“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” - Henry David Thoreau
If you have ever dreamed of re-writing the story of your life, this article is for you. This is the profile of a man who had a comfortable life and career building a family-owned business he had taken over from his dad. The easy career path for him would have been to continue that business, finding a way to be content with his fairly successful practice that ran like a well-oiled machine. But, as much as that career would have been the easy choice for him, it didn’t feed his soul. And so, in his forties, he went back to school to learn about something he was passionate about, journalism. Before long, he was walking away from the business he took over from his dad and picking up a pen in a new career. This is a story of following your inner passion, feeding your soul, and reinvention.
His name is Jim Morrison. For twenty years, he built up a successful and respected home inspection business, a family business he took over from his father. To give you an idea of its success, the Morrisons have inspected more than 10,000 homes in Massachusetts. Morrison says that what he loved most about the job was investigating each house and uncovering the truths, integrity, and little gems of inspiration within each property. It was while building his home inspection career that he was offered an opportunity to write a column for a newspaper called The Lancaster Times. For a stipend of $35 per article, he inherited his very own byline on real estate and, what he didn’t realize back then, was that this little column would unlock for him a deep love for writing that would eventually catapult him into a full-fledged career reinvention. In 2012, he turned over the home inspection business he had built for twenty years to pursue a new career in journalism, and today he is a staff reporter for Banker & Tradesman, a weekly banking, commercial, industrial, and real estate newspaper for Massachusetts. He also freelances for The Boston Globe, a newspaper he delivered as a boy. People like Jim are, in the opinion of this writer, rare. For it is much easier for most to stick with the status quo in life, regardless of your inner desires and life passion. In other words, it’s so much easier to settle. But Jim Morrison didn’t settle for comfortable. He picked the road less traveled. He picked passion over a paycheck, happiness over contentment, and the unknown over the absolute. The first time I met Morrison, I was compelled to get inside his head, and so we sat down for a one-on-one conversation on reaching for big dreams. Here are Morrison’s 4 simple strategies for reinventing yourself:
Are You As Happy As You Could Be?: Morrison says that in today’s world it is not unusual for people to work into their seventies. With that in mind, he says that the one question that helped him make his final decision to go back to school in his forties was, “Are you as happy as you could be?” He says that the choice for him wasn’t just about choosing one job over another, it was about choosing happiness. Morrison says that life is short and he long ago made a simple choice for his own life; happiness. He says that his home inspection business was busy, profitable, and comfortable, but it just didn’t make him as happy as he could be. He says that choosing to stay on that path would have been a disservice to himself and to the customers he was working with. He says that the people who climb the furthest in their careers are the ones who have absolute passion for what they are doing. He says that they are the people who do the job for no other reason than that they love it. Morrison says he had reached his peak in that career and he couldn’t take the business any further because his love for it was gone. He turned the business over to his cousin, who has the passion to drive the business to new heights so that he too could pursue a career he’s passionate about, journalism. Morrison says he still asks himself all the time, “Are you as happy as you could be?” He says it feels good to honestly say to yourself, “yup.”
Advocates: Morrison says that reinvention for him would not have been possible without a handful of advocates who supported him in his decision. First, he says that his greatest mentor in life has always been his dad. Morrison’s dad had started the home inspection business in 1983 and so if there was anyone who would have wanted Jim to stick with that career path it was his dad. However, Jim’s dad, also a product of reinvention, had founded Morrison Home Inspection in his late fifties, after a long career as a civil engineer. Perhaps it is for this reason that Jim’s dad supported his mission to reinvent himself. Morrison also says that the greatest advocate in his life journey is his wife who helped him think through the pros and cons of pursuing his passion, and supported him all the way. Morrison says that what is most interesting about pursuing a new career is that you will pick up new advocates along the way. He says that one mentor who has offered priceless guidance and advice is Mitchell Zuckoff. Zuckoff was Morrison’s journalism professor at Boston University, and was a reporter with The Boston Globe and was a member of their famous Spotlight Team. Zuckoff has penned several books, including his recent New York Times Bestseller, 13 Hours, which was also made into a film of the same name. Morrison’s advice for anyone facing reinvention is to find your advocates and ask for advice.
Your First Career Was Practice: Morrison spent more than twenty years of his life building his home inspection business. He says that when it comes to facing reinvention it’s important that you really analyze your old career to determine if there’s anything you can use that will make you better in the new career. Although home inspections and journalism are very different professions, Morrison says that there are also many synergies if you look closely. For example, he says his job as a home inspector was to parachute into a situation (the home sale), investigate the home in detail, and then articulate the details of the inspection in a written format that could be easily understood by the reader. From this perspective, he says his home inspection career was very much like his journalism career. He says that his new career as a journalist with Banker & Tradesman is all about parachuting into a situation, investigating, then articulating the story so readers understand it. Morrison says that when it comes to pursuing your passion, don’t discount all the lessons you’ve learned thus far, even if those lessons were in a very different career. He says that everything you did yesterday is training for what you are doing today or what you are about to do tomorrow.
Just do it: His final words of advice for anyone with a dream of reinventing himself, “Just do it!” He says that there are plenty of ways to skin a cat. You can drop everything and run after your new career, or you can sneak up on it slowly. As Morrison points out, he wrote articles for his local paper for many years, long before he decided to go back to school for journalism. Morrison says that if you have passion for something, find a way to get your feet wet. He says that many years ago he received a valuable lesson from his old boxing coach. The lesson is that if you can score on an opponent once, there’s a good chance you can do it again. If you can score on them a few times, you can win the match. Morrison took that lesson forward to his new career. He figured if he could get an article published in the local newspaper, he could get additional articles published. If he could get a bunch published there, he could get into a larger paper. If he could do that, he could probably make an entire career doing what he loves the most, investigating, articulating, and writing.
In a world where it’s much easier to choose the road that you have been already traveling for years, occasionally you meet someone who picks the other road, the one less traveled, and in doing so is teaching others that they can too. He’s Jim Morrison, home inspector, journalist, and re-inventor.