One Person/Multiple Careers

Well, joining me to discuss this concept is a veteran slash careerist, Marci Alboher, freelance journalist/author/speaker/writing coach. After ten years practicing as a lawyer, Marci became a writer, which led to her other slashes. As a freelance journalist, Marci is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. She's also a member of the faculty of the New York Writers' Workshop and frequently speaks at national conferences and career related events, as well as coaching private writing clients. She's written a book on this unusual topic. It's called One Person/Multiple Careers: How the 'Slash Effect' Can Work for You and it's published by Warner Business Books. Marci joins me on the line from New York. Good morning.

Marci Alboher: Good morning. How are you?

Rachel Salaman: Very well thank you, how are you?

Marci Alboher: I'm terrific.

Rachel Salaman: Excellent. Let's just start with a few definitions. How different do careers have to be in order to be considered slashes? For instance, you're an author/speaker/writing coach, but these could all be seen as facets of being a well-rounded journalist, couldn't they?

Marci Alboher: They could. They could certainly be seen that way, but what's interesting is, when I think about what I am in my career, it's a big part of my career that I am a lawyer as well and that I practiced law for nearly a decade. It really shaped the kind of journalist I became and the kind of speaking that I do, and even the kind of coaching that I do, because I work quite a lot with professionals, for example from other fields, who want to learn how to become writers. So my slashes, all these identities that I carry around, have become my calling card and helped me to create what may seem like a disconnected group of things that I do and it makes it a very cohesive one. Now, most of my book focuses on people whose slashes are quite more unrelated than the ones that I have strung together, but I think the book is relevant and the message is relevant for even those people who think they just have a singular career because every career requires you at some point to take on something that doesn't come naturally to you, but that is an opportunity to expand the scope of what you do and to move in other directions, and to create alternative revenue streams, alternative paths to fulfillment, even job opportunities when your career is stagnating.

Rachel Salaman: So do you think it's an advantage for you to define yourself in terms of slashes?

Marci Alboher: Oh, I think it's a great advantage. The way I look at presenting yourself and listing your slashes is a way of branding yourself and conveying your identity that you would like others to associate with you or with the identity you would like others to associate with you. So, when I announce that I'm a speaker and I'm talking to a corporate person, they might think to recommend me as a potential speaker for their company at their next annual retreat. However, if I just had a – if I just presented myself as a writer or a journalist, I'm not sure that thought would come to mind.

Rachel Salaman: Do you ever get the sense that you're creating a negative impression by defining yourself like that?

Marci Alboher: That's a very good question and I talk about this at length in the book, about when it's appropriate to actually list the various things that you do, and it is not appropriate in every situation to list the various slashes that you use to identify yourself. So, for example, there is a person in the book who is both a Pilates instructor and an art dealer. Now when she is selling art to a high profile client, it's not a good time to talk about her other life as a Pilates instructor; that could really work against her. That said she's often found that in her – in the Pilates context when she's working with a client, sometimes they're very interested and intrigued to hear about her other life and she's continued to get a lot of new clients by talking about her artwork while giving a Pilates lesson, so this is a very context driven question you're asking.

Rachel Salaman: And you have to be a bit savvy if you do choose to go down that road.

Marci Alboher: You certainly do. You certainly do.

Rachel Salaman: So, for our listeners, so they can really understand what you're getting at here, can you share some specific examples with us of the slash careers you've come across?

