How to Achieve Renewal without Dumping Your Career

Your time has come to shine, all your dreams are on their way.

Simon and Garfunkel

Crime doesn't pay--enough

Sometimes you can take a metaphor too far. When Susan and I write or talk about Changing Lanes, our road trip imagery might give the impression that we are trying to get all you fellow boomers to dump your current careers. You might conclude that only then will you overcome the sense of feeling stuck in a career that no longer gets your juices flowing and be free to renew your life.

To be sure, many of the change artists  who inspired us to tell their stories did indeed leave one profession for a completely different life. David Hinden traded in being a lawyer to become a high school biology teacher. Ed Lin left hospital administration to become an inventor. Carla Howard and Suzanne Singer both escaped the entertainment world to become rabbis. But this radical upheaval isn’t the only path to an exciting transformation.

Some people find a way to turn their lives around without dumping their careers. And it’s a good thing, too since there may be legitimate reasons why a dramatic shift may not be right at this point of your life. If you’re still on the hook for your kids’ education or your elderly parents’ support, your capacity for dramatic change might be limited. Furthermore, you may still love your profession and maybe even your current job, but just find something lacking. Your work might continue to offer you a strong sense of pride and fulfillment—if only you could achieve better alignment between what you do and who you are inside.

It was a kick to listen to Les Klinger tell his story of how he manages to straddle two lanes and draw enormous satisfaction from the ride.

Don’t Give Up Your Day Job

Les has been a tax lawyer for a very long time. He thoroughly enjoys the detailed analysis and creative solution focus of his work. His career has been good to him, but his work commitment didn’t prevent him from exploring a new lane. In the mid-90’s, feeling somewhat bored with his daily routine, Les decided to write an article which grew out of his hobby since law school days. Buried in the law library during his second year and desperate to find something different to read, Les happened upon The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and William S. Baring-Gould. Instantly, Les became a Sherlock Holmes junkie. In Sherlockian circles, this means joining the thousands of amateur scholars around the world who research and opine about the life and times of Sherlock Holmes as if he really existed.

Les had come up with a theory that a particular deduction Holmes made in one of the Conan Doyle stories was wrong. His conclusion was based on his superior knowledge of wine which had figured in the crime analysis in the book. As Les described this to me, I found myself completely buying this bizarre concept of second-guessing a fictional character’s conclusion based on current investigation of the minutia in the case.

Eccentric? Of course. but also very intriguing. Les had me hooked when he described his research of train schedules in middle Europe to determine if events in another story could actually have transpired when a character claimed them to have happened.  

Just for kicks, Les wrote up his theory and submitted it to The Baker Street Journal which, since its founding in 1946, is a respected source of scholarship about everything Sherlock Holmes. His article was accepted and Les was launched as a bona fide Sherlockian. He was even asked to join the prestigious Baker Street Irregulars , a group of about 300 Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts founded in 1934 by Christopher Morley and whose members have included Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Isaac Asimov.

Bitten by the bug, Les started adding to his “ modest” Conan Doyle book collection that grew from 300 to 4,000 volumes as well as pictures, posters, and other collectables which now adorn his home and law office.

He also discovered that he absolutely loved literary annotation and was very, very good at it. He dreamed that someday, in his “golden years”, he would update the Baring-Gould annotated Holmes book, but meanwhile toiled happily away at writing scholarly footnotes of his own. His hobby tapped into several of his key strengths as a tax lawyer—keen attention to detail, analysis of a huge number of facts, and the ability to synthesize it all to come up with creative solutions. Holmes himself might have been a very successful tax attorney had his “life” moved him in that direction.

Straddling Two Lanes

In 1996, Les kicked his hobby up to a whole new level. He was having so much fun writing footnote annotations to the Holmes canon, that he decided, “Why don’t I play with this?” His wife encouraged him to edit his work and send the compendium to a friend in the publishing business. Miracle of miracles, a small publisher who specialized in the Sherlockian market loved the idea and organized the material into a nine volume collection.

The first volume came out in 1998 and was reviewed quite well. Les’ own opinion of the work is tougher. He thought it “scholarly but dull—like a Law Review article.” Nevertheless, Les became a celebrity within the tiny universe of Holmes devotes. Better yet, four years later, he got a call from Bob Weil, vice president and executive editor at the prestigious publishing house, W.W. Norton & Company, who wanted Les to update the Baring-Gould Annotated Sherlock Holmes. A fantasy come true.

Les thought he could leverage all the work he had done for his first publisher. But Norton wanted a more “user-friendly” version. Something that would present the full range of opinion out there since the Baring-Gould book had come out in 1967. Also, Les’ own voice needed to come through, throwing his own judgments into the conversation and inviting readers to continue the debate. This approach required Les to do a ton more work, not to mention acquiring the 1000 illustrations that he bought to liven up the material.

3,000 pages and three years later, the first two volumes came out, covering the short stories, and in another year, the annotated novels were published. In 2005, Les won the Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work, presented by The Mystery Writers of America—the premier organization for mystery and crime writers and regular folks who just love to read crime fiction. And this honor keeps on giving him pleasure—what a kick in the pants to see his work cited in articles published in The Baker Street Journal.

“This is Cool Being a Writer”

His next project is The Annotated Dracula, which focuses on another Victorian literary icon. It’s a little scary because, he doesn’t have a deep collection of relevant working material right at home. He got to travel to Transylvania to find pictures for his book which allowed Les to demonstrate that Bram Stoker had never been to the region since he got a lot of the geography wrong.

The 700 page book (of which 250 pages are the original novel) is due out very soon. Les hopes that his Dracula will spark a new game, with the kind of obsessive following as that devoted to Arthur Conan-Doyle. He is proud of his legacy and is confident that his books will be read 50 years from now.

Yet, Les doesn’t think of himself as a “real writer.” Real writers have to face a blank page every day. Annotation begins with a really good book and goes from there. He revels in the chance he gets to hang out with his literary heroes as part of his work as president of the Mystery Writers of America Southern California region. When he compares his work to theirs, he knows there’s a difference. While he’s proud of his work, but doesn’t think that it’s art. Rather, it’s a way for this tax attorney to apply his talent for solving puzzles in a different realm. As he says, “It’s perspiration and so much fun. I love trivia and love learning about a thousand new things.”

So how can he do all this and still practice law full time?

Here what Les has to say about that:

• In his chosen genre, the book structures itself. He doesn’t have to spend a lot of time and effort on creating it from scratch.
• He doesn’t make himself out to be an expert in any one thing. Rather he can skate blithely across many areas.
• The book is made up of lots of manageable, discrete topics which he can get his arms around and complete researching and writing over a weekend (Note: the  kids are all grown and out of the house).

I think Les is way too modest, making his achievement out to be so unremarkable. On the contrary, how he manages a two-career straddle is quite extraordinary. He has managed to break the code and let us all in on his secret.

You too can make this dual career work if you identify your core strengths and then explore new realms in which they can be leveraged. If you want to or need to maintain your current career but long for another way to express yourself, take what you do really well and put it to use doing what you really love.

Check out the other roadmaps to renewal in Changing Lanes.

Share with us your own ideas on straddling two lanes. Our readers would love to hear from you.

Comments

*Name	*Email
*Comment
*For security, enter the word you see below