Second Acts: How People Are Redefining Their Careers and Embracing New Beginnings
Eight years ago, Maggie Louise Callahan launched a line of eponymous confections. The collection, which is handmade in Austin, is wildly imaginative. Buttery milk chocolates in the shape of lips are finished in glossy pinks. Mini lemons made of white chocolate are glazed in citrusy yellow. Tiny dark cocoa martini glasses laced with caramel come finished in shimmering silver. Every candy evokes a sense of glee too rarely experienced in adulthood.
In seeing these details it’s easy to assume chocolate-making was a life-long pursuit for Callahan. That she plunged into the profession in her early adult years with a siloed vision. But it’s the opposite. Her business came to be after a near decade-long career as a lawyer. “I started to feel that my sense of self wasn’t really there,” says Callahan, who is in her forties. She yearned for more creativity and a way to use all her skills. So, she started exploring. She took culinary and design classes and volunteered at museums. And after moving with her husband and then 9-month-old baby to Austin, “a creative, vibrant place,” she finally left her lucrative law career and jumped into entrepreneurism.
Callahan’s journey unspools into a common story today: People are leaving their jobs to pursue their passions. Some want more work-life balance. Others autonomy. Many are motivated to foster the ability to create jobs for others. Or they want to water a side of their personality that’s wilted away at a desk. Type in the hashtag #careerchange on Instagram and nearly 460,000 posts boasting messages like “choose what you want” and “what are you waiting for?” appear. These sentiments of potential and adventure permeate the work lexicon. A bright sun shining over a sea of logged hours and demanding bosses. To pivot, to have a second (or third or fourth) act has appeal.
“I was in my early thirties and I started thinking philosophically. Like, what is life all about,” says Mike Doehla, an entrepreneur. “What is a human’s purpose? It is to not spend all of our waking hours doing things we don’t want to do.” Like Callahan, Doehla eased into creating his own business. While working his longtime corporate HR job, he built up a clientele on the side for more than a year before “jumping ship” to launch his nutrition consulting company, Stronger U. “I really started to think, what could I do?” he says. “What do I care about? What am I passionate about? What problem in the world do I think can be solved?”
Similar seeds are planted in millions of minds in the US. At the end of 2020, applications to start businesses were up 42 percent from the year prior, according to the US Census Bureau. The reasons, of course, vary person to person, but a great part of the charge is fueled by a desire. “There is a sense that there is a lot out there and that people want to be themselves,” says Callahan. “I don’t mean let it all hang out. I mean finding a career or a passion that really reflects who they are, what they believe in, and their values.”
As electrifying as following one’s passion is the realization that one’s career doesn’t have to conform to conventional ideals. Rather than succumbing to the belief of choose this vocation and stick to it, thus building on the corporate-ladder model, today’s working world looks like a constellation. As Callahan sees it, “people are discovering that there is a lot more out there than just path A, path B, or path C.”
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The concept of pivoting is inspiring. But it elicits questions. How does one shift with kids, with credit card debt, with student loans, with no security? Exciting as it is, it is daunting—and for some, not an option. “It’s a privileged place for people to be considering,” says Lauren McGoodwin, author of the book, Power Moves: How Women Can Pivot, Reboot, and Build a Career of Purpose, and founder of Career Contessa, a resource that helps women build healthy and successful careers. One in four adults in the US have trouble paying their bills since the outbreak of COVID-19, according to the Pew Research Center. And a third have had to pull money from additional accounts, like savings, to make ends meet. Life is hard. Throw in a pandemic, continued institutional racism, and extreme societal inequity and making a change to follow one’s passion evaporates into the ether.
The past year has been particularly challenging for working women. According to an annual report from the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, women, especially women from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities, have been more likely to be laid off or furloughed during the COVID-19 crisis, thus “stalling their careers and jeopardizing their financial security.” Furthermore, of the 140,000 job loss claims accounted for the US Department of Labor in December 2020, all were held by women (according to an analysis by CNN). The pandemic has also intensified challenges all too commonly faced by women (and widely known at this point), which include juggling work, motherhood, caring for others, and maintaining domestic labor. McKinsey & Company found that one in every four women are considering leaving their job or careers all-together.
