Starter career: Like a starter marriage without the messy divorce

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Henry Kasdon learned to break dance on his mom's tennis court. Now he's a dance teacher who is astute enough about marketing to change the names of moves from the Brooklyn to the Brookline. He is a successful dancer; he's getting ready to switch careers to trial law. “I want my kids to be taken care of,” he says. Not that he has any now, but Kasdon is a man with a plan.

The odds are, recent college grads will be working for the next fifty years. That's a long time. No one expects to stay in the same job for fifty years, and probably not even the same career. So why not have a starter career before you get down to the business of making enough money to buy a home or raise a family?

A starter career is similar to a starter marriage but without the pain of divorce. Pamela Paul, author of Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, says, “Once you're at the end of a starter marriage, you realize all your mistakes, misperceptions and false expectations that you had, and you can make better decision next time.” And the same is true for careers. Pick a starter career with the best of intentions, but be ready to learn from your shortcomings to make the second one even better.

A starter career is serious business. This is not a McJob to pay the bills. You might need one of those in your life, but a McJob is not a conscious, career decision so much as an acknowledgement that starving is painful. A starter career aims to accomplish something; otherwise you're just spinning your wheels, biding time.

A starter career should have meaning to you. Sonja Lyubomirsky, assistant professor of psychology at University of California at Riverside, describes meaningful work as a job that meets a core goal. “People have important goals that come from inside themselves, for example personal growth, community or relationships. Jobs that allow you to meet intrinsic goals will lead to more happiness.”

Kasdon is audibly elated when he describes how he's grown as a dancer and how he has helped other people to learn, which is what makes his dancing a starter career rather than just a sideshow to pay bills.

It should be too risky to do later. Barbara Reinhold, director of the Executive Education for Women program at Smith College, generally recommends that if you can squelch your spending, you should make some money before you launch a low-paying career; if nothing else, creative juices work better when they are not diverted to financial crises. But in many cases, there is no time to wait. For Kasdon, we're talking knees. A break dancing career will not be available to him physically later in life. For others, like math rockers, the cool factor precludes breakout success as a forty-year-old, so you should get out your CD earlier than that.

Paul says that most starter marriages are to college sweethearts. Read: Married for love and not earning potential. And that's what you should be thinking with your starter career. The money can come later — the second time around. Jason Cole, managing director of Abacus Wealth Partners, a national financial planning firm, says when asked about people in their twenties: “We encourage people to pursue their passions. They'll have a lot of years to earn money. Sure you'll lose something by forgoing the ability to put money away, but you need to balance what is most important to you.” (Savor these words because you will not qualify for any more advice from Abacus Wealth Partners until your net worth reaches $1 million.)

You might think a starter career is risky, but there are dangers to taking time to make some money before you do what you love. Reinhold warns that a good paying career straight out of the gate leads to “golden handcuff syndrome”. She writes that, “You have to be careful not to grow your tastes with your income”? anesthetic spending is the phenomenon where you spend and spend to try to forget that the lucrative work you’re doing doesn’t really fit you.”

For those of you not totally convinced of the financial genius of a starter career, take solace in the fact that even if you don't begin saving for retirement until you're 25, you'll be ten years ahead of the average baby boomer.

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Forget about asking yourself if you’re likeable

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I write a lot about how people have to be likeable to get what they want in life. I get so frustrated, though, because everyone thinks they are likeable. Maybe to their dog, yes, but in my experience most people are not nearly as likeable as they think they are.

I thought of this because I was reading a list of five tips to be likeable:

1. Be positive
2. Control your insecurities
3. Provide value
4. Eliminate all judgments
5. Become a person of conviction

And I thought, this is a great list. I should put it on my blog. Then I thought, forget it. People will read the list and think they have all these qualities and then move on. But don’t do that.

The problem is that the most unlikeable people are the most clueless so they are the least able to become more likeable. Harvard Business Review ran a whole issue on incompetence (via Ben Casnocha) and the conclusion is, among other things, the incompetent don’t know they are incompetent.

So here’s an idea that can apply to likeable and unlikeable people while avoiding the uphill battle of getting the unlikeable to confess: Find the item on the list that is your weak point and force yourself to get better at it. No one is equally good at all five things. Improve on one. Taziana Cascario, professor at Harvard, does research in this area, and she told me that the biggest barrier to being likeable is not caring. So just pick something on the list and improve on it and stop analyzing whether or not people like you.

