Embracing a big idea
In the nick of time
Back in late 2016, the wonderful company I worked for was being sold and it was the end of the world as we knew it. I started plotting my exit strategy, thinking I might like to try something new after many years in corporate leadership positions. Around that time, a co-worker who knew I secretly wanted to write fiction gave me a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and insisted I read it. This terrifying passage hit me upside the head:
“I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form…driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest…through collaboration with a human partner… ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightning does).”
The message was clear: if you have a great idea that won’t leave you alone, you’d better do something about it before it finds another host. I’d been carrying around the idea for my first novel The Italian Prisoner since I first heard the true backstory in 2003. I was sure if I didn’t write it, somebody else would. And I knew if I took another 80-hour-a-week corporate job, it would be many more years before I got to it.
Then my rockstar financial advisor sent me a book by Marci Alboher called The Encore Career Handbook. Working through the very practical steps in the Handbook (I do love a good worksheet), I figured out how to pay the bills with a “portfolio” career—consulting, teaching, nonprofit work, and board service. I decided I’d work with people I liked, who shared my values, on projects where I could make a positive contribution. And in my “time pie,” I saved a wedge for learning the craft of creative writing, conducting historical research, and finally getting my first novel finished and published.
I recognize the literary life I’ve constructed reflects a certain amount of privilege, for which I’m grateful. We all have other priorities—life maintenance, families, economic pressures, health challenges, and saving our democracy. But as the great Bonnie Raitt reminds us, “Life gets mighty precious, when there's less of it to waste.”
Since leaving the corporate stress factory, I’ve been so inspired by many friends and former colleagues out there sharing their artistic talents during their “encore careers” as painters, musicians, and actors. I’ve also seen many of my writer friends emerge from a lifetime of doing other work to take on serious writing projects and deliver books that readers have embraced. There’s big magic in that.
What’s your big idea? What are you going to do about it?
Good post; a push I needed. :)
I love encore careers. It's "do it my way" time. Well, not entirely. I ran right into the deadly "IT" grinch when I wrote my book. I thought "IT" was a pronoun. Yes, I drove a number of editors and publishers crazy and used my boomer age to win sympathy. The truth is: the big, bad IT trend, with its army of mildly talented AIs, can be whipped into shape.