Preparing for Your Second Act

F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, "There are no second acts in American lives," but if he were alive today, he might consider revising the quote. After a lifetime in politics, Al Gore won an Academy Award and has refashioned himself into a business and media mogul, founding an investment firm, an Internet television concern, and advising or sitting on the boards of companies such as Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL). Mitt Romney moved in the opposite direction, leveraging success as leader of private equity titan Bain Capital and head of the 2002 Winter Olympics into a successful term as governor of Massachusetts and now a run for the U.S. Presidency. Even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is getting into the second-act "act," recently announcing that he has signed on as an adviser to Deutsche Bank (DB).

If you haven't yet started to think about your own second act, it's never too early to start. Peter Drucker predicted the average young American at the turn of the century could expect to have about six careers in a lifetime, in part because of the rapid, discontinuous changes reshaping the workplace. While in many countries people's job mobility is severely limited by class, educational background, or other societal factors, people in the U.S. today still enjoy an unprecedented freedom to change careers midstream. A friend of mine who was a massage therapist for more than a decade is today a top computer networking consultant. Another friend, a top person at Morgan Stanley Private Equity (MS), is building universities in Asia.