“What if My Experience Is Wasted?”
I made a shift from a career entirely focused on business and technology to a career as an artist, writer, and teacher looking to inspire people to live a more authentic, creative, and meaningful life.
Given this radical shift, I often get asked if I use any of my previous experience in my current work. People who know deep down that they want and need a career change are looking for reassurance that their education and extensive work experience won’t “go to waste”.
I use all my previous experience in my current work.
On the practical side, my business experience is relevant to… running my business.
My technology experience makes it easier for me to integrate, manage, and troubleshoot the 1,784 technology platforms and tools needed to run a business today.
My consulting and executive coaching experience is useful when I mentor people looking for more purpose in life. When I coached executives in the past, it was often clear to me that the best thing for most of them was to leave the companies who hired me to support them. Now I can see that and say that.
My years of logically and concisely articulating business concepts help me create logical and concise newsletters, courses, and marketing materials.
Decades spent obsessing over art and design in my free time have shaped my aesthetic sense and artistic voice, even while I wasn’t actively creating anything.
And these are just a few examples.
That said, the biggest reason my prior experience, knowledge, and skills are fully utilized in my work today is that they made me into the person who can now have this new career.
I couldn’t teach people how to find more meaning in their lives if I didn’t have what felt like a meaningless career and had to go through the journey to find purpose in my own life.
I couldn’t understand what it means to live authentically, paint it, or teach it if I hadn't spent years repressing my authentic self and then learning to recognize when and why I do that.
I wouldn’t have the same life purpose, message, or way of communicating it if I hadn’t lived the life I had so far.
The idea that my old career may have been “wasted” comes from a society that assigns people into buckets of “professions”, and values only the training directly associated with each profession. It’s easy to see why 20 years of painting are useful for an artist. But 20 years of life experiences that generate a unique perspective on a topic that can then be expressed through art? Not nearly as useful.
We’re in an era where our career can be… who we are. Our life path creates our unique value proposition. Our mix of experiences, skills, and knowledge make us, us—and will lead us to the next version of ourselves. The more we stick to old-school thinking and look for a box to fit into, the more interchangeable we are, and the more susceptible to being replaced by AI.
If that’s not enough to convince you, the sunk cost fallacy still applies: If you could spend the next 10, 20, 30+ years of your life doing something you love, do you really want to miss out on that because you spent the last 10, 20, 30+ years doing something that no longer fulfills you?
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