I am going to improve on number four by being less judgmental. After all, I just wrote a whole post about the misguided-and-unlikeable and how much they annoy me.

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Ten questions with Gloria Steinem

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I interviewed Gloria Steinem. She’s promoting her new undertaking, GreenStone Media, a radio station founded by women for women. There were nine bloggers on the call with me and we each got to ask a question.

During the interview I was routinely sidetracked by:

a) Gloria Steinem is the revolutionary we talk about when we talk about feminism. She is huge. I felt incredibly honored to be talking to her.

b) The other nine bloggers are huge. Not huge like Gloria Steinem, but huge like smart writing and big audience and I was dying to know what they were thinking about the call.

c) Emily Rice put the call together, and she identified ten top bloggers across blogging genres — tricky to do. Rice will generate publicity for GreenStone Media in an area that would have been hard to reach. I think she is a publicity genius and I got sidetracked thinking about ways to become her friend.

Here’s what happened on the call. The women asked very interesting questions, and Gloria gave very interesting answers. But the two were not particularly related.

Here are examples. (I am paraphrasing in places. If you need to hear the whole interview, here it is) :

Q: (From Catherine Connors) In your keynote speech you say that women want less conflict on radio. One of the criticisms of the mommy bloggers is there’s too much camaraderie. It’s too rah rah and we don’t disagree nearly enough.

A: (From Gloria, of course) People complain about the Oprafication of media. I think, if only the media were as good as Oprah we’d be in a different world. There is such a premium on agreement that we forget to tell the truth. There really can’t be community if it doesn’t include the freedom to say what we feel.

See what I mean? Catherine brings up an interesting topic that is very this-moment. And Gloria says some inspiring stuff that would have been an equally good answer to fifty questions people asked twenty years ago.

Q: (From me) In your keynote speech you say women are reading more than men and getting more college degrees than men. You say it like that’s a positive. But right now girls are working much harder than boys in high school and in college and it seems to me like a trickle down from women doing more work than men everywhere else. Do you see this as a problem?

A: Women need to ask themselves the revolutionary question, Is this really what I want to do?.. When mediocre women do as well as mediocre men, then I’ll know we’re getting somewhere.

Again, I bring up a topic that is very current, and Gloria gives an answer that spans decades. So this is one reason why Gloria is an amazing figure in history; the answers she’s been giving to the media for the last twenty years still resonate. But I couldn’t help feeling like I was in a press conference with some political figure who is sticking to talking points.

So for a minute, let me move past Gloria Steinem and GreenStone Media.

I want to tell you about the women on the call. I love their blogs because they are so honest and well written. I loved that each of us was so nervous and excited about talking to Gloria, and each of us was so eager to hear what the others would ask.

But, when you get a group of women together, the stay-at-home moms separate from the career moms. So it’s no surprise that the moms divided here, too.

Jenn Satterwhite, said, “If you are a mommy blogger you’re written off.” This is true. Many women dread working in an all-women space. And I personally have lost a job giving career advice right after I wrote about being pregnant. (“You should write for a working mom magazine,” my editor told me.)

So it did not surprise me that when Pamela Slim spoke she made sure to tell Gloria that her blog focuses on entrepreneurship, not parenting. And when I got on the phone, I said I write about work and parenting only as it relates to work. I said this because I would never, ever want to be called a mommy blogger. I’d lose half my readers.

But let me tell you something. While I was distancing myself from the mommy bloggers, I did something only a mom would do: built a fortress in my bedroom so that my kids wouldn’t bug me on the call; I had a mattress against the door to muffle screams and a dresser against the mattress to keep the door shut.

So in the end, we have a snapshot of women’s media in the new millennium: There is a group of bloggers asking contentious questions from the media’s edge. And there is Gloria Steinem, representing the establishment, and giving seasoned and wise but measured answers in an effort to promote her burgeoning radio empire. And while Gloria is marketing her conflict-free radio station, the bloggers are doing what they do best, celebrating conflict, even within ourselves.

Here’s the list of bloggers:
Catherine Connors, Her Bad Mother
Ingrid Wiese, Three New York Women
Jenn Satterwhite, Mommy Needs Coffee
K Smith, Almost Literally
Kristen Chase, Motherhood Uncensored
Leah Peterson, Leah Peah
Liz Gumbinner, Mom 101
Pam Slim, Escape from Cubicle Nation
Sarah Brown, Que Sera Sera

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It’s the Brazen Careerist internship: Come and get it!

