SECOND CAREERS
Can You Have A Second Career As You Enter Your Late Sixties?
I am about to find out.
I turn 67 this fall, which I consider the beginning of my late sixties. It is also when I ask myself whether I can embark on a second career.
The second career, were I to have one, would be nothing like my first.
My first career relied on my MBA, analytical skills, salesmanship to find and retain clients, diplomacy on multiple fronts, and paranoia that I might have just serviced my last client.
Paranoia is what makes you reach out, again, to the one who said, “Maybe in six months…” You never forget the remotest of possibilities.
One of my favorite business reads was Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive. I could relate. When my phone wouldn’t ring, and the emails wouldn’t come, I’d call my husband at work and sing,
“Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I’m gonna go eat worms.”
He would tell me to knock it off and do something fun. “Isn’t this what they call ‘beach time?’ It won’t last, so enjoy it.”
He was right, and I tried hard to enjoy the symbolic beach. Sometimes, I succeeded.