Marci Alboher: Sure. I think I have to start with Angela Williams, because she's really the person who inspired me to write this book. Several years ago I met this woman, and this was while I was – I had just left the legal practice and started writing about lawyers for a bunch of publications, and I was at a conference for women lawyers, senior women lawyers and the speaker that day was a lawyer named Angela Williams who, at that point, was working for a big law firm in Washington DC, and she got up to the podium and introduced herself, and the first thing she said to the audience was, "I want to make an apology. Please remove the description, the bio you have in your binders, because my secretary put the wrong bio in there for you. Today I'm here as a lawyer, but the bio you have in your binder talks about my other life, which is as a Baptist minister." So the audience started chuckling, but I was rather intrigued that this person, who was a quite senior lawyer for a big firm, had a whole other life as a minister. So I tracked her down and I started talking to her, and she explained to me how that worked for her; how she worked both as a lawyer and as a minister. And, after meeting Angela, I started writing about this subject, and I started collecting other slashes all over the place, in very varied careers. And the next person who I encountered who I actually wrote an article with, teaching both Angela and this guy for The New York Times, was a man named Rashid Silvera, who is a very, very successful fashion model. He's appeared on the cover of GQ and all kinds of other magazines, and he's also a high school social studies teacher at a top secondary school in the United States, and he's been doing both of those careers in a pretty full-time way for 25 years, so they're all over the spectrum. I have a longshoreman who's a filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker; I have many, many musicians who have really interesting, thriving, what they thought were secondary careers, but then became equal competition for their music career. I have many people in the arts who have these complementary careers; many entrepreneurs who have other jobs that are quite significant to them. There's a range of types of combinations.

Rachel Salaman: What difficulties do you think these people run into, particularly the very successful slashes like Angela Williams?

Marci Alboher: I think the biggest problems these people have is time management, and when one part of your life is delivering you a particularly challenging period. So there's always an issue of – we all know what it's like when we have a big deadline in one career and in one job, or in one part of our life, but imagine if multiple parts of your life were heating up at the same time. And in Angela's case, I remember her telling me she was a young lawyer working on Senator Ted Kennedy's Senate Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and this was during President Clinton's impeachment trial, and she said that she was sitting there working on committee work while studying for her final exams in her Masters for her Theology degree. So these are moments that obviously you just have to pull all-nighters or do whatever it takes to make it work. It's really like studying for finals, and that happens frequently to slash careerists, but most of them are very high achieving types who figured out ways just as we figure out ways to get through medical school or to get through business school or get through being a new parent. They apply the same kind of techniques; they find moments in one job where they can coast for a little bit, or they get some coverage from someone, or they find some other way to improve their focus so that they're not distracted. They're masters at figuring out how to focus, I find.

Rachel Salaman: Well, your book is full of success stories, and you've run through a few of them. Did you ever meet anyone who tried to make a slash career work, but ended up going back to pursuing just one career because it was just too difficult for them?

Marci Alboher: Yes I did, and sometimes it was because it was too difficult, and sometimes it was because the two careers were just not compatible, and I'll give you a few examples there. Only a couple of the people in the book asked me to use a pseudonym, and one of them was this young woman who had just graduated business school, who'd gotten a big, big job in a marketing program in a big public company, and it was one of the jobs where they run you ragged because you're going up in the ranks, and she was working 12 hour days. And she was doing quite, quite well but, at the same time she had, prior to accepting that job, launched her own interior design business, that was not big enough for her to say no to the job, but she had this feeling that it would really take off. And, after about a, oh, a year and a half of doing the marketing job, she just couldn't meet the demands of her clients and keep up this dual life which she was not open about, she was not open to either her clients or her employer about having a dual life. And she said she had just gotten so burned out that she needed to quit the job and she waited until her business was strong enough to allow her to quit the job. She doesn't regret having that period though, because she really had an exposure to the corporate world that she thought was useful in her life; it allowed her to move to New York and to be able to afford to move to New York while building a small business, so she was happy in the end. Today she tells me though she's slashing for herself in a number of different ways, in that she runs her business, she's writing a book, she's getting involved in a reality TV show; she's kind of taken that interest in spreading her wings and moving in different directions, but she does now all of that under the auspices of her own entity; not dividing her allegiance between an employer and herself. So in my mind she's still quite a slash, but she has changed the way that she slashes. I interviewed a very accomplished novelist and fiction writer, Amy Bloom, and long before she had made it big as an author though, she was a psychotherapist and, what happened with her, and she really found her psychotherapy work very, very rewarding and she's credited by critics for having that inform her fiction and the reality of her characters quite a bit. But when she became really well known as an author and started having book tours and the kind of media frenzy that follows a successful book, she just found it wasn't fair to her clients to keep up a practice at the level that she had. She hasn't abandoned her psychotherapy practice completely, but she has shrunk it considerably and only sees some patients who are really not in crisis. She does maintain a small practice, but it's nowhere near the full-blown dual career that she had before.