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I want to take on one intern for the fall semester. I say semester, though you don’t need to be in college.

My motivation is two-fold. Of course, I want to offload stuff I don’t like to do on someone who might like to do it. But also, I want to mentor someone (see my bit on that in the post below). And I want to have conversations with someone about the topics I write about and should write about. The internship will be a great learning experience, but it will not be a great financial experience: unpaid.

If you don’t know that much about what I do, you can get an idea here.

Here’s what you will do that will be fun:

1. Learn to write a column.
You can author one of my columns, with my help, which will give you a byline in multiple publications.

2. Learn to make money from blogging.
Many of my blog entries are syndicated in print. I’ll help you to write one or two blog entries that can be picked up by my syndicate.

3. Get focus and traction in your career.
I’ll help you get to the next step in your career. My job is to figure out what people should do next in their careers and then write about it. I will take a lot of time to help you figure out your next step is. We can develop the skills you need and use my contacts to help you get there.

Here’s what you’ll do that I hate to do myself:

1. Research.
Here is the type of stuff I’d like you to help me find:
People who will talk about hunches that I have.
Academics who are publishing new research about business.
Trends at the intersection of business and personal life.

2. Basic changes on my blog and web site.
This is really annoying work that I don’t like to do, like delete spam, fix typos, find relevant links. I’ll split it with you, so that we both acknowledge that no job is all fun and games.

I’d like you to work 12 hours a week. Five of those hours will be you writing and me helping you. You can work whatever hours you want, from wherever you live. That said, if you live near me — Madison, Wisc. — you will get preference, because it’s fun to have lunch with people you work with.

If you’re interested, please send an email to penelope@penelopetrunk.com.

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One example of why it’s great to be a mentor

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One of my best experiences as a mentor was when I inherited an IT department where the average age was 18. There were many men and one woman and no leaders. I sniffed around for who might be good at what in preparation for a departmental reorg. The woman, Sari, looked homeless at best, a drug addict at worst.

I started taking steps to fire her, but she kept turning in the best work each week. So when I met with her alone, I asked her a little bit about her situation — what does she want to do, what sort of experience does she have.

It took only a little prodding for her to tell me that she was 16 and a high school dropout and she ran away from home. I made it my mission to get her back into school. I gave her responsibilities that she would succeed at to show her that she was smart and capable. For months, I met with her each week: She told me that her family had drug and alcohol problems; I told her if she would look like she could command authority then I could make her a supervisor. Miraculously, almost overnight, she had a new haircut and a new wardrobe.

After two promotions, Sari gained enough self-confidence from work to apply to college two years later. I couldn't have been more proud writing a recommendation. Today Sari is a rising star in the software industry. And while she always thanks me for helping her to get back on solid footing, I am always thankful to her for teaching me how much we can do for each other, even in the workplace. Sari single-handedly gave my work meaning.

9 new ideas that may sway on-the-fence entrepreneurs

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Are you considering entrepreneurship? It’s all the rage right now because the bar at the start line has never been lower. Here are nine new ideas about entrepreneurship that will make you feel like you can do it, too. Right now:

1. You don’t need a venture capitalist, you are the venture capitalist.
Today, you can make something people want without spending money. Technology is simple enough to use that you don’t need to pay for high-end software to get a business off the ground. If you can figure out how to pay for food and lodging (hello, mom and dad) then you can fund your own startup.

2. For a killer marketing plan make a list of your friends.
“Businesses these days are built on word of mouth,” says Scott Fox, author of Internet Riches. You know 200 people. Send them an email telling them about your business. If it’s great, word of mouth will generate a customer base. If your business isn’t great, you’ll know right away.

This can be true offline as well. Daniela Corte started with an even smaller base than 200. She gave five friends custom-fitted pants. “I wanted this pair of pants to be their favorite pair,” she says. And it worked. After interviewing the friends about fit and texture preferences, Corte created pants that were buzz worthy, and she grew a multi-national business from those first five women raving about their pants.

3. Globalization is good for you.
As long as your needs are well defined, hiring a programmer in India is a great way to save money. When Katherine Lee wanted to create a database of yarns for her business Sweaterbabe.com, she paid an Indian programmer $250 — a significantly lower price than US developers would have charged.

But you have to know what you’re doing when you outsource to India. If you’re looking for someone to hold your hand and teach you about online design, forget it. But you can pay the online design maven her US rates and then send the design plan to the guy in India to execute.

