Famous Career Changes in ‘History’

Sometimes, even when we’re flying high, we come to the realization that it is time to spread our wings even wider. To change gears, to march to a new drummer, to salute a different flag, to stand convention on its head, to shatter the conformist chains that bind us, and in most cases to do something so totally brainless and idiotic we regret it our every remaining second on Earth.

But changing careers doesn’t have to be that bad. It is worth taking a look at history for inspiration and guidance. History tells us there are five top ways to change careers:

* Skill Transfer. Perhaps the best example of this is Harry Truman. A little fellow as a child, the older he got, the taller he became, up to a point. But nobody realized just how tall he would become, as nobody can predict height. To this day, nobody knows how tall he was, and he ain’t talking.

As a young man with only a high school education, he started a men’s clothing store. The lessons he learned there he would remember all his life, such as, if you don’t pay the rent, you’ll be out on your butt. But before the store failed, he established the Truman Doctrine, whereby a customer who bought a shirt was also required to buy a tie. “The shirt stops here!” he would snarl, blocking the doorway.

From there it was a seamless move into the job of county commissioner, where he learned the intricacies of foreign policy and atomic weaponry, and thence to the White House, where the Truman Doctrine was reborn as aid to the French in Vietnam.

* Personal Chemistry. This can make all the difference. Phlog Wells was a resentful railroad freight agent in Buffalo, N.Y., whose father had devoted his life to perfecting Phlogisten, the theory of combustion, which as we know turned out to be woefully incorrect.

Young Phlog was so disheartened about the family’s failure that he lounged around all day at the railroad yards, playing with matches and tying bums’ shoelaces together.

When his mother would venture bravely down to the rail yards and ask Phlog about his plans, he would sneer sardonically, “I will bite and chew with confidence.” Some career!

Then he met Bill Fargo, an easy traveler in the B-movie-railroad-roundhouse orbit, who saw in Phlog’s bitterness a deep pool of energy that could be harnessed. Wells, in turn, was galvanized by Fargo, and the two men forged a creative partnership that, after a series of C and even D movies set in model railroad layouts, resulted in the film “Wells,” the bizarre but folksy true tale of a botched snow-country kidnapping, later re-released as “Missoula” and, finally, “Fargo.”

* Serendipity. Sometimes things happen that are just so crazy, there’s no explaining it. But this can be planned in advance, just like Jean Paul Getty did.

Most people think Getty was just another rough-edged oilman who happened to sink a drill bit in the right place, another crude rich guy who happened to be endowed with a large amount of sexual prowess.

The fact that nobody took him any more seriously than that made him very sad, and he was always looking for approval. Then, a letter arrived in the mail. In it was just the ticket Jean had been waiting for--a ticket to the Dodgers-Giants game.

A few years later another letter arrived. This one was from kidnappers, who said they had an ear--one of Vincent Van Gogh’s. In fact, they included a Polaroid of it lying on the sports page of a recent newspaper. The kidnappers would sell it (the ear) to Getty for $100 million.

They knew the great man well. That simple $100 million check would change Getty’s career overnight, or rather in the two weeks it took for the ear to reach Malibu. There it became the signature display for a new world-class museum, the Getty. Yet the restless Getty went to his grave asking himself, “Didn’t van Gogh have two ears?”

* Dissembling. Here, the sky is the limit. Recent polls suggest that more than 40% of Americans are now masquerading as somebody else. And many of them got their inspiration from Gerald Ford, who was rescued from the presidency by voters and has since launched dozens of careers.

He has leveraged the slapstick of his White House experience into membership on many corporate boards while acting as a leading destination marketer and husband of his much-brighter wife, Betty. All of this without a brain in his head.

Most recently he has licensed the American Dental Assn. to publish a trade book under his name, titled, “Dental Assistants: What About Their Teeth?” And later this year, he is to be dubbed a clarinet by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth.

* Terminology. The past offers up many lessons. In fact, that’s where just about all our lessons come from. Here’s one from Adam Bagehot Wassily, whose drywall business was struggling at the turn of the century while he waited for drywall to be invented.

Wassily noticed that he was always misplacing things on his desk. So he devised a system in which he put the new stuff in one pile and the old stuff in another pile. Later, he put this stuff in baskets. Then he scrawled “In” on one basket and “Out” on the other basket. It just came to him out of the blue, he would explain later at the ceremony in Oslo.

The Input-Output Technique would give birth to the science of economics and, more lucratively for Wassily, to the Nobel Prize in economics. Over time, the phenomenon became familiarly known as the in-basket and the out-basket. This was the first example of a career that has largely replaced manufacturing in today’s economic system, the skill of giving a catchy name to something we already knew intuitively.