The Zeal For the Job

By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

Why We Work: First in a series of articles about successful professionals: the choices they make, the paths they pursue

In a fluid corporate career marked by big leaps to disparate industries, Sue Parks' most fulfilling step sprang from a slower-paced hobby. Parks left her native Midwest to work in Southern California, rising swiftly to become a respected executive in the paper industry. In 1994, during the height of the telecom frenzy, she jumped to US West's Denver headquarters to run a $2.6 billion division. In 2000 computer maker Gateway lured her away to a similar position out of San Diego. And in 2002 Dallas-based Kinko's crowned her head of operations, the office-services company's No. 2 job.

All the while, Parks, 50, commuted home to her husband in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Between airplanes and meetings and hotels, she maintained a constant habit: walking. "It was the one thing that kept me relatively fit--and sane," she says. As exercise methods go, walking requires not much in the way of accessories, yet Parks often found herself wishing for snazzier pedometers, age-appropriate shorts and a walking pal or two in a strange city. Her aha moment came in 2003: "This, I realized, was my passion." She quit Kinko's and started WalkStyles, a Web company offering equipment, apparel and networks to walking enthusiasts.

Our grandparents worked to keep a roof overhead, and they didn't much bandy about terms like career development and change catalyst. Today, why we work is much more complex. There's still the roof, of course, but success is also measured by the freedom to pursue a lifelong passion, exploit a hidden talent or even try to save one small corner of the world at a time. No amount of success seems to scratch the itch; a survey by Netshare, a career site for high-earning executives, found that almost half its subjects are actively trying to transition into a new field.

Whatever our motives, American society presents few barriers today to a professional seeking change. An oboist can become a lawyer, an accountant an agent, a lawyer a baker--and that may be the problem, says Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice. "There's a restless dissatisfaction that comes from always wondering if there's something better out there," he says. Indeed, more than half of global executives wish they could start over in a different career, according to a survey by search firm Korn/Ferry International. "People define their work as a job, a career or a calling," says Schwartz. "Jobs are to support yourself. Careers today require a lot of hopping. If we're lucky, we wind up with a calling."

Some feel the calling early but heed it only later. Josh Ruxin, a doctor's son from Ridgefield, Conn., traveled at 17 to study development projects in Ethiopia with a school group. "That changed the rest of my life," says Ruxin, 36. "I couldn't believe that people so desperately poor were living on the same planet as we were." After earning a doctorate at University College London in medical history, he joined the Monitor Group, a management consultancy in Cambridge, Mass. "There's a dearth of management skills in nonprofits," he says, explaining that choice. When some colleagues broke away to focus on economic development in underdeveloped regions, he signed on. During a visit, he learned that every one of his African clients was deeply affected by health crises like aids and tuberculosis. "I realized health care there had to get fixed before these economies had a chance," says Ruxin. In 2002 he formed Access Project, a nonprofit that applies American management systems to hospitals in Rwanda. He is also an assistant professor at Columbia University's public-health school.

Conducting multiple careers simultaneously takes an awful lot of energy. Good thing that Mariela Dabbah, 42, has enough to power her native city of Buenos Aires. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1988, she landed a job at a Westchester, N.Y., company that distributes bilingual textbooks. Dabbah bought the distributor in 1993 and sold it in 2000. By then she had started a company that translated business documents. A teaching stint at a community college awakened her to a need among Latinos for help navigating the U.S. educational and employment systems. She published a guide for Latino job seekers in 2005 and followed it quickly with one for parents and then another for professionals. A book for parents of high school students will arrive in the fall. Lately, Dabbah has added "speaker" and "consultant" to her business card. "Next I want to have my own TV and radio program," she says.

Success is hard to give up. Overcoming training and experience to try something new takes courage. "I don't know if it's courage or stupidity or what," says Janet Reid, 52. The daughter of educators, Reid expected to be one, too, and followed her love of chemistry to a Ph.D. from Howard University. But Procter & Gamble began to pursue her, and after 18 months, she gave in. Under then ceo John Pepper's mentorship, Reid hopped within the consumer-products giant, rising ever higher in title. But after 10 years, she broke off and started Global Lead Management Consulting. She likens her decision to leave P&G to a hermit crab deserting its shell to seek a better one. "I was fueled by fear and driven by faith," she says. "I'm scared of drowning, and that's why I scuba dive. You've got to face up to the fear and own it to get to the next level."

Career changes can affect family members dramatically too. When Reid accepted the P&G job, she uprooted her doctor husband from Richmond, Va., along with their two young children. The couple eventually divorced. Ruxin's move forced his new wife (the trailing spouse, in human resources--speak) to make a career change of her own. Alissa, 32, once managed wellness programs for Goldman Sachs; today she is about to open a swanky cafe in Rwanda's capital. In his reporting on the "true stories of people who turned their obsessions into professions," Josh Piven, author of The Escape Artists, to be published this spring, found that career change sometimes tore couples and families apart. "Some people in your life are like, Are you crazy?" he says. "It's not always a happy ending."

But for more and more Americans, career change isn't an ending--it's a lifestyle, a pathway to fulfillment that could take them anywhere, like career bees going from flower to flower. Robert Norton, 37, has always buzzed from job to job to make a living. His father, a Marine helicopter pilot, died in Vietnam months before Norton's birth to a Japanese mother, who passed away when he was 19. It took him eight years to work his way through college. He has guided Japanese tourists in Hawaii, sold chocolate in Jamaica, exported sea urchins from Maine, managed real estate in New York City and translated for the Mets and the Yankees. His nose for opportunity led him to law school. "I figured there was a market for Japanese-speaking lawyers," he says. There was. Since 2002 he has practiced intellectual-property law at New York's Day Pitney, from which he may someday segue into baseball agenting. Eventually, "I'd like to find a fishing boat and be a fisherman," says Norton. "Until then, my work is interesting enough to keep me motivated--for at least another five years."