Rachel Salaman: In those two stories, those two examples, do you think there are any lessons for people who might be considering embarking on slash careers?

Marci Alboher: Oh, certainly, and that is, while I'm an advocate of this way of life, I think it's very important to know that you don't need to be living like this all the time. Life and career, and I think this is a book both about work and life, not just about your career, but there are times in your life when it is not compatible, and there are combinations where it doesn't make sense to live this way. I look at it as there are times to share the slash and there are certainly times where you need to be very singularly focused on what you're doing. And one of those times is when you're in the learning stages of something and I find that a lot of people really benefit from a full-blown immersion and acquiring of expertise and, you know, while you're in medical school may not be the best time to work on becoming, you know, a cellist. I saw that message playing out again and again.

Rachel Salaman: Well, I was going to ask you that is, there ever a right time? Do you have to think about the timing or should you just go for it? What's your advice?

Marci Alboher: No, no, no, there certainly is a right time. There are several of them and they look different for different people, but I'll tell you some of the right times that jump out at me. We all have periods when we have to admit that we're coasting at work, when we're kind of at a plateau, and those are very, very good times. You know, the time where you think, well, I would have time to take a class right now; my nights are feeling free, my family life is not that complex. Those are really good times, you know, your option would be, oh no, maybe I'll like to accelerate at work right now and I'm already down for the promotion. Well, a lot of the people I talked to for this book said, "Well, rather than going for the promotion right now, I'm going to use that coaching period 'cause I know that I can just give and get, you know, A pluses right now by just doing what I have to do, what I know how to do, but why not use that time to take the night program or to use my weekends to focus on something else," so, when you're coasting, when you're plateauing. Another time is when you're bored and restless, when what you were doing before is not giving you the same thrill it used to give you. I've thought that, and I've certainly run into people who actually make a time, they take a leave to explore something. I've had people show up in my writing classes and in my career workshops who are on leave of absence from a company that allowed them to take some time off, so obviously those people had kind of the financial wherewithal to do it, but that is a pattern I've been seeing. I've even met some people who used a maternity or paternity leave to work on something else and, in fact, one of the people in the book, Mary Mazzio, kind of one of the stars of the book, a former Olympic athlete/lawyer/filmmaker/mother of several, I think three, children. She really spent a lot of time working on her filmmaking skills while on leave with her second child, and it was a time that she just felt like that was a really good outlet, a creative outlet, to divide her time between taking care of a newborn and rushing off to a film class, whereas going back to her law job would have felt oppressive in that time period.

Rachel Salaman: It does seem to me though that you do need to have the financial security in place, don't you, often before pursuing this. Would you say that was true?

Marci Alboher: I would say it's true but, interestingly, several of the people that I talked to developed a slash in order to help their financial position. And I have a whole chapter called Thinking Like a Modern Moonlighter which is really about finding a slash job; when you're searching for a money gig, finding a way to love that job rather than to just see it as the kind of ball and chain that meets your financial obligations. And an example of that is Oscar Smith, who is an entrepreneur I featured who – he's a quite successful personal trainer in TriBeCa in Manhattan, and he works with a lot of celebrity clients, you know, successful fashion models. And what he did is, when he wanted to get a loan to start his business, he really said he needed a steady job and something that would support him while he was running and building that business, and he applied for a job in the Police Department of New York City and he became a cop. In his view a civil servant job was the perfect way to have enough job security that he would able to be thought as solvent to get a business loan and it worked on his behalf. And what's fascinating is he's kept to the job in the Police Department; it will give him a pension, it gives him health benefits, lots of things that he would worry about as a fledgling entrepreneur, but he's also found a way to find a niche in the Police Department that uses his unique talents. He's just applied and was accepted to an elite Air and Sea Rescue Unit where he scuba dives as part of his job, and he does rescue missions, which brings all of his physical fitness passions to his steady money gig. So he was able to solve the financial job and do it in a way that brought him great satisfaction.

