The story of Leah Ingram’s career breakthrough comes in two versions.
Here’s the first, the kind of dumb-luck tale you might hear at a cocktail party. A few years ago, Ingram, her husband, and two daughters moved to her dream house: a white Colonial on a shady street in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, due to maintenance costs and some hangover from a blown home- equity loan on their last place, living in this dream house turned out to be more expensive than Ingram’s family imagined. As the economy tightened, she hunted for ways to be thrifty. She started blogging about her family’s adventures doing laundry in cold water, using their library cards, and shopping in thrift stores. When BusinessWeek decided to do a cover story titled “The New Age of Frugality” in the fall of 2008, a reporter found Ingram’s blog and featured her rather attractive family in a photo spread. Before long, she had landed a book deal to write a tome called Suddenly Frugal. It was a big career break for this long-time freelance writer.
Here’s the second version of the story. Nothing about the BusinessWeek article or the book deal was random.
A few years ago, Ingram, who had carved a niche writing about etiquette and nuptials, decided, “If I have to write about another wedding, I’m going to put my head through the wall.” She’d been raised in a frugal family, and finding herself in more debt than she liked as she entered her forties, she decided that she wanted to make low-budget living her new area of expertise. “Having seen so many people who did a blog that launched into a book, I sort of threw caution to the wind and just said I’m giving it up to faith and fate that this will actually work.” She committed to posting on her new frugality blog roughly 5 days a week as she tried to raise her profile in this area. She knew blogging could easily take 5-10 of her 168 hours, and they would be uncompensated, but as she explained later, “The topic is important to me, I think it is timely, and will lead to a book, so what the hell.”
Things went swimmingly at first. She met a “big shot agent” at a journalism conference in early 2007.
She later sent him a query about her book idea, which at the time was styled as saving green (money) while being green (environmentally friendly). He liked the concept and agreed to take her on. But when her agent shopped the proposal around for the rest of 2007, he got “nothing, nothing, nothing . . . We missed the green boat. The green boat had already sailed. He went from the A list to the B list to the C list” of publishers, getting rejected every time. So Ingram just kept carving out time to blog about frugality amid the other assignments that were paying the bills.
At times she wondered if the investment was worth it. But after a year of diligent 5-days-a-week posting and advertising her blog through various social media, people started to notice her. The economy cratered. News media outlets wanted examples of frugal families. Some found her, and she found others by responding to queries on the “Help a Reporter Out” service (an e-mail list that I’ve also used to find
“real people”—including for this book). She started doing interviews. Colgate-Palmolive, the consumer goods company, contacted her about doing an Earth Day satellite media tour as the “Lean Green Mom,”
which netted her five figures for, in essence, one day of work. “I was starting to get a sense that this blogging thing might actually lead to something,” she says.
In September 2008, the BusinessWeek reporter Steve Hamm posted a query on “Help a Reporter Out”
stating that he was seeking newly frugal people to profile. Ingram sent him her story and a link to her blog, which, by that point, was fleshed out enough for Hamm to know that Ingram could speak coherently to reporters and on camera, that she was near enough to New York City to visit, but not in New York City
(reporters for national media outlets never want to write about New York people), that she looked acceptable enough to feature in a magazine, and that she had made progress on getting out of debt (she paid off a $20,000 car loan early). He called, then came out to interview the family in person. His coworkers descended on the house in New Hope to take photos and video clips for the BusinessWeek Web site. When I opened my October 8 issue, on “The New Age of Frugality,” there was Ingram, her husband, her kids, and her dog staring back at me.
I wasn’t the only one who read the story. So did an editor at Workman Publishing, who loved the concept and asked if Ingram had a book proposal. Well, she said, funny you should ask. She revamped her prior proposal to lean more toward the frugal side and less toward the “green” side. Unfortunately, the Workman editor couldn’t sell it to the editorial board. But Ingram’s agent convinced her to shop her book again with a new name and a new slant. In November 2008, he sent it around to publishers. To take her mind off what she figured was going to be yet another round of rejections, Ingram wrote a draft of a 58,000-word young adult novel in January 2009. Just in January. Seriously. But finally everything clicked.
By the end of the month, she had an offer from Adams Media. “Not a huge offer, but it was an offer,” she says. After nearly two years of daily labor, she could start writing her book in this new area of expertise, and take her career to the next level.
Maybe, like Ingram, you feel like your career and your life are at a turning point. You know you’re in the right job, or at least you’re close. You’ve seized control of your schedule and have cleared as much of your non-core-competency work from your calendar as possible. You’ve engaged in “deliberate practice”
of your professional craft for a while, maybe even the 10,000 hours necessary to compete for world-class status. Now what? How do you achieve a breakthrough?
Ingram’s story—the second version, at least—is typical of these tales, in the sense that it involves massive amounts of undernoticed or undercompensated prep work, and making the most of chances when they come. On the other hand, I think her story gives plenty of reason for optimism, too, in the context of figuring out how to allocate our 168 hours to get the most out of life. While Ingram certainly worked hard, she did not have to turn into a hermit to turn her vision into a reality. She did it while billing six figures on other projects—something I can attest, as a fellow freelancer, is hard to do. She achieved it while finding time to write a novel, walk her dog for an hour each morning, serve as the statistician for her daughter’s basketball team, and cook dinner for her family most days.
I find this encouraging because her story does not fit the dominant cultural narrative that achieving big new things in a career is necessarily going to conflict with a full personal life. While that may not be the intended message of all the work-life-balance literature out there, it’s a message all the same. In 2009’s Womenomics, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay write that they’d “offer each other private advice on turning down plum jobs and avoiding tantalizing promotions that might upend the hard-won balance of our daily lives.” You can’t open business publications these days without reading glowing stories about companies that allow people to “downshift” or make lateral career moves, or universities that postpone tenure decisions after people have children and the like, all in the name of work-life balance. There is nothing wrong with these ideas. In many cases, they’re quite good ones. They’re certainly better for the economy and people in general than the idea that work needs to be 100 percent of your time or 0 percent of your time. But as we saw in the earlier chapters, work rarely consumes 100 percent of anyone’s time, even if people think it does. A full personal life—as we’ll see in the later chapters—doesn’t require 100 percent of anyone’s time, either.
So while I think work-life-balance programs are great, I disagree with the assumption inherent in some of them, which is that it is not possible to build a Career while maintaining an intense personal life that involves raising multiple children and/or engaging in intense fitness pursuits and volunteer activities or other passions. It is possible to ratchet up your career while investing in other parts of your life as well. It isn’t easy, certainly not as easy in the short run as outsourcing 100 percent of your personal life to your
spouse or destroying your health and relationships out of some misguided notion that this is what is required for your “art.” But since these actions have their own long-term consequences, people who want to get the most out of their 168 hours follow a slightly different formula for achieving career breakthroughs than the dominant cultural narrative, that of the recluse, deems necessary.
This is the anatomy of a breakthrough for busy, balanced people:
Know what the next level looks like Understand the metrics and gatekeepers Work up to the point of diminishing returns Spin a good story
Be open to possibilities and plan for opportunities Be ready to ride the wave