The 10 Laws of Career Reinvention by Pamela Mitchell

Author:Pamela Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

What if you have access to none of the Big Three?

The “Plan B” Job

An additional source of funding kicks in after you have exhausted the possibilities of keeping your job, leaning on your partner, or si-phoning off your savings. This fail-safe option is to take a temporary job—the less demanding, the better. This is your Plan B gig, just in case the money runs out sooner than expected. It can happen if you miscalculate how much to set aside or if your reinvention time frame takes longer than anticipated.

Did I say “if ”? I meant “when.”

Most people underestimate the amount of time involved in a reinvention. However long you think it will take, I recommend doubling that—at least from a funding perspective. Career reinvention requires an investment of six months to a year, minimum, of effort. Two years is fairly normal as well. Having a Plan B strategy in place will give you peace of mind and may even help you get where you’re going faster—you never know who you’re going to meet along the way.

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people balk at the idea of taking another, lesser job, temporarily, to ease them through a cash crunch. From the way they carry on, you’d think I was talking about breaking rocks in the Gulag with a pickax. There was a woman who came to me and said, “I want to reinvent myself but I’m running out of money. I don’t want to get a job in the meantime because it will block my reinvention. What do you think I should do?”

I told her to go out and get a job.

I knew that unless she got her cash flow going to meet her basic needs, she would be hard-pressed to make any progress on the reinvention front. The mental energy she needed to brainstorm ideas would be sapped by worrying about the rent. When my 401(k) money ran out after I left my Wall Street job, I moved on to Plan B and took an office-temp job. It was a painful, demoralizing experience. I was doing menial work even the assistants wouldn’t touch. One day I found myself standing at the photocopier, reduced to tears—here I was, a former director on Wall Street, and my biggest task was making copies!

During my three months as an office temp, a friend of a friend offered me a job. I turned it down because it would not have taken me closer to the entertainment field, my goal. “Fine,” said the woman. “When you give up your dream, you can come back and work for me.”

Give up my dream? Never. I would rather stand at a copier fixing a paper jam.

Your Plan B job is temporary. It’s strategic. Maybe I was collating and stapling, but I still had all the talent and skills and wherewithal that had gotten me that far. I was still me, even without the big title.

Two months after that woman told me to give up my dream, I started my wonderful new life in the entertainment field.

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