Reinvent Yourself

"About a week later, I got a call from someone who said he worked for the Aurora Casket Company," Koors recalls. "I thought he was a telemarketer selling coffins. Then, he told me that he had my résumé. 'Where did you get my résumé?' I asked him. And he said, 'Well, actually, you sent it to us after we put an ad in the paper.' At this point, my daughter was jumping up and down on the bed, and I told him, 'Look, I don't think that I want to drive to Aurora, Indiana every day to work for a casket company.' "

The caller was Chris Barrott, one of the family members who runs Aurora, the second-largest casket manufacturer in America, with annual sales of about $100 million. "He simply asked me to hear him out first, and then I could turn him down if I wanted to," Koors says. "He kept me on the phone for two hours. He had a vision of using interactive software and the Internet to make it easier and more pleasant for funeral-home directors to show caskets to grieving families. But he had no idea where to start. And he wanted me to come and do it for him."

Koors could have ended the conversation after 30 seconds, but because she was open to the wildest of possibilities, she decided to keep listening. After that two-hour phone call, she was seriously intrigued -- and eventually convinced. Today, Koors is the Internet marketing director at Aurora.

That is what's so powerful about opening your eyes and ears -- and maintaining an open mind. "Every step you take," says Andy Tuck, "should increase, not decrease, the breadth of your opportunities. I tried to think of my move as an experiment."

Knowing full well that any experiment is only a test, and that he could end or reverse his experiment at any time, Tuck called a few friends and former students to quiz them about how they spent their days. His bass player was doing market research by day for Yankelovich Partners; someone he knew from graduate school at Princeton was in advertising with Young & Rubicam. He landed interviews with both companies, received two job offers, and took the advertising job because it paid a bit more.

After a year, that experiment ended when a friend of a friend hired Tuck as a political consultant for Sawyer Miller Group, which had an active practice doing political media campaigns. That led to dabbling in the firm's corporate-crisis practice, which was a great arena to play in as companies downsized, went bankrupt, and merged throughout the first half of the 1990s. "I had no idea that kind of job existed," he says now. "But it really worked for me."

Admittedly, going from a brief vocational experiment to a dream job in such a short time is rare. Attorney Cecilia Barajas, 37, dabbled in video-game design for many years before one of her game designs helped her turn a passion into a profession. "The student center at the University of California at Santa Barbara had a Ms. Pac Man machine, and I got hooked as an undergraduate," she says. "Then my friend and I started going to this arcade; the guy who owned it slept in a room over the store. We would throw rocks at his window in the morning to wake him up so he could come unlock the doors and let us in to play."

After a brief stint reading scripts for Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles, Barajas entered law school at the University of Virginia, where she owned a personal computer for the first time. "I was up all night playing computer games and would miss classes the next morning," she recalls. "I'd fall asleep with the wires entangled around my legs and the monitor at the foot of my bed." Toward the end of law school, as part of an independent-study project, she and her future husband, who was also a gaming freak, built a game that ran mock trials.

Barajas returned to California, passed the bar, and eventually landed a job with the LA district attorney's office, where she spent four years putting criminals in jail. It didn't leave much time for games, but she still daydreamed about designing her own one day. After a yearlong sabbatical, during which she traveled the world with her husband, Barajas returned to LA and found that the district attorney's office couldn't take her back right away because of a hiring freeze. "So I started to jot down ideas for a game I had been thinking about for a long time," she says. "I figured I would send it out, and if someone liked the idea, at least I'd get to play it someday."

The girlfriend of Barajas's brother-in-law was an MIT alumna who knew the creative-affairs director at a game company called Activision Inc., a pioneer in the use of CD-ROMs for computer games. So that was Barajas's first stop. "They told me they weren't interested in my game," she recalls. "But they asked me if I would be interested in coming to work for them as a low-level producer. I was shocked. I couldn't figure out why anyone would want some lawyer to help them design highly technical computer games."

Barajas didn't come to any conclusions right away, but she decided she didn't need to. It would be an experiment, for both her and her employers, even though neither party had considered conducting it until the moment she walked through the front door of Activision with a big head of steam and some game sketches under her arm. "There will always be crime in Los Angeles, and there will always be criminals to put away," she says. "I went back and forth on it for a while, but I knew that I would be a fool to pass up an opportunity to work for Activision."