4. You only need to master a small niche.
Google makes searching so effective that customers with a very specific interest can find businesses with a very specific interest — at such a high rate that niche businesses are more viable than ever before (like mobile game development). This is the premise of Chris Anderson‘s book, The Long Tail, which encourages entrepreneurs to focus on the small areas of the world that are neglected by big retailers because the market is not big enough.

And Fox points out that everyone knows a lot about something, so the best place in the long tail to start experimenting is where you have a good deal of specialized knowledge — which is likely to be a niche.

5. You don’t need a widget, you can sell yourself.
The idea of an Internet startup is to grow an audience first, and then figure out how to make money. So a logical place to turn to is yourself, because if you can build an audience, then you’re an expert in something.

At the sprightly age of 24, Ramit Sethi writes the very popular personal finance blog iwillteachyoutoberich.com. He has parlayed this success into a public speaking career (seriously — Fortune 500 companies are paying him to come talk to employees about finance) and a book-writing career (stay tuned for his advice on how to recruit hotshots like him to your company).

6. You don’t have to quit your day job.
Jessa Crispin did not set out to start a business. She was just writing books reviews and posting them on her web site, Bookslut. The reviews were so popular that eventually she was able to quit her job and make Bookslut her fulltime job. But she built the business while working at another job.

Of course, not everyone is a genius on the first try like Crispin. But Fox points out, “The feedback loop is short. So you can try several different things to see what works.” The trick is to recognize when your idea is going nowhere before you’ve sunk too much time into it.

7. Entrepreneurship is about choosing a lifestyle.
Most entrepreneurs don’t start a business to get rich, they start a business so they can live the life they want. Maybe they want to be creative, maybe they want to do what they’re passionate about, increasingly, they want to have flexibility to manage their own workday.

When Corte had a baby she realized that her current business model with daily fittings was too time-intensive. So she moved her retail business to online in order to continue to be able to offer her clothes direct to consumers but to regain time for her daughter.

8. You don’t need to wait to cash out.
The 1980s brought us real estate flipping; the new millennium brings us web site flipping. Not only are people auctioning their companies on eBay for denominations formerly reserved for successful garage sales, but there are more than 70 Internet locations where people are buying and selling web sites 24 hours a day.

Tom Kuegler, partner at New Concept Factory, runs an incubator that is starting eight Internet companies each quarter. He estimates that most of these companies he’ll “unload at a low price” and two out of twenty-four will grow into “super companies.” If this sounds pie-in-the-sky to you, consider that Kuegler is no neophyte. He’s been starting and selling Internet companies since 1994.

9. Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking, and you can change the world.
This idea comes from eighteen-year-old Ben Casnocha, who founded Comcate, a leading software company for governments, when he was twelve years old. Yep. That’s right. Twelve years old.

Casnocha says, “Entrepreneurship has a lot to do with business but it is a way of thinking about things that everyone can do: Seeing individuals as empowered as agents of change; Trying to figure out the status quo, the normal thing, and then thinking about what we can do differently. If more people thought like entrepreneurs the world could be a better place.”

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Friday smorgasbord

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Here are three tidbits I’ve collected that haven’t fit in other places over the week.

Condoleeza has a workplace crush
Maureen Dowd brings to light the evidence that Condoleeza Rice has a crush on the Canadian Foreign Minister Peter McKay. Scroll down in Dowd’s column to see a great photo of the two of them looking at each other, which reminds me of all the times I’ve fallen in love — how exciting it is. The photo also reminds me of all the crushes I’ve had with people I worked with. In each instance, unfulfilled sexual tension at the office made my work life more productive. Really. Probably due to some sort of synergy and that I was so in tune with how the other person was working. Side note: Peter McKay is so cute.
(Hat tip: Ben from AMVER)

Homework in grade school encourages bad habits in the work world
Doing more than 90 minutes of homework a night in middle school means lower test scores, according to Claudia Wallis writing for TIME magazine. She shows why excessive homework is ruining kids’ childhoods and family lives for no purpose. One expert suggests extending the school day so kids get all their homework done before they get home, because home is for family. My friend Mauri points out that when we encourage kids to bring school work home and do it at the expense of family, we set those kids on a path to bring office work home at night and do it at the expense of family.

