Nancy Payne: Profit To Passion
In episode #18 of My 2.0, guest Nancy Payne, Entrepreneur in Residence at WeWork Labs, shares her transition from a career in new and media to entrepreneurship.
Nancy’s life has been a lifelong series of transitions. She had an early start in news media, working in multiple firms and then moved over to a small government agency working on global development and social impact. Moving on to become the COO of a non profit that used technology for peace building. She took a break 2 years ago to travel the world with her husband coming back to become a mentor to early stage entrepreneurs and to volunteer.
In Nancy