#new career
Conventional wisdom says that if you want to make a career transition, you need to train for a new industry while still working your current job. Get an MBA! Go to night school! Do an internship! Apprentice on the weekends! Network! Beg for informational interviews!
I’m obviously not one for conventional wisdom. Which is why I also recommend you… start a weirdly specific hobby with your college roommate???
Kitty and I started Bitches Get Riches when we were both full-time employees—a graphic designer and a book editor, respectively. We’d both been in our careers for about six years, and gotten fewer promotions than we deserved. We liked our work, but we’d smoothed out all its most exciting challenges long ago. We had the mental bandwidth for a new endeavor.
So we started Bitches Get Riches.
We never viewed it as a money-making venture. (In fact, it was a money-sucking venture.) We never tried to make it seem more polished or professional than we wanted to. (BGR: proudly rocking the same free WordPress theme since 2016.)
It was for fun! It was a way to work together, express ourselves, promote interesting ideas, and maybe help a couple of people along the way.
We’ve always taken pride in being self-taught. Our personal finance advice is for Real Amuricans™! Give us your tired, your poor, the huddled masses who need to bust out a tip calculator for a $19 lunch bill!
Essentially, I was becoming an amateur expert in personal finance—a field that had nothing to do with my chosen vocation of book publishing—while operating as if I had one career path and one career path alone. I quietly built up expertise and contacts in a second industry, keeping that second iron in the fire with no idea it could lead to a career transition someday.
My self-administered education in personal finance was taking up a significant amount of my personal time. I probably dedicated as much time and mental real estate to BGR as some people spend getting a grad degree. It’s just that I wasn’t viewing it as actual job training. I certainly didn’t see it as a path to a career transition!
So when the time came to decide if I would transition away from publishing and into another industry, I didn’t just have a lightbulb moment. I walked face-first into a solar flare.
-My Career Transition Succeeded When I Gave Fewer Fucks, Made More Friends, and Had More Fun