Rachel Salaman: But, if you're pursuing two careers at once, you inevitably have less time to spend on each one than you would have if you pursued just one career. How can you keep up with your professional peers whose time is not divided like this?

Marci Alboher: I think it's – again, this is a bit of a case by case situation and it really depends on what the requirements of keeping up in your field are. But, from seeing how people have accomplished it, I would say they deal with it like they deal with any kind of unusually burdensome time of life. I look a lot at how new parents deal with their careers. They get by. It always helps if you've established a reputation and proved yourself in a career before you get to a point where you're asking for some kind of understanding, but you have to kind of figure out what are you doing in your life or in your career that you can give up for a while; what's unnecessary? And it shouldn't be something that's important to keeping yourself healthy; it shouldn't be let's give up the working out. It should be how much time are you spending on email right now? How much time are you spending on unnecessary activities that are not, you know, the most important things to do in your job? Notice when you have downtime, notice the cyclical nature of your job. If it's always still in December, maybe December's a really good time to kind of focus on something new. I see people using their vacation time wisely. I see people who work during the day using evenings and I see people who have weekends free using weekends and I see, you know, slash people really looking at whatever pockets of free times they have and making the most of those. Sometimes they disappear from the social scene for a little while; sometimes they take time off from a hobby that they're really committed to. It's unique and it's customized for each person.

Rachel Salaman: Well, another worry I think people would have about splitting their time between two completely different pursuits, is that they'll end up being mediocre at two things rather than great at one. Is there any truth in that and have you seen that?

Marci Alboher: No, I'm sure that must happen for some people and I can't say that every, as I said, every possible career combination that you can think of is compatible, but one thing I've found that everyone who lives like this has told me, that they have found ways that one career enhances their abilities in another, or delivered them some unexpected synergy, or a networking opportunity that became a career, you know, boost. And then I think of this guy, Dan Milstein, who's quite wise, who's in the book, who divides his time between being a computer programmer and the founder and director of an avant-garde theater company. And one thing that he told me is, that there is this ethic in computer programming that people think, you know, you just work at the problem, work at the problem, work at the problem and you'll solve it. And, what he has found, with a lot of the programming teams that he works on is, the best way to solve a problem is to leave it for a little while. And a lot of times, when he has to shutdown because he's rushing off to theater rehearsal that night, he gets back to work the next day and his mind, having taken a break, and that break has solved the problem. That's very much what artists always talk about and what writers always talk about, about how, you know, the back brain is working on things even when you think you've taken a break from them, and I saw that happening quite a lot. So I can tell you that, you know, there are certainly people who've talked to me about times they felt overwhelmed and sometimes they felt it was hard to keep up with what their peers were doing, and then an equal number of people told me stories about the way one career just magically boosted the other.

Rachel Salaman: Now, it's probably fair to say that some people would think twice about going to a surgeon who has another job on the side. How can slashes convince their clients and co-workers that they've got what it takes, if it's common knowledge that they have a combined career?