How to make useless career lists useful
CareerJounal has published what seems like their five thousandth list this year on which are the best careers.What can we learn from this list? First, lists with juicy titles get linked to a lot, and I should have made this post “Three essential things for September”, or something like that. Second, the criteria someone uses to come up with the best career list is more useful than the list itself. Some editor decided that the question to ask is, do you have these things in your job:

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The funeral industry can teach you how to specialize in your career

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I write a lot about the importance of specializing in your career. The bottom line is that if you are great at what you do, you will get better hours, better pay, and more flexibility in how you run your life. But no one is great at everything.

Specializing means figuring out what you don’t do. If you are a programmer, you can’t be great at hardware and software. If you are in marketing, you won’t be great at marketing to kids and business-to-business marketing. You need to know your niche if you want to be great.

But I receive tons of mail from people arguing that if you specialize, you run the risk of being great in an area that no one hires for anymore. This is true. Especially now, when the workplace is changing so quickly. The solution to this problem is that everyone, no matter what their career, must be not only a specialist, but a trend spotter as well.

For a good look at how people become trend spotters in order to stay relevant in their field, check out the new book, Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death, by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen. The book is filled with characters like Lou Stellato, a sort of a futurist of funeral directors, who declares, “Funeral service as we know it is over.”

Cullen’s book explains the issues of the shifting funeral industry, and incidentally, the process that individuals take to shift their careers so as not to get left behind. This is a great lesson in specializing because the funeral information is hilarious (for example Costco breaking the casket monopoly) and shocking (people turning their loved ones into diamonds – yes, there’s a new process…).

The biggest problem for funeral directors is that by 2025 most funerals will not involve caskets. This means no big profit from the panic of a last minute, overpriced casket. No profit from renting a room for a viewing. In fact, there is the possibility that most funerals could bypass the funeral home altogether.

But something happened after 9/11. People needed to hold funerals without having any part of the body to bury. And, since many of the dead were very young and well-connected in the community, the funerals included literally thousands of people. So funeral directors became event planners.

And then, the smart funeral directors noticed that if they honed their event planning skills then they would be useful even as the industry shifts away from casket-centered funerals.

Your industry is like this one. Whatever industry you’re in is shifting because all aspects of culture and business are shifting. These funeral directors are not happy about having to change, but they face the need head on and they figure out, in the funeral world, how they can be specialists in a way that will keep them relevant to their customers.

Remember Me shows that there are many ways to adapt to change, and you only need to find one that works. For example, not everyone is abandoning the casket world. Some are adapting it – Goliath Casket Co. is making caskets to fit the obese (at least one overweight body was squeezed into a standard-sized casket with a shoehorn.) And Batesville offers low-cost wood veneer alternatives (positively revolutionary for the price-gouging industry). And to address the fact that more people are choosing cremation, some funeral directors are focusing on audio add-ons, a one casket company partnered with Nambe – the renowned purveyor of wedding registry silver — to create coffee-table quality containers for cremains.

To become a specialist in your field takes a little vision and a little luck. Usually one’s specialty comes by dint of the opportunities that present themselves. The way I got to be a career writer is a process of finding a specialty. I started writing fiction, but I was not that great at it. I realized the only thing I was getting paid good money for was business writing. And within that field, I found that the way I really stood out was in my approach to writing about careers.

Trend spotting takes diligent information gathering with an open mind, but there’s big payoff in having a relevant, specialized career. I always aim for a dynamic, innovative career like one of those trend-spotting funeral directors, and you should, too.

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How my friend copes with her disability at work

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Wendy Waters suggested that I write about how to deal with disabilities in the workplace. So here’s a story about my friend Ann, who has a really deep voice. It isn’t a sexy deep voice; it sounds more like Oscar the Grouch with a sore throat or Darth Vader on Prozac.

Her voice, which is a result of a birth complication, is a disability that she must deal with daily and for the most part, has overcome. While I know this now, and it’s the basis for this story, I didn't always see things that way.

I knew Ann in grade school where I confess to having had evil thoughts:

1. Why is she first chair in saxophone and I am last chair in oboe? She has the right mouth for wind instruments, and I don't. It's not fair.
2. Why is she class president and I am not even getting invited to boy-girl parties? How can someone with such an awful voice be so much more popular than I am?

But Ann and I ended up on the high-school track team together, and we became close friends. I spent so much time with her that I stopped noticing that her voice was different than other people’s. It seemed normal to me.

But there were constant reminders: restaurant customers stared when they heard us talking. Often sales people did not hear what she wanted because they were so stunned by the sound of her voice. Ann never lost patience, never seemed uncomfortable. I never knew how she did it.

