Escape your profession and save your life.

By Terry Carson

This book offers advice and inspiration for unhappy and stressed out professionals looking for a way to escape their current professional lives, to reinvent themselves and find a new and more satisfying work/life balance. Learn how to plan your escape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terry Carson
• Release date: May 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9780473186029

Terry Carson

Terry Carson is a full-time writer and small publisher who lives in New Zealand. He spent most of his working life as a lawyer until he decided that there had to be a better life outside of the profession. So many of his former colleagues asked him how he managed to escape his former hectic and stressful legal life that he decided he had better write a book about how to do it. Terry has also written non-fiction books about the Family Court, old historic Courthouses, and New Zealand's most sensational early murder trial. His keen interest in his country's early colonial history has led to his first crime novel, An Unjust Death, which combines themes of early New Zealand colonial history and the law.

Book preview

Escape your profession and save your life

By Terry Carson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Terry Carson

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

www.alibipress.co.nz

http://escapeyourprofession.blogspot.com

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter One A cautionary tale.

Chapter Two The professional life.

Chapter Three What is escape?

Chapter Four The problem of the professional.

Chapter Five A professional’s dirty little secrets.

Chapter Six What is really important?

Chapter Seven Just do it.

Chapter Eight Retire debt and get a life.

Chapter Nine But what can I do next?

Chapter Ten The opportunities around us.

Chapter Eleven Digging the tunnel.

Chapter Twelve Cultivating fungi (The garden you don’t want).

INTRODUCTION

Many people dream of a life as a successful professional. Obtaining professional qualifications and working hard is seen as the path to financial security, social status and respect. Having that title of doctor or lawyer or engineer or IT professional after your name is a mark of success – you are well educated, high achieving – you have arrived.

Unfortunately the professional qualifications and status often brings with it stress, depression, long and family unfriendly work hours, and a feeling of being trapped on a treadmill from which you cannot escape.

When I gave up my successful full-time career as a lawyer almost a decade ago many colleagues asked me how I managed to do it. Now that I’m totally divorced from my former profession and happily pursuing other interests the queries still keep coming from former colleagues who listen to what I say, and then make excuses about why they cannot make a change. Frequently they are miserable, unhappy, unwell and trapped by their material success. They are also getting older.

I believe there is nothing so sad as meeting highly educated, well qualified, talented men and women, who have convinced themselves they cannot make the personal changes they need to make in their lives to attain happiness and personal satisfaction.

Hopefully, if some of them read this book they will discover that escape is possible!

Chapter One A cautionary tale

"One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name."

Thomas Osbert Modaunt

I can still remember my very first day working in a law firm. Employed as a law clerk to the senior partner of a leading commercial law firm, I arrived at the firm’s offices bright and early. I discovered that my first job every day was to carry the senior partner’s boxes of files from the firm’s strongroom to his office.

The file boxes were always over-filled and heavy. As I staggered along the corridor that first morning, shedding files on to the floor like a tree losing leaves in the fall, the senior partner who was following close on my heels suddenly remarked -

You know Terry until I had my heart attack last year I used to work to mid-night six nights a week. I did it for forty years and it never did me any harm.

Perhaps he thought this observation would inspire me in the years ahead and fill me with admiration at his devotion to the legal profession, instead it had the opposite effect. There I was, only a few months short of completing my law degree, excited at being able to put into practice the skills I had learned during my years at university and I was being told my chosen profession required working to midnight six nights a week for almost twice my life span to date. I immediately felt depressed.

Perhaps I should have tossed in the law at that moment but the starry-eyed idealism of a young newly trained professional, the thought of the expected professional rewards and the knowledge that I was the first member of my family to go to university, and there was a family expectation that I would do well, kept me going…and going for another thirty years or so.

What happened to the senior partner under doctor’s orders to take it easy? Well, his typical day entailed having clients constantly in his office, more clients waiting to see him in the waiting room and often yet