Marci Alboher: Very, very good question, and here I do have a few examples that jump right out at me. And in fact, you know, when you mentioned a surgeon you might have done that because there is a very well known surgeon in the book, Sanjay Gupta, who is a familiar face to anyone who watches CNN. I interviewed Dr Gupta for the book and he still works as a surgeon, even though he is an established correspondent for CNN; he's an internationally renowned journalist but, at the time I interviewed him, he was still performing surgery several days a month back at his hospital in Atlanta. He did that because he wanted to keep his hands in medicine and he really feels that it keeps him kind of qualified to do the work he does for CNN and vice versa, and he is busy, so people are believing that Dr Gupta is qualified, even though he's doing surgery on a more limited basis. Now, he told me that one of the things he does is he makes sure he is regularly briefed by people who keep up with scholarly research, something that he said he has less time to do now that he's working for CNN. So there was a lot of planning that went into that, and I think there's a line of people who would be thrilled to have him doing work on them. I have another situation that came up a couple of times with people that I interviewed, is that they were developing a side career or a secondary career, and it was a career that had a client service aspect to it and, in many instances their boss in their existing job wanted to be a client of the new venture. So this guy, Todd [Rozenflag?] fits that bill. He's a marketing consultant here in New York City and, while working full tilt at that job, he decided he was very interested in alternative healing and holistic medicine and he signed up for a very, very intense program to be a holistic health counselor. A couple of months after that, I talked to him about his first clients and he told me he had signed up a few first clients and he was thrilled to be working with them, and that his boss was among that group. So I think what ends up happening is, for someone who's proved themselves in one way, it's very interesting that sometimes people who know them from that context want to get to know them in a new context.

Rachel Salaman: If your future clients already know you, then that works really well, but what happens if you're trying to present yourself to a new client or a future employer? Should you keep quiet about your other life so you look like you're 100% committed to the career in question?

Marci Alboher: Oh, timing is very important, Rachel, here. I do not think your interview for a big job is the time to talk about your side passion that has nothing to do with that job and you've hit a very important thing, and I don't think we've spent enough time talking about. Everybody in my book, from the entrepreneurs who work for themselves to the high-powered corporate types to the artists, all said to me that timing is very, very important. And you cannot – you can really risk the loss of confidence of an employer or of a client if you disclose too soon that you have competing passions so, yes, it's very, very important to wait. Now, there are instances where, even though you don't want to detract from somebody's impression that you're wholeheartedly committed to something, that it's proper to disclose that you have another business, and I have a whole chapter on kind of how to make sure you do things properly. For example, if you're working for a company or applying for a job in a company that has restrictions against moonlighting or against, you know, conducting your own business, you should be aware of that and realize that you probably are going to have to disclose that kind of moonlighting job if there are guidelines that would prohibit it. So you have to be really careful about this and you have to think it through, and again, it varies case by case.

Rachel Salaman: Is it possible to generalize about how mainstream employers view slash careers?

Marci Alboher: It is not possible to generalize but, what I would say is, I'm seeing more and more interesting developments of companies, either cropping up to capitalize on this trend and to fulfill a niche of people who want to build lives like this, or existing companies who are realizing that they can tap into kind of the zeitgeist stuff today, by advertising that they're interested in people and that they have people on board who have kind of interesting other lives. And at this point I just wanted to share with you, Rachel, an ad I saw in a local college newspaper here in New York. NYU has a fantastic local newspaper, and I think it's called The Washington Square News, and I saw this ad from a global investment and technology firm called D E Shaw, and this – can I just read you the first line of this?

Rachel Salaman: Sure, go ahead.

