Many careers

imgresWe spent the week with some very old friends.  It was fantastic.  On the last night our friend said “Who would have thought that we would all be where we are today spending this time together”.  We have known him for 34 years and his wife 32 years.  Although we both raised our families in different parts of the world, we have followed a very similar path.  How we lead our lives, how we raised our kids, the priorities we made, etc.   In many ways nothing has changed yet everything has. Some of our kids are the same age as when we first met.

As someone who has had several careers I have been thinking a lot about different times of our lives.  Our children could live to be 100 years old.  That gives them the opportunity to have several careers.  They could decide to take 10 years off and raise their kids, they could start out in one career and shift to another because life will be long and the experiences they can have are endless.

People will no longer have one specific career.  The world of taking a job out of school and retiring with the gold watch is a thing of the past.  There are so many people who I know that were wading water in their 20’s and started to do something of interest in their 30’s and by their 40’s actually found a totally different career and couldn’t be happier.  That makes for an interesting life.

I know that I am spending time thinking about the evolution of my career.  The Women’s Entrepreneur Festival has been running for 5 years at NYU.  Next year the festival will be running outside of NYU making it into a profit business.  It gives us the opportunity to build it into something else and it has been calling for that for at least the past two years.  It is exciting and many could say it is another career building a new business even though it has been around for 5 years.

I think of Julia Child who at 35 started a career in food when she was living in Paris. Her meal of oysters and sole meuniere was a life changing moment for her and she embarked in a totally different career.  She was way before her time.  We are going to see more Julia Child’s going forward.  She went to Smith College, got a degree and her smarts and curiosity is what kept her moving forward and eventually finding something she fell in love with.  It was all serendipity but it worked.

You never know where the road takes you.  I am pretty sure that the most successful people I know never planned on a particular path but it just happened.  I know that if anyone had asked me at 20 years old that I would doing what I do now…I would have just laughed.

 

 

Comments (Archived):

  1. awaldstein

    Been on my mind alot.Read somewhere that the majority of people working today are doing jobs that didn’t exist when they entered school.Telling statement….

  2. William Mougayar

    No 2 job paths are the same. That’s for sure.Definitely, the corporate lifelong career is getting challenged, for several reasons, one of them is that few big corps are as good to their employees as they used to be (at least in NA). For me the first 14 years I spent at HP were grounding years that benefited me later.TL;DR: a good grounding helps you to pave your own path…and a bit of luck too along the way.

  3. Ella Dyer

    Our PWN-Nice group just discussed the “silver” market and how we continue to add value even later in life (Rita Montalcini, the very inspirational Italian Nobel Prize winner for brain Nerve Growth Factor when she was in her late 70’s ) with our “encore careers”. Empowering and enlightening.

  4. Sherry Abdou

    Wonderful post! It got me thinking a bit deeper into the course of my life. And, how the universe perfectly orchestrated it for me. I want my kids to know with all the wonder, turbulence, and joy life has in store for them to trust and keep faith that it WILL be amazing!