This data spotlights a chilling fact: We work to support ourselves, but our vocations and careers too often don’t provide all that we need. (And for too many, work takes and takes with no return.) These cracks are sparking a sense of ingenuity. As Amy Nelson, founder and CEO of The Riveter, a company that advocates for women’s equity and evolution in the workplace, points out, necessity breeds invention. “Women are taking the current state of work and our economy and the pandemic and doing what they can,” says Nelson, who founded her business after a career in law. “What we’re seeing is women entering the freelance market at an incredible rate.” These changes allow for autonomy, the ability to be “the master of your own schedule, more so than when you work in corporate America,” and the chance to mandate your rate, continues Nelson.
McGoodwin agrees. Amidst the wrath of the past year, she has been seeing people make career shifts that fall more in line with their needs and their values—the most notable driver being a new perspective on the most fleeting thing in life: our time. “[It] is one of those things that you don’t get back,” she says. “No company can offer it as a perk. Also, people were recognizing that a lot of their time was being spent in ways that they didn’t need to be spending it.”
While writing this story, my own perspective on career pivots has evolved. As a longtime advocate for making changes, I’ve always viewed the concept through an iconoclastic lens. Don’t follow the institutions, follow your heart! But in listening to the people I’ve interviewed here, I feel the crux of the career change conversation speaks to McGoodwin’s point: How do we spend our time? In theory, money can be lost and replenished. But hours? Days? When they’re gone, they’re gone—so why wait to do what you love?
Of course, many answers to this question bring us to the serious aforementioned issues: ability, lack of support, low funds, fear. And it could elicit a response around age. Even today, ageism continues to be an issue in the work world, especially for women. “It is very real,” says Nelson, whose found this to be true after she and her colleagues conducted a study on working women two years ago. This issue is “ridiculous,” she says, especially in considering that our experience is what makes us valuable, “and we are living such longer lives.”
“So, we will iterate, we will change, we will adapt,” Nelson continues, “and we will have so many different careers. I think that’s something to celebrate and not shy away from.”
Age can be viewed as currency, a motivator, or even, as Doehla believes, an advantage as “you are more prepared to make better decisions.” Callahan admits age almost stymied her from starting anew. She worried she had spent too much time going to law school, developing her relationships, “building up a knowledge” to justify a change. But this was a self-made theory. “I wasn’t too old,” she says. “In fact, all of those experiences before informed what I did after.”
These sentiments are intuitive—the older we get, the better we get. Any doubts around this can be quelled by our President-Elect. He is is taking on the greatest career evolution of his life—at 78.
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One of the toughest realities we’ve all come to face this past year is life’s fragility. Some of us reading this have lost loved ones, friends, colleagues. Others have faced their own mortality. The things that have true meaning have come into razor sharp focus. With our working and personal lives becoming more enmeshed, the idea of persuing something that feels aligned with our souls feels more and more critical. Annie Dillard said it best: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
So what’s the ticket to taking a leap? No one can offer a one-size-fits-all answer. But there is the titanium value in finding and lending encouragement. “Women realize more than ever that the support of one another is the fastest way for us all to move ahead,” says Nelson.
This growing culture of support is suggestive of the bigger message behind career pivots. The world of work is changing. Autonomy and flexibility are becoming more attractive than the perception of security—and they’re a harbinger of what’s to come. “I think work will become unbundled over the next 10 years and freelancers will make up the majority of the American workplace,” says Nelson. And as more workers see where and how they want to spend their time, and many can prove that they can do their jobs remotely, the corporate world will have to keep up.
As will the country’s leadership. With the advancement of social benefits that can bolster greater equity, we could work toward making the concept of a career pivot less of a privileged idea and more of an actual option for all. “If we can solve for a really big gap in terms of insurance, parental leave, and the benefits that come from the American workplace, I think that will be the best transformation we could see in our economy,” says Nelson. In any case, the idea of making a change that would bring more fulfillment into one’s life is a worthy endeavor. This could mean making a career pivot, or it could mean carving out more time for one’s passions and family outside of work. “At the end of the day, it’s the small steps that add up to big things anyway,” says McGoodwin.
This rings true for Callahan. Eight years into her shift from lawyer to entrepreneur, her business is thriving. The change hasn’t been an easy journey, she says, but ultimately the decision to create a second act continues to satisfy her. It also presented something beyond herself: an example for her daughter and son. “I wanted to show them that, first of all, I thought I was worth it,” she says. “I wanted to send the message that finding passion and utilizing your talents and skills is important and will bring you more joy than making a lot of money or doing something because it is perceived as more prestigious.”
She continues: “Being able to do something where you get to truly be yourself is pretty remarkable.”
