would say to me, “Where’s the scarcity, Brenda? Is there a scarcity of people who are making deals? Is there a scarcity of people who can put together bulleted lists? No, there’s a scarcity of people who can really bring out the best in the people and make great products.” That dialogue allowed me to start working as a freelance editor, which was really only a step. I thought it would lead to something else, but I didn’t know what. I knew I would be meeting lots of interesting people, that I would be developing a skill again. It was important to me to be able to get in doors and to reestablish a network.

By this time, I had developed a pretty strong point of view about the publishing business. High-quality authors were the scarce commodities. And I thought that being an editor at a publishing house had become a very passive job. It’s become totally P&L-oriented, which is neither a creative nor an innovative way to be involved in a business. And with the “disintermediation” that’s happening in the business, all of the power was accruing to people other than acquisitions editors—people outside the publishing houses, like agents. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that being an agent might be the absolute best option. I could have more reach than I had ever imagined. I could be true to who I was, and not just by being a deal maker. I mean, there are literary agents who are deal makers, who are very transactional and extremely focused on their relationships with publishers and who do not serve the interests of their authors particularly well. But I knew that that would not be how I would operate. I would stay true to being relational, being concerned about the content of books, being absolutely an authors’ agent, because the publishers don’t have as much power as they used to have. And I knew this would be a very good selling line to authors.

It is hard for people to achieve the objectivity they need to question and change their daily routines while they are still actively immersed in them. Time-out periods—sometimes as short as Jane’s ten-hour drive, other times as long as Brenda’s multiyear moratorium—help people make changes by providing a space for reflective observation.^[18] Stepping back makes room for insights we have been incubating but cannot yet articulate. It helps us see the coexistence—and incompatibility—of old and new. Changes in the habitual rhythm of our work or halts in our normal productive activity can work as triggers, waking us up from our daily routines and refocusing our attention on change.^[19] In a time-out, attention shifts away from everyday pressures, creating the space needed to reconsider the future.

Brenda’s first reaction to a trigger—the menace of a caricature—was to overcompensate for the void she felt by putting her career at the bottom of her list of priorities. But stepping back led her to a more creative solution, in which she combined the best of all worlds.

Being an agent gives me a complete career and a complete life. There’s no trade-off. Sure, I get busy and, of course, on any given task, I have to decide what comes first, my job or my life. My life is more enjoyable all around. It’s not just about work versus personal life. It’s about “What’s my voice? Can I be creative? Am I just a corporate drone? Do I just exist as a thank-you in people’s prefaces? Am I a writer?” If someone were to draw that cartoon of me now, what would I tell the artist about myself? Lots: arts boards, philanthropy, a dog, a great marriage, a Jewish faith, Pilates, dance class. . . .

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

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