In the track world you meet tons of kids from schools all over the state, and when Ann walked by, I heard lots of them say: “What's wrong with her voice?”

When I asked Ann if she felt weird about how she sounded, she'd say no. “A deep voice sounds authoritative,” she’d tell me.

Ann flourished in college. She learned to be extra nice to people because they usually would be extra nice back. She became very loyal to friends who stuck by her because so many others shied away after hearing her speak. Naturally, she knew she was different, but good grades could help her overcome prejudices and she excelled in school.

After college she went to a top advertising firm. I assume that her voice was not a problem during job interviews, or at least that interviewers believed Ann could overcome her voice impediment enough to impress potential clients.

But then she was assigned to a manager who hated her. He berated her intelligence, made sexually offensive comments around her, and generally let her know he did not want her around. In truth, his actions amounted to harassment. But her harasser had leverage, so Ann had to leave the company.

Once you leave a high-profile company without recommendations, you can pretty much forget going to another company in the same industry. So Ann returned to where she flourished — school. She took programming classes, and a classmate liked her so much that he got her a job. His software firm needed someone who knew advertising and someone who knew programming, and the company liked the idea of Ann wearing two hats.

The company went under in the tech meltdown of 2002, but Ann found that by switching gears, she had developed a new specialty, which is in a very narrow niche that she now dominates (and doesn’t want me to identify because she wasn’t thrilled that I was writing about any of this). But the bottom line is that things are good for Ann now. She weathered many storms and is successful despite her disability. Here are her tips for others who are struggling with some kind of impediment. But the tips are applicable to all of us:

1. Don't blame other people for your failures. Take responsibility for your life and move past people who don't help you.
2. Have patience with yourself if you don't choose the right career on the first try. Trust that you will find a place that’s right for you, and keep looking.
3. Convince yourself you are great. Then convincing other people is much easier.

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9/11: Digging myself out of the debris

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I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. At each anniversary that passes I write my story, and each year it changes a little. This year, I have been thinking about that moment when I accepted death.

I was at the corner of Liberty and Broadway when the first tower fell. I was too close to the building to be able to see what was happening. It sounded like a huge bomb, and it felt like a snowstorm of dirt. Everyone ran. But in just a few seconds, the world became dead silent and no one could see. I crawled over piles of people. My mouth was full of dust and I could barely breathe. I had no idea where I was or how to preserve myself. I thought I might be the only person alive. As breathing got more difficult, I settled into the idea of dying.

Time got very slow and I seem to have had an hour’s worth of thoughts in seconds. At first I worried that my family would be sad. But then I was disappointed. I would not see my brothers as adults. Would not know what I was like as a mom, or what it was like to grow old with my husband. My to-do list was overflowing with things I wanted to achieve, things I had been looking forward to. But the minute I thought I was going to die, that list didn’t matter. I was sad that I would not get to hang out and watch family life unfold.

It’s surprising because like almost all New Yorkers, I was not the hang out type. And in case it’s not clear from the obituaries and essays that have come from 9/11, the World Trade Center did not attract the slow-lane types.

Like many New Yorkers, I went to a World Trade Center recovery group. The groups were divided into the kind of trauma you experienced. People who watched the scene on TV were not in the same group as people whose spouse died. I was in a group with people who were there the ten minutes or so before the Tower fell. Some of the people in my group felt the impact of the plane while sitting at their desk. Some of the people ran from their building and were splattered by body parts from jumpers. All of us felt lucky to be alive.

All of us vowed to make life more meaningful after 9/11. Almost all of us changed jobs to do something that gave us more personal time. The few of us who could, had a baby.

Now I know that if I die tomorrow, what I’ll regret is not getting to watch my life unfold. So I have been changing my life, a little at a time, to give myself more time to watch life go by. I made a career change from Wall St.-based business development to home-based writer, I had two kids, and I encouraged my husband to reject jobs with long hours. We vowed to cut back our spending 70% to create a more simple life.

But cutting spending is not so easy, especially in New York City. It required making a lot of difficult choices. Finally we decided we could not reach our goals without moving. So this year, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I am making a new home in Madison.

Sure, I’m still competitive and ambitious when it comes to my career, but what 9/11 gave me the strength to make the scary decision to slow things down. Slowing down means missing opportunities, missing a chance to shine or a serendipitous meeting. It’s hard to simplify life because a complicated life is so stimulating. But nearly suffocating in the rubble showed me that what I want most is to be present: Consciously watching while my life unfolds.

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