10 Years Out

As a follow-on to the lottery exercise, I’m going to answer Anastasia’s questions from this post here in its own post.

In a nutshell, she asks: what does my ideal career situation look like in 10 years?

Now, I’m not generally one to make a heavily scripted 1o-year or even 5-year plan.  This works well for some, but doesn’t mesh well with my thinking style.  On the other hand, Anastasia is right to ask what my ideal outcome is, since you can’t attract or achieve what you can’t describe.  So I know generally what my ideal situation 10 years out will be, and I can dive deeper into the specifics of that situation as I need to (e.g. when I’m ready to move more quickly towards that destination, or if I need to tweak what that destination looks like).  But at this time I won’t script out the specific steps I’ll take.

10 years out, I :

• Have an equity stake in a small, high-growth private firm,
• Am probably not the original founder of that firm (not really my style) but came on board early on,
• Lead strategy and new business development for that firm (my favorite kind of stuff to do),
• Probably also own the back office functions and staff (also stuff I like to do)
• Carry a highly marketable title, such as VP of Strategy and Operations,
• Am highly compensated in salary and benefits, more so that I would have been at the F50C by this time,
• Work highly flexible, adaptable hours (my kiddo will be 10 by this time and I want high flexibility to be involved in school and lots of time for my family),
• Write: I Enjoy my work enough, and work flexible enough hours that I also easily have room to publish a relatively sophisticated blog and do some highly-selective freelancing & column work,
• Volunteer: I Enjoy my work enough, and have enough room in my schedule to have a leadership role again on a nonprofit board (larger nonprofit with multi-million dollar budget and/or statewide reach — this is a size I like),
• Am well-regarded (at least locally, not sure if I care or not about nationally) in my field and am sought out as an expert and collaborator,
• Run every day and race regularly; have completed a marathon,
• Have plenty of time to read widely (fiction, news & business),
• Have big & small adventures, and cozy home time, with my family,
• Laugh a lot,
• Wear jeans most days to work

Like the lottery exercise, 10-Years-Out is another great exercise to do when times are uncertain or scary. Thanks, Anastasia, for the prompt!

What Would You Do If You Won the Lottery?

I think one of the best time to do the lottery-what-if exercise is when times are scary.  Because if your current circumstances — your Plan A — go away, wouldn’t you rather have a Plan B that you really love (or at least a vision if not the actual plan), instead of a Plan B that’s more of the mundane same-old same-old?
Make a mere repeat of your Plan A, your Plan C.

Make your Plan B really special.

That way, if Plan A collapses, you’re well poised with a clear vision to start to execute that vision.  And if times start feeling abundant again, and Plan A is going well, why not consider: now that you have a great vision, what’s stopping you?

The lottery-what-if game is a great way to brainstorm some truly soul-nourishing Plan B options. Here’s what I’ve come up with, sort of in rank 0rder:

1. Focus full-time on this blog, freelance writing & writing columns.
2. Open the COOLEST skyway convenience shop ever, in downtown Minneapolis. Filled with what you need and expect but also with amazing oddities & unexpected fun crap.
3. Open an Etsy shop and sell custom-order poetry.
4. Consult for non-profits on back office management, career development & grant writing.
5. Run the back office of a small creative business and get an equity position.
6. Be a courier or concierge.
7. Stop working entirely, and work at home on artisan & homestead things (growing & preserving my own food, remodeling my house, keeping chickens, converting my car to run on biodiesel, you get the drift.)
8. Buy and manage all the properties on my block.

See, some are kind of crazy, some are do-able fantasies, and many are things I can start doing very easily and quickly!

What to Do When You’re Totally Overwhelmed? Smackdown!

Team, I’m privileged to be a guest poster over at the excellent 101 Smackdowns For Your Inner Critic.  I wrote about a great technique for calming the whirlwind – and your Inner Critic’s negative voice – when you’re totally overwhelmed.  Here’s an excerpt:

I am prone to a) inserting myself into totally-out-of-the-comfort-zone situations and b) getting totally overwhelmed as a result.  Since part a) is what helps me grow the most, and generally pays the biggest dividends, I have had to find a smackdown to combat part b). I’d like to share it with you by way of my favorite example:

I graduated from a very small liberal arts college with a writing degree and then for the next six years worked exclusively in and with non-profits and lived a freewheeling lifestyle of clubbing, tattoos and underground commix.  Suddenly one day I decided to pursue an MBA and a life in corporate America. This decision was borne not from cool-headed thinking, but from the emotional aftermath from a political takeover of my agency and the firing of my mentor.

Talk about out of comfort zone.  Not only did I have no undergraduate education whatsoever in business or economics, I had no corporate experience at all.  Nor did I even own a suit. Nor do I really have a head for math. Or skill at golf.

But I had decided to join a top-30 ranked business school, study finance (math math math!), sell out into a corporate job, hold my own with the “golf playing assholes,” as I mistakenly thought all corporate types were, and wear a suit.  And because I’m both a perfectionist and competitive, I took it upon myself to kick ass at it all.

Talk about overwhelmed. Totally, utterly, unbelievably overwhelmed.

What did I do to combat this? Head over to 101 Smackdowns to find out.