Reinvent Yourself

Andrew Tuck sits in a stylish loft in New York City's Soho neighborhood with some of his life's work spread before him. There's his philosophy book, published by a top-drawer academic press, which he wrote in the 1980s while working at his day job: teaching students at Columbia University. Then there's his recording of some jazz tunes that he composed while he worked as a musician at night during the same period. "I was living my undergraduate dream," says Tuck, now 47. "I was teaching at an Ivy League institution and working with well-known musicians."

To your average wage slave, that kind of life might sound enviable. But Tuck was miserable. "I was killing myself to pursue both dreams," he says. "I didn't get any satisfaction from my successes. I cringed when I listened to my recordings, because I felt that I was never going to be as good as I wanted to be. And I just felt such constant pressure to come up with another article for an academic journal and the next idea for a book."

So Tuck decided to reinvent himself, to make the sort of dramatic career change that so many of us think about, but few of us actually pursue. Today, Andy Tuck, the pianist-philosopher, is a founding partner of arc (Applied Research and Consulting), which uses social research to help such high-profile clients as vh1 and the World Bank make decisions. "You need to know that you do have a choice in the matter of your career," he says. "But no one is going to force you to take a risk. You have to make that choice yourself. And sitting in one place and continuing to do something that doesn't make you happy is a choice too."

Unfortunately, too many people choose to stay put and stay unhappy. "It's a variation on the golden-handcuffs phenomenon," explains Marti Smye, 49, a career consultant based in Toronto and author of "Is It Too Late to Run Away and Join the Circus? A Guide for Your Second Life" (Macmillan, 1998). "When you're so damn good at what you do, it's extraordinarily difficult to convince yourself to give it up -- even when it's not making you happy. Only about 10% of all people who daydream about making a radical career change actually do it. And most of them are forced into it because they got fired or because their company moved away."

This article is dedicated to that reticent 90%. Consider it a call to action propelled by a simple question: If not now, when? There has never been a better time than now to make a radical career change. Fast-growing companies are starved for talent. Millions of people are choosing to become free agents and are helping others make that same choice. The stunning growth of the Internet has created whole industries that didn't exist five years ago -- and genuinely vast opportunities for people without technical expertise to participate in the digital revolution.

What follows are before-and-after stories of four people who have made such radical changes in their work lives -- and the lessons they learned along the way. Besides Andy Tuck, there's also Cecilia Barajas, a prosecutor turned video-game producer; Bob Presman, a sportscaster turned financial consultant; and Nancy Koors, a long-time telephone-company employee who breathed new life into her career by going to work for a casket manufacturer. "Ten years ago," says Smye, "big companies made some radical changes by convincing themselves that they didn't have to continue to do the same things in the same way. There's no reason that today, we shouldn't apply that same sort of mind-set to our own careers."

Plan? What Plan?

The blueprint for a standard-issue job change is pretty clear: Spend months drawing up your perfect new job, chat up your network, zero in on a few good companies, make some contacts, send in your résumé, and go on the interviews. It's a perfectly good way to get a new job. When you're hunting for a new career, however, a focused plan may keep you from seeing the amazing things that exist outside that narrow field of vision.

When Andy Tuck decided to shift gears, he gave himself only one broad directive: After years of working outside the mainstream -- playing piano in jazz clubs, teaching, and writing -- he wanted to see what putting on a suit and working from 9 am to 5 PM would be like. He was also honest with himself about how little he knew about what that would actually involve. "As someone who had made a living as an artist, I defined myself almost as alternative to the mainstream," he says. "But I finally decided that I never really knew why I felt it was so important to define myself in opposition to what most everyone else was doing. In fact, I didn't know all that much about what those people were doing. And how would I know unless I tried it? That was the challenge I gave myself."