I was introduced to a phrase recently that I found interesting, the “encore career.” Lately, that’s how I have been thinking of my own time.
I have found it hard to focus on the idea of building a business because I need to have some surgery. Without going into a lot of detail, I don’t have any idea how long I will be out of commission. I’m hoping it is the minimum time but how much can you aggressively go after something and then say, “Wait. I need like 8 weeks to feel better. I’ll get back to you.”
Right now things are just not at a point where that is feasible. And I don’t really want to do to do that. I find it is rare for me to really know what I want. Perhaps it is early conditioning to realize that you have to participate in a family or not being wealthy, but what you do and what you want seem to frequently be on different paths.
In the encore career, the idea is that you are in a different financial place and you can take the time to pursue something more in line with what you want. But what do you want? Some people know already, I want to travel. I want to train for a marathon. I want to practice the piano more and teach tuba lessons.
I don’t really know what I want. I would love to know what I want. Do you? Am I the outlier? Rather than that, here some ideas of things I would enjoy doing:
- teach some tuba or bass.
- write some music
- play in a quintet
- teach some adult swimming lessons
- work with small companies to get their business stuff in the cloud (accounting, web site, etc,)
- write about my experiences
- do some writing projects in technology (i.e. my old job)
- develop an app or two
- play a little golf
- exercise to stay healthy
- eat good
- hang out with my wife
- see my family and friends
- write one book – the history of Franco-American
- spend a little speaking French, Italian, maybe learn a little Spanish
- work in my garden (I used to love doing this and lately it feels less rewarding and more like work – why?)
That’s too much to focus on. That’s no encore. That’s more like a season’s worth of repertoire.
So I don’t know, am I just too scatterbrained? Or is the encore idea just not that well-formed. My goal in starting a business was that it has been something that I wanted to do since my first job in a start-up, Graphx. My personality has not been conducive to thriving a corporate environment. I was good at doing the work but not the politics. And my motivations to do better didn’t fit with the means of promotion in the company.
Over the years, I have worked in number of organizations that kept making the same mistakes. I would like to try to create a place where we avoid those mistakes but maybe that’s just impossible.