Marci Alboher: "It isn't always clear to people at first that they're right for the D E Shaw Group, like the poet we hired to head an automated block trading unit, or the woman who designed solar powered racecars. We hired her to help launch a new venture in computational chemistry. They didn't think of themselves as financial types and neither did we. We thought of them as people with extraordinary talent." And I thought that was just – and it's a recruiting ad for undergraduates and graduate students at NYU, for on-campus recruiting, saying, "We are a financial services company and we want you, even if you think you're not the kind of person we want." And I think that is announcing that the world is recognizing that this kind of thing is happening. I interviewed several of the firms who employ people who I interviewed in the book, and the law firm that employed Mary Mazzio when she – she's the Olympic athlete – when she was training for the Olympics she went on a reduced schedule. Not even a reduced schedule, I would call it a flexible schedule 'cause she still worked full-time; she just had very unusual hours because she had to accommodate her morning rowing sessions on the Charles River and she lives in Boston. And, when I talked to the senior partner and the managing partner of that firm, he was pretty clear that it was quite exciting to the firm to have an athlete who was training for the Olympics, and I can assure you that they brought Mary Mazzio to many an important client meeting because it was pretty cool to meet an Olympic athlete. And the same is true when you've got a person who has another, you know, an arts accomplishment or another interesting sideline. So there are times when employers find it very attractive and it's a very nice PR tool to be able to tout your employees who have these other lives. I see more and more companies interested in that. And I also profiled a few of those companies who I mentioned who are really sprouting up to cater to this type of a workforce. There's a company called Axiom Legal, which is really a new kind of law firm that has developed to embrace lawyers who want to have other lives in addition to practicing law, and they advertise that, "You can come here if you want to be a lawyer and a filmmaker or a lawyer and a race car driver." And they showed me the résumés of both of those people who are currently working with them. And they work is they say, "Hi, you know, we have a project for you and you can work on a project basis for us. Do you want to work 20 hours a week, do you want to work 30 hours a week, do you want to work five months at 40 hours a week and then take off for two months and then come back to us? And all the while perhaps we get you your health insurance and give you the feeling of a real job, but you can have your other life as well." And I saw that happening in the accounting sector; I saw that – saw it happening in the graphic design sector. I found lots of examples of companies like this that are growing up to really service the types of workers who want to live this way and still have professional accomplishment in another field.

Rachel Salaman: So we're going to see more of this in the future?

Marci Alboher: I predict we will see lots more of this, yes.

Rachel Salaman: Now, what about any general tips for people who might be thinking about branching out into a slash career? What's your key advice for them?

Marci Alboher: I have a few general words of wisdom. The first thing you need to do is start with some experiments, test the waters. If you think you're interested in something, if you have a hobby or a passion you want to see if you can expand into a career, I always encourage people to try with a little experiment. I think one of the best ways to do this is to raise something I call an adult internship. Offer to trail someone who does the work you want to do or do it for free somewhere. There's a great example of someone in the book who developed a wonderful landscaping business by offering his services free to a nearby estate that had beautiful grounds that were falling into disrepair. He became so good at it that people started asking him to do this work for him as a client, so I would say start with the experiment, and then survey your life and figure out the right time to take it to the next level. Pace yourself. As we talked about earlier, it's not always the right time to jump into something and you have to wait 'til you're at one of those coasting periods or when you've identified the proper window of availability. Then I would set some reasonable goals. Come up with what you think is reasonable for a few months, maybe look at the first three or four months, and then revisit those goals. Go back to them after you've had a little time to work at them. And it's very important to have a support system in place; bring in somebody or maybe a few friends, family, partners, colleagues, and get some support so that people know what you're trying to do in your life, both so that they can support you in how you're going to keep your current working situation going smoothly, and how you're going to get confidence to take on this new thing. And then just remember, you always have to go back and tinker and tweak and see if that combination is working for you, you know. What's working for you now may not work for you a couple of years from now, and what worked for you ten years ago is probably not still working for you today.

Rachel Salaman: Some fantastic advice there. Marci Alboher, thank you very much for joining us today.

Marci Alboher: And thank you, Rachel. It's a pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: If you're interested in finding out more about slash careers and Marci's work on this, visit her website www.heymarci.com. Her book, One Person/Multiple Careers, is full of great examples and practical advice, including how to write a slash résumé and how to negotiate with your employer so you can add a slash to your career. And it's a very interesting read anyway, even if you're happy with your one career path. I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview, so do join me then. Goodbye.