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The One Metric That Kills Every Reinvention

There is one career change financial expectation that instantly ruins any chance of reinventing your life into one aligned with your values, passions, and purpose.

When I began to consider my first reinvention – leaving national account sales to become a math teacher – people advised me to build a tutoring side-hustle and keep working at it until the income from tutoring matched my salary. Then and only then would I be ready to make the leap into fully living a life aligned with what mattered most to me.

Applying Big-Company Logic to a Startup Dream

At the time I had a salary of just under $60K a year. If I could tutor from 6-10pm weeknights (20 hours) plus another 8 hours per day on the weekends (16 hours) at a rate of about $30 an hour, I would still not make enough to replace my salary. In addition, tutoring work isn’t steady, clients don’t need you forever, schedules change, I had periodic work-travel conflicts, and I didn’t include any potential drive time to and from tutoring appointments.

Perhaps I could have charged more, except that in the market where I lived, that would have been nearly impossible. Tutoring rates were not as high and this was nearly 20 years ago (circa 2007). Some argued if I could develop an interesting tutoring solution and take it to market, then I could earn significantly more.

I know that people meant well. The problem is they assumed I wanted to earn at least the same amount of money as I did as a national account sales manager and/or start a business of some kind. I did not want either of those things. I simply wanted to help students break through their limiting beliefs in math. That was it. Working at a learning center part-time initially while I kept my day job, allowed me to do just that. However, no matter how many hours I worked there, I’d never be able to recreate my salary.

Shifting from Profitability to Viability

I just wanted to teach. So I went about it differently. I looked at my living expenses, debt obligations, and other monthly costs. I put together a spreadsheet that looked ahead at least 2 years. I called the banks that I owed money to and restructured my debt obligations. In other words, I worked with them to get my minimum payments down, even if that meant paying over a longer period of time and adding more interest. Once I got my monthly expenses down as low as I reasonably could, I set that as my monthly income target.

While that number was less than my income and I would still have trouble earning that much immediately after quitting. So I looked at my 401k and made a very calculated and tough decision to withdraw all of it and use that as a seed fund to make up any gaps, as needed.

After I quit, I picked up all the tutoring hours I could get at the learning center, I also started my own tutoring business, and I got a part-time job at a retail store at the local mall. All combined, it meant I didn’t need to draw on my 401k withdrawal as much. A year after quitting, I had about 10-12 steady tutoring clients, I worked part-time at a local university, and I was enrolled in two masters degrees. My life was being reinvented, one piece at a time and I enjoyed every minute of it. At the university where I worked part-time, I helped run the student leadership development program. In my business, I worked with some incredible young people. When I wasn’t working, I was studying for a masters degree in psychology focused on executive coaching and a part-time M.B.A. Oh, and did I forget to mention, 6 months after quitting my job, I married an incredible woman whom I loved very much!  In fact, I met her 3 months before I quit my job and well, that’s a whole other story.

The point is that in 12 months, I didn’t make up my $60K salary. In fact, I got into a bit more debt in order to pay off my tuition for the masters in psychology. Fortunately, the M.B.A. tuition was waived as a benefit of my part-time job at that university.  In any case, I didn’t wait until I made up my salary to reinvent myself and begin living a life aligned with my values, passions, and purpose. I simply figured out how to start living that life as soon as possible and that even included getting married.

Why Large Companies (and People) Fail to Innovate

The one expectation that can ruin your reinvention almost from the beginning is putting a dollar or profitability target on it too soon.

It’s interesting because we live in a time that celebrates startup success. Startups are businesses that pursue a solution despite not making enough money to fund it, with the hope that it will one day figure that part out. That is, they purposefully don’t set profit expectations for years so that it has a chance to grow.  They set other goals and metrics in the early years in order to build a strong foundation, grow, and develop slowly (at least the wisest ones do).

Large companies have their own version of the same problem. The late Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, wrote in The Innovator’s Dilemma that the problem large established companies have with bringing new and innovative products to market is that they set strict financial expectations before it’s ready to live up to them. As a result, most innovations don’t see the light of day at larger companies, but eventually, a small startup brings it to life and disrupts the established order. Think Kodak or Blockbuster. Both of them had opportunities to invest in new ideas but set unrealistic financial goals that made it seem their old products and services were the better way to go.

Creating a Protected Space for Growth

At IBM, the team that brought their “e-business” to life in the 90s was initially protected from the company by an executive sponsor who knew if they had exposed their ideas to executive committees too soon, their early-stage ideas would have crumbled under the expectations.

Young professional athletes suffer the same fate when unrealistic expectations are set on them before they are truly ready to deliver—and that’s assuming they will even deliver the way people think they might. Some teams do a great job of protecting their youngest and most high-potential talent from unrealistic or irrelevant expectations. The ones that don’t, tend to never see their young talent fulfill their potential.

The Unexpected ROI of Following Your Calling

Why should our dreams, passions, and life be any different? Building a life on your terms has more to do with the fulfillment you draw from doing a thing you love than from the money you may or may not make. In my case, I pursued a career in teaching, where it was a guarantee that I’d never make as much as in corporate.

If I had put strict financial expectations or milestones on my reinvention, I would never have been able to pursue my true calling of teaching. However, teaching eventually gave way to careers in coaching, public speaking, teaching in the Ivy League, writing a book, starting a podcast, and facilitating professional development training. All those things have higher earning potential, yet I never would have discovered them if I had not had faith enough to follow my initial calling of teaching math.

If you want to make more money, that’s one thing. If you want to reinvent yourself, that is not the same thing. 

While your reinvention may eventually lead to more income, that is not the expectation you should set for it. Treat your reinvention like a startup. First focus on getting started and making progress and then focus on financial returns.

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