Gonna make a (career) change, for once in my life…
So here we are. I notified my work that I will be leaving the company and so the countdown begins. Shit, most definitely, has got real.
What hit me first was how things have instantly and drastically changed for me: my time is now my own, so I’m no longer wasting my employers’ time anymore or finding new and innovative ways to do the minimum possible just to get to the next pay cheque. No – now every minute I waste dicking about on my phone is time I won’t be making progress towards my goals, and so time seems much more precious to me now…quite a shift of focus as you can imagine, but a very, very good motivator.
When I revealed to my friends and family about my decision to leave my job and the free time I would therefore have to look for a career, I got a range of responses. Mostly positive to be fair, but to summarise, the general feeling was:
What an opportunity!
I agree. However, I feel this opportunity represents a double-edged sword in some ways: it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to find a career that I truly love… But, there are no more excuses: no client calls at awkward times, no ‘I had to stay late at the office to finish a piece of work’, no ‘I’m so tired from working that I don’t have the energy to focus on my passions or get up and go to the gym’.
No. Excuses.
Everything during my working hours are now fully under my control. This is both hugely energising and, honestly, kind of terrifying. All the excuses I’ve made to myself over the years of “if only I had the time…”, “if I ever got the chance…” – those bluffs are now all being well and truly called and I have nowhere to hide, so the question is: what the F*** do I do now?!
At this point I could quite easily have kicked back, stayed up late every night, gone out drinking with friends, played through Elden Ring for 100s of hours (more), and basically enjoyed being unemployed. However as I reflected on the potential of this time, and the massive, obscene privilege afforded to me, I felt an obligation, and duty almost, to not waste the time and to extract the maximum benefit out of it for myself and for others.
So, what did I do?
I started by doing what any good (or bad, or average, I guess) strategy consultant would do: break down a big, hairy, amorphous problem into a clear structure, segment the problem logically into more manageable chunks, break each down further into a list of topics, ideas, questions and actions, which I can then start to investigate to find out more about these areas and, most importantly, find out more about myself.
OK, but, what did I actually do?
As you may have read in the About section, I have spent quite a lot of time doing every recommended career or passion test under the sun. My biggest criticism of these is that once it gets to this stage, it gets far too wishy-washy (e.g., “find what works for you”, “everyone needs to uncover their own path” etc.) – so what I’d like to provide here is some details on what I actually did and, although I don’t recommend you follow it exactly, I’m hoping it can provide some inspiration for you on how to tackle your unique journey and circumstances.
I essentially looked at 4 key areas that I wanted to focus on, and then went through a process of defining my goals and structuring my approach for each of these areas:
- Structuring my day – what did I want my day to look like and how could I maximise my time?
- Passion: music – what are my goals and how best can I work towards them?
- Passion: writing – (same as 2.)
- Wildcard option: how do I expose myself to new inputs and experiences outside of my comfort zone to help break ingrained thought patterns and generate new ideas?
Note: as I’m (almost) starting from scratch, these structures and approaches will evolve over time, but this is just how I plan to start and adapt as I go…
1) Structuring my day
The temptation here would be either to start too intensely and try to achieve everything in the first week, burning out and getting jaded when not 100% of things go to plan (note: I am an expert at this). Alternatively, I could start too slowly and end up enjoying my downtime a bit too much with the idea that I need a few weeks to just free my mind up and see what inspires me….
Neither of these extremes sounded great. So, in the end, I decided on a balance of the two.
My main priorities were that I wanted to have a sustainable, long-term approach (Rome wasn’t built in a day, it’s a marathon not a sprint etc.) but also to ensure I have the necessary headspace to not only be doing, doing, doing, but also to have time to reflect on what I’m doing, understand it, and “feel” my way forward a bit, instead of ticking “1 hour of reading: check!” off an ever expanding list of to-dos.
Non-negotiables
As a first step, I began with a list of tasks which I would call the ‘non-negotiables’: things that I know are beneficial for me and will help me be more productive, energised and motivated each day. The first of these was exercise. I feel if I exercise in the morning, I’m just generally a better and nicer person for the rest of the day. Again, sticking with my principle of sustainability, this didn’t need to be a 6am bootcamp session, but just an hour each day where I do something. Typically this would be a gym session, run or cycle, but could also be some light stretching or a walk. Whatever works and as long as I can keep it consistent.
Another of these non-negotiables is breakfast – you may laugh but in the consulting world this can vary from no-breakfast-fasted-cardio, to tracking macros alongside continuous glucose monitoring, to having a snatched yoghurt while on mute and camera off on a client call at 7am. I like breakfast, I like eating breakfast, and so I am going to have breakfast every day (bonus points if I have it with my wife before she goes to work). Same goes for lunch and dinner.
Not ignoring, and factoring in, life admin
On top of this, I knew I would need time during the day for normal, life admin-type tasks, with the risk being that if you can do these at any time, you do it ad hoc and it can be disruptive to your plans. So, I factored these tasks into a standard workday structure, whereby I’ll have some personal time at lunch and then in the evening to get these things done.
Sustainable, focused working blocks
Finally, rather than give myself a huge single time block in which to “get shit done”, I broke this down into manageable work blocks of 1hr15m each, with a 15 min break in between (sustainable, and there if needed). This will help me to focus on specific tasks I define each day, have long enough to make meaningful progress and to not be so overwhelming that I dread doing them, no matter how enjoyable they may seem in theory!
Taking this all into account the initial structure for my day looked something like this:
It’s not perfect, but it’s a start, and as someone rightly said: “imperfect action it better than perfect inaction”, ergo it’s good enough to start with, so let’s roll with it.
2) Music
Here’s where things get a bit more tricky.
I have very limited experience to speak of in playing music, the music industry or anything really outside of attending festivals, listening to a lot of music, playing around with some music software over the years and spending far too much money on vinyl. However, to explain my thinking as to why I chose this as an area to explore, it came down to a couple of simple reasons:
a) Because I love music and it has been one of the only constants across my life where I keep coming back to during good times, bad times and everything in-between, so feel it’s worth exploring to see if a potential career lies hidden somewhere.
b) Because I feel like I have been given and taken so much from music over the years, that if I could pay something, no matter how small, back into the collective canon, I’d feel like I’d actually contributed something to the world.
So, how do I take this pretty broad area and turn it into something actionable that I can use to explore and experiment with as a future career?
I started by breaking this down into a few different action areas, and then setting some initial tasks against each to conduct some light, playful experimentation which will hopefully form a nice feedback loop of learning and improvement. These were:
- Learn music
- Take music lessons
- Read music theory books
- Educate myself via critical listening of ‘great’ music (definitions may vary)
- Create music
- Learn music production software*
- Create music and write songs
- Understand the music industry
- Research major companies, record labels and recording studios
- Identify and reach out to people locally who work in the space
- Identify contacts at large organisations on LinkedIn and ask to connect for an initial conversation (i.e. could there be a sideways step from consulting here?)
Again, rather than spending too long on formulating a beautiful structure, I felt this was good enough to get the ball rolling, to take some action and then see how I felt as I learned more.
* Full disclosure: I’m not starting totally from scratch here. About a year ago I bought a cheap MIDI keyboard at Christmas (a gift to myself) and then spent some time learning Ableton via their free trial for a few months as a test. I ended up really enjoying this and so now plan to dedicate real time to learn the software and actually try to produce music (rather than just play around). FYI I hate bullshitters, so I’m trying to be as open and honest as possible here (within reason).
3) Writing
Again, similar to music, this was something where I was fumbling in the dark a bit. About ten years ago when I went through a divorce, I spent a lot of time then reflecting on what I would want to do with my life and writing was one which continually popped up, despite the fact that I had never written anything proper to speak of. So once more, when I came to this major life juncture, it just wouldn’t shut the f*ck up, so rather than ignore it, I plan to explore it and find out whether I want to be a writer, or I just like the idea of being a writer.
For writing, I felt I needed some initial thinking and research to help structure my approach. However after much research and looking into publishing a novel, careers in writing, journalism and all other variants, one consistent theme seemed to emerge:
If you want to be a writer, you have to write something.
This is what I’m sure you all come here for: the absolutely profound shit. You’re welcome.
With this profundity in mind, rather than start reaching out to people who work in publishing, magazines or journalism and have them ask me what I’ve written, I decided to focus on learning and developing my craft as a writer before having any of these initial conversations. So my structured approach looked something like this:
- Learn about the fundamentals of writing
- Identify and sign up to a writing course or learning programme
- Write something!
- Set up a blog to write and experiment (ta da!)
- Come up with ideas and start writing a short story or novel
- Read everything I can
- Literature
- Poetry / song lyrics
- Screenplays
- Non-literature / trash
This has an odd cyclical feel as I’m explaining my writing goals while working on my writing goals…so this is all I’ll say for now, and we’ll revisit this in later blogs!
4) Wildcard
This one, I’m sure you can tell by the name, is the least thought out and structured part of my plan!
I see this as more about breaking down personal mental barriers, to open myself up to new opportunities and experiences that I would never normally take on. Now, see, a lot of people say this type of stuff (looking at you Baz “do one thing every day that scares you” Luhrmann, if that is your real name?), and in theory it sounds great, but by definition if you follow this advice to the letter, it will actually be scary and maybe not in such a fun way! But, if you don’t change what you do, you can’t change who you are (again: profound).
So, very little structure or plans but I had some initial ideas based on things that were always in my mind in some shape or form, but these were always those that got moved to the bottom of the list as they never felt feasible; but things have well and truly changed.
These are a few of the starter areas and ideas I came up with, which will no doubt evolve massively as time goes on and I embarrass myself beyond cringing belief:
- Try new things / Find new inputs
- E.g., read magazines that tend to catch your eye in the shop but you never buy*
- Break ingrained habits
- E.g., walk a different way to the station, go into shops you’ve always walked past and never gone in, order food you’d never normally order; force yourself to do different stuff
- Look for inspiration in new places or in new ways
- E.g., go to new places, with no agenda and see where the mood takes you
- Explore other creative fields in the arts
- E.g., sign up to be a TV/Film extra
*No…not those type of magazines
The TV/Film extra thing has been on my list for a while and now I have the spare time, I hope to get signed up and be part of something as I would love to see how a big budget TV or film production works.
Other than that my plan is to make time for and to look for opportunities to throw a bit of fun chaos into the mix, use my feelings as a guide, and then reflect on the experience and use this to iterate on new ideas moving forward.
In summary
It’s a lot. I’m aware of this. And looking across all of these tasks it does seem a bit overwhelming and literally impossible to make progress towards each of these areas every single day.
So, my plan is to plan my day in order to progress a mix of small, everyday tasks where consistency beats intensity (e.g., reading), with a set of more focused, prioritised tasks, where the desired outcome will be at the end of the week, rather than each day (e.g., writing and editing a full blog post).
I think that’s quite enough on the process for one blog post, and so I’ll update you on the next post with more details on how this is actually working, and how I’ve managed to turn my plans into action.
