I didn't have an "Aha!" moment.
Unlike Patrick, I didn’t have a clear “Aha!” moment or moments (paying subscribers can read his article here. There is a treasure trove of insight and wit behind the paywall, like this and this and a whole lot more. Give it a try and let us know what you think. You can cancel at any time).
In retrospect, it’s clear to me that I should have launched in a new direction sooner than I did, and I wish that I had, but I didn’t.
Perhaps the idea of an “Aha!” moment doesn’t sit right with you or isn’t how you’re experiencing the whole nexus of ideas and feelings that accompany launching from academia, or just thinking about launching. If so, maybe my experience, which was more of a drawn-out accretion of impulses and insights than a moment or a few moments of realization, will be useful for you.
A quick refresher on my bio. I left academia in 2007, when I started a job that summer at an investment consulting firm, Cambridge Associates. I was there until 2011, when I joined a hedge fund in NYC doing marketing and strategy and sales. I did that until early 2019. Now I have a couple of start-up ventures with several partners. One is Exeunt, with Patrick. The other is a consulting and e-commerce venture: HarborHouse Partners.
As with most big pivots in life, I suppose, the backstory is complicated and seems much clearer now, in retrospect, than back then. Let me start with graduate school. I was always a bit ambivalent about being an academic. I loved ideas, and the rush that comes with a new discovery or another level of understanding or the praise of the famous professor. But I never felt like grad school and academia and being a professor were inevitable, like it was the only thing I could be and do. My pact with myself is that I wouldn’t go on for my PhD unless 1. I liked it; 2. my professors gave me some assurance that I was pretty good at it; and 3. I didn’t have to pay for it. By the time I finished my MA, all 3 of those conditions had been met, and I went on. Getting my PhD was a terrific experience for me, and I could feel myself becoming more intellectually dynamic and nuanced. But I loved leaving school and the library completely for the summer to take up my other career, as a fishing guide in Alaska. My peers were doing useful things like learning German and reading Foucault. I wouldn’t get through a single mystery novel in a summer, much less The Order of Things. I loved thinking about my dissertation, but I hated writing it. While I was writing it, I went on the academic job market. I also applied at McKinsey and other consulting firms. I wasn’t so much disgruntled with academia or burned out as I was antsy and curious about other stuff. I was raised Catholic – first communion, altar boy, Catholic school – the whole bit. But when it came time for confirmation, when I was 16 or so, I refused. It didn’t feel right or authentic to me; deep down, I just didn’t believe. Grad school felt like that: I enjoyed it most of the time, and I was pretty good at the rituals, but I wasn’t a true believer.
Then I got a tenure-track job. Not just a job, a sweet job. Wellesley College – smart students, good salary and benefits, small classes, beautiful campus. The whole enchilada. Here’s what I started to realize after a few years: I loved the idea of being a professor, but I didn’t love actually being one. I liked talking with my students, helping them and advising them, and I sometimes loved teaching, but I also couldn’t wait for the semester to end. I loved twisting and turning ideas around in my head, and I liked wandering down various blind, but exciting alleys (like the year I spent reading and trying to understand Althusser), but I didn’t like writing about them. I would get all tangled up in my head and paralyzed at the keyboard and I couldn’t get out of my own way, which always felt like crap as I’d hear the constant refrain that I had to publish more, bigger, faster. I enjoyed being on committees and trying to help figure out how to make things work better, but I was crestfallen at the constant naysaying of my peers, that committee work just didn’t count for much, if anything, and was mostly a waste of time. And that bummed me out even more -- one thing I really liked about my job didn’t matter that much. So there I was, with a great job, but it didn’t feel very great to me.
Never a quitter, I worked harder than ever to find the magic of what I imagined being a professor must be. “This is a great job,” I told myself. “I just have to figure it out and it will actually be great.” I mustered my enthusiasm and knowledge every semester, and I tried to share it all with my students. I took on more advisees and senior theses. I tried to be innovative and exciting in the classroom, and to improve parts of my teaching that needed work. In my research, I tried harder than ever to organize my thoughts and put them on paper, with some success. I got a few things finished, and slowly, in fits and starts, was filling in the contours of a book that I was proud of. I worked constantly. I didn’t like being a professor very much, but I put on a brave, happy face, even when I hated it, and myself, the most. And then I came up for tenure.
I didn’t get it. Ugh. That sucked, no doubt. After all, we all want to get picked to be on the team, and I was told that I wasn’t good enough. I was pretty disappointed – for about an hour. Then I was elated, relieved, hopeful. It was like my life was going to begin again. I know, that’s not what I was supposed to feel, but I did. For the previous few years, I’d been exploring some new directions that interested me. I’d gotten really into investing, and was teaching myself economics and stock analysis and statistics and stuff I’d never thought about, much less ever taken a class in. I wondered about being an analyst flying around the world evaluating companies. Buying and selling stocks. Trading commodities. Making money -- a lot of money. I’d had many conversations with people “out there”, I bought cups of coffee and tea and roast beef sandwiches, I asked a lot of questions, I listened and learned. I didn’t know when, but I was going to stop being a professor and I was going to become someone, something else. Before I came up for tenure – a year, 6 months, I don’t know – my wife and I were in the kitchen. Probably a Friday, the end of another week of working and racing around and keeping all the plates in the air. Our young kids were in bed (finally), and we were somewhere in a bottle of wine and I said, “I don’t know if I’m going get tenure or not, and I’m not going to quit now. But whatever happens, especially if I do get it, please remind me of how unhappy I am. I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to do something else.” I like to think that I would have had the courage to leave academia with tenure. I guess I’m lucky that I didn’t have to put that to the test.
So, what’s the takeaway from all of this? I can come up with a few. First, maybe there is not an “Aha!” moment for you. That’s OK. I don’t remember being struck by a great insight or realization. It was more of an accumulation of feelings and ideas, a suffocating weight that not getting tenure finally let me shrug off of my shoulders. Second, I did have some resolve to change my professional life. I wanted different, even though I didn’t know exactly what that meant, or what the blueprint was. At some point, I resolved to be what I describe as “that middle-aged career-change guy”, this imaginary person that I felt like I’d read about or heard about, but didn’t actually know. So, it’s not like I was just bumbling down a path and got hit by career-change lightning. I was thinking about it, reading books about my “Second Act”, talking to people, and making plans. One week, I was going to get an MBA, the next week I was going to start my own hedge fund, the week after that….who knows? Even if I didn’t really know what I was doing or where I was going, I was accumulating energy in a different direction than the path I was on. I wish that I’d been more decisive and that I’d just picked up and left academia, but I wasn’t and I didn’t. So be it. The key? Don’t do nothing. Don’t wallow or bumble. You don’t have to get hit by a lightning bolt. But I do think that you ought to follow your intuition and your interests, and see where they lead you. The biggest risk is taking no risk at all.