I have a friend who is the master of reinvention. We met when we were both teaching English in Barcelona in the late 1980s. He moved back long before me and bagged himself a big-wig corporate job, which he loved for a while but then really hated.
He then retrained as a hypnotherapist, which he found interesting and rewarding but didn’t quite pay all the bills.
I was back in the UK by then and friends and I encouraged him to try his hand at magazine subbing. He did that for a few years, moving up the masthead ultimately to become a burned-out editor who needed an escape plan.
That escape, and his latest reinvention, has been moving back to where he grew up. He lives in a massive house (the kind you can afford when you don’t live in the South East) with his loving partner and works in a local shop.
And he’s never been happier.
What post about reinvention would be complete without Madonna?
I’ve been thinking about reinvention a lot over the past few days – it definitely seems to be a thing right now: last week I found out that an old work colleague had become a therapist (something I think she'd be very good at) and yesterday I saw an old boss advertising his garden design business (a total curveball – I'd never have had him down as the outdoors type).
I’m also thinking that I need to reinvent myself. Twelve years ago a friend and long-time work colleague asked me if I had capacity to freelance on an issue of a property/lifestyle glossy while the editor was away. The editor never came back and what was meant to be a one-off turned into 12 years of writing about property, design, architecture, art and travel. The job kept me busy and took me to exotic locations and the kind of hotels people like Giles Coren visit for TV shows.
It was fun, if hectic, and went through a few fair crises as agencies, clients and managements changed.
The latest change is that I have been retired.
Nicked from LinkedIn. Who wears red laces? But you get my drift…
The agency producing the magazine has given the editorship to one of their full-time employees – I’ve been freelance the whole time. I am not surprised – the magazine has gone from four issues a year to two and the agency has lost other projects so it makes business sense for them to use in-house resources who now have capacity. We are parting on good terms.
It does, however, mean that my income is down 70%.
I’ve had a chance to adjust to not working full time (though am in denial about the hit to my finances) and now need to work out what I want to reinvent myself as. Either that or try and find someone who would pay me to read books, scroll social media feeds and play ball with the dog!
What would your reinvention be?
Personal reinvention is challenging. Thanks for this post! Fortunately, I developed a 'career' in a social justice issue that I feel strongly about. Career, though, is a word I wouldn't necessarily use to describe my professional life. More like leaping over canyons from one project to the next. It's only in the last ten or so years that I feel I'm in the professional role I've always wanted to have. It took some forty years to achieve! Anyway, the best and only advice I give to those who ask about careers and work is to identify what and where you want to be in years from now and work out an itinerary from there to the present. Often, it's all about making the work you want rather than relying upon someone else to engage you to do it.
Mine has been to start living off my pension a decade before 'planned'. It's a blast!