Happy Birthday to me! This is 76!
Do you have a number that is unequivocally yours? My number is 37. My birthday is the 7th day of the 3rd month, and when I was 37, I made my career change, which was a surprise even to me.
Happy 76 Birthday to Me
I’m old! That’s another surprise! Wasn’t it just yesterday I was fresh out of grad school and had the world on a string?
I had been singing and performing since the age of six, but then, in my mid-30s, secure with my degrees and my tenure-track position, I wasn’t happy.
It was 1982, and I was earning $23,000 a year as an associate professor. Feeling that I needed to augment my salary with part-time gigs at Bonita High and St. Mark’s Episcopal, I was utterly exhausted, so perhaps it was sleep deprivation.
Perhaps it was the devastatingly demeaning way I had been treated in graduate school; how dare a woman become a conductor, “Janice, I have to help the guys first because they have families to feed.”
Perhaps it was because I was tired of performing, and now, as a professional, was directing and conducting and felt as if I had a doctorate in event planning with a specialty in telling people what to do, when to stand and when to sit, when to breathe, and how to shape their larynx, pharynx, mouth and throat while they were doing it. Of course, I loved the music, but what had always brought me back for more was the applause and wanting to please people, and eventually, that wasn’t enough. I knew if I continued making my living as a musician, something many people envied, if I didn’t change careers, I would die before I finished living.
Every day I looked at the framed quote by Bizet in my office: “Ah, music! What a beautiful art, but what a wretched profession.”
I attended lectures by compelling women who had made drastic career changes, from French poetry to finance, from art to accounting, and afterward, I asked them questions. Why? How? What advice would you give me? Who else should I interview?
I bought the first edition of “What Color is Your Parachute,” read the chapter titles and the occasional paragraph, and put it in a drawer. Ok. That made sense.
I read In Search of Excellence, never imagining I would, years later, serve on the National Restless Legs Syndrome Board with the author Robert Waterman, Jr. What he and Tom Peters laid out also made sense. I had a bias for action; I stayed close to the customer; I was autonomous and entrepreneurial; I was value-driven, and I could motivate people.
I read about hedgehogs and foxes. First mentioned by philosopher Isaiah Berlin in 1953, he divides “writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, like Plato for example,… and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea, like Aristotle. 1 I felt as if I was an unsuccessful hedgehog, but I knew I could be a successful fox.
I went to EST, Erhard Seminars Training, and asked myself some hard questions. Some people considered EST a cult, but that’s too strong a word. My harmless neighbors at the corner of Rockford and Lowell probably got a discount because I went with them. They were merely going because their twenty-something kids had gone and had really shaped up as a result, and it was just two long weekends and two weekday evenings at a giant Marriott in Orange County, and I came away saying, “That was nice for those who don’t have their act together, but I don’t think it affected me.”
A year later, I had left a short marriage that never should have occurred, dropped ten pounds, and left music as a career.
Growing up in the bellybutton of Illinois, when I’d see a cloud of dust appearing on the horizon, as the pickup came closer, I’d recognize the driver and immediately know that his family, Methodists, always drove Fords, and do you know what else? They……..and on and on weaving connectivity.
Eventually, I recast my encyclopedic reading of individuals as knowing what they needed, wanted, and would buy. Yes, I grew up as a fourth-generation farmer, but we were a family of musicians and storytellers with a natural instinct to connect to people.
It was 1983, and “When EF Hutton talked, people listened,” but I actually talked to EF Hutton, well, not EF himself, but some down-the-food-chain Joe who interviewed me.
A new investment called Money Market had just been invented and legalized; they had to change the banking laws in order to create a new class of mutual fund; an FHA 30-year fixed was twelve percent on its way down from fifteen, and the industry was just beginning to understand why it might need to hire some women. I wanted to leave a profession where only ten percent of conductors in higher education were women, and I wanted to move to a profession where I was also going to be in a ten percent minority once again. Impediment or benefit? Glass ceiling or opportunity?
So here’s what I told EF JoeFoodChain Hutton in my interview: “Performance is a good background for sales. As a conductor, I put raw data into a format people can understand and then present it to an audience.” I maintained that I had the basic skills to become a financial advisor. The raw data would be quite different, but I reassured Joe that, as a liberal arts graduate, I knew how to learn.
That was my entire pitch, but it was enough for them to match my university salary while I studied for the SEC licensing exams. It was a gamble, but six months later, I became a fully registered stockbroker. It was April Fools Day, and the year was 1984, doubly surreal. When I told my farmer father I was also licensed in commodities, the first question out of his mouth was, “What’s July corn?” which, of course, was not yet in the nomenclature of a baby broker.
Serendipity has always been my friend, and that fall, networking at a NAFE National Association of Female Executives mixer, I met an artist contemplating a career change. She asked if we could meet again so she could continue to pick my brain and I was eager to pay forward the kindness I had been shown when seeking to re-tool. Fortunately, Claire Brown (anything underlined is a hot link to more info) didn’t change professions and continues to create, but at the end of the interview, she invited me to a Halloween party she was giving with her friend Joan Hanor and specifically, they wanted to set me up with their friend Laurence Hoffmann, aka Larry, but you already know that story, and if you don’t, you can find it by clicking here:
Larry, typically not impulsive, six months later, with all the wisdom that a Claremont McKenna College tenured, full professor who had won the Huntoon Teaching Award three times and had a slew of successful textbooks, with all that wisdom, Larry decided he needed a change, too, and uttered a phrase that, to this day, amuses even him: “If a musician can do this, I’m sure a mathematician can.” And so we married and worked together in financial services for the remainder of our careers.
EF Hutton told us a husband-and-wife team would never work, so we went first to Prudential-Bache and later to Shearson, where we settled into an office building on Route 66 across from Trader Joe’s. We enjoyed over thirty-five years of working with the same wonderful clients as our company shifted beneath us, changing from Shearson to Smith Barney to Citigroup to Morgan Stanley, and then we retired.
I have to quit now and go out to celebrate my birthday, but I will come back next week for the rest of the story. Life starts at retirement, you know.
Join me on Thursday, March 28, at 6:30 p.m. at the Claremont Heritage Garner House. I will present “Our Stories and How to Share Them” as part of the Muriel Faith O’Brien Infotainment Series (my term, not theirs). I will be channeling my inner David Sedaris by narrating a few favorite stories like
I will also offer encouragement and prompts for you to write one or two of your own stories and will provide a link to give your stories a home. We hope to see you there. Zoom will be offered, so please let us know in the comments if you would prefer that option.
Wikipedia:The Fox and the Hedgehog
Hey Postdoc, I have a pain in my portfolio. I will be 70 in a few weeks. I'll be camping in Death Valley next weekend and then on to Cataract Canyon in August. Why does it all sound like a retiree's dream? Good Stack, Janice. Can't wait to read the rest. Angie
Happy Birthday! Thank you for sharing this story!