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Life experience & transition

Career changers

The push, pull, transferable skill, beginnerhood, hidden cost, identity shift, and evidence that a change was right.

12 questions, 574 answers on the record, from 457 members. Every question is asked in FLAPSS wording — nobody answers as anybody else.

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Worth reading

How has a setback or failure set you up for later success?

Agnès Varda

Film director, photographer and installation artist

Recorded · Eye For Film · 2018

I have never made any money from my films but I have won prizes and recognition. I have been on the margins forever.
Theodore Roosevelt

26th President of the United States, 1901–1909; Governor of New York 1899–1900; Assistant Secretary of the Navy 1897–1898

Recorded · The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara · 1910

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
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Every question in this questionnaire

  1. What pushed you away from your former path, and what pulled you toward the new one? —
  2. As a child, what career or life did you imagine for yourself? 197
  3. Which skill transferred unexpectedly well from your previous work? —
  4. What was hardest about becoming a beginner again in public? —
  5. What is the biggest professional obstacle you have faced? 24
  6. What did the change cost that success stories usually leave out? —
  7. What made you stop something you were known for, and how did you know it was time? 14
  8. Which part of your old professional identity did you keep, and which part did you have to release? —
  9. How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? 69
  10. What counsel would you give your twenty-year-old self — and what should they ignore? 78
  11. When did you know the change was right, even before it looked successful? —
  12. What accomplishment matters most to you? 192

Who has answered

Members with enough answers in this questionnaire to be worth arriving at — listed A–Z, not ranked by count.

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