Flashback to the spring of 2016. Laura Barcella has just quit her job as managing editor at Discovery Communications to earn around $12 an hour as a caregiver at ASPCA’s kitten nursery on the Upper East Side.
“I was really burned out and I hated working from home, alone, full-time,” says the Brooklyn resident. Never mind her passion for animals, cats in particular. Make them orphaned kittens who need a human’s help to survive, and Barcella is all in.
“I didn’t worry about how it [the career shift] would affect me professionally. I was dead set on doing it,” she says.
Luckily, Barcella had some money saved, a few freelance writing gigs and a portfolio that could win her new work as time allowed. The latter didn’t matter much, especially early on, because she was often too tired to do anything when she got home after a shift of cleaning litter trays, preparing bottles of kitten formula and feeding. “I was also emotionally drained. Some kittens don’t make it,” says Barcella. Even so, her mission fulfilled her.
And that is what it’s all about, according to Robin Moriarty Ph.D., author of “What Game Are You Playing? A Framework for Redefining Success and Achieving What Matters Most” (Greenleaf Book Group Press). Moriarty dares readers to be gutsy and to define and redefine what success in life looks like for them, as individuals, rather than how society, including parents, family and friends, describe it.
“Life is a game,” she says. “You decide what winning looks like. You don’t have to play someone else’s.”
Attorney Laura Smith (real name withheld), a partner at a large Midtown law firm, wishes someone had taught her to think like that.
“I hate my life,” she says. “I’m so pressured to bill hours that I barely see my husband, and now I am having problems conceiving. I’m running out of time,” says the 38-year-old Westfield, NJ, resident. “Looking back on it now, I wish the 22-year-old me had made different choices. It never occurred to me to wonder which matters more: being a great lawyer or becoming a mother.”
Smith’s situation may not be an anomaly. One-third of the female lawyers surveyed by Hemington Wealth Management said that they were frustrated in their quest for joy and fulfillment. “Thirty percent said they wouldn’t go to law school again and wished they had made different career choices,“ says Jen Dawson, managing director at Hemington Wealth Management. And she is talking about what most consider to be successful women — many earn more than $500,000 per year.
“You have to find out what you want out of life [versus what you want your job title to be] and work backwards,” says Dawson.
Moriarty, a former college professor and an successful executive at BellSouth and Kimberly-Clark, figured that out for herself more than a decade ago.
“I like to spend time in cool places, so I won’t take a job unless it involves travel,” she says. And though it has meant occasionally being overlooked for promotion and turning down assignments that don’t fulfill her criteria, she has had opportunities to live on four continents and visit more than 60 countries.
Making different career choices during different phases of life can be game-changing, too. Sarah Piampiano left a $500,000 job on Wall Street and sold her apartment on the Upper West Side to live on a mattress in a Los Angeles apartment while pursuing a career as a professional triathlete. She knew she was taking a big risk.
“Everyone thought I was crazy,” she says. But Piampiano reasoned that she had won several triathlons as an amateur and that this was her window for making it big. “You get only one life to live, so you have to take chances and risks,” she says.
For Piampiano, 39, it paid off. Between prize money, sponsorships and endorsements, she now earns well into six figures per year. And though she plans to retire in a year or two — not only because she will have peaked, but also because she wants to have children — she is certain that there’s yet another career she can excel at in front of her.
All of that said, experts such as Erica Keswin, author of “Bring Your Human to Work” and founder of the Spaghetti Project, which aims to teach the human connections that the workplace needs, cautions about making radical career decisions.
“Be careful,” she warns. “If you want a job that aligns more closely with your passion or purpose, take a risk and talk to your boss. In a tight job market like this one, they might be open to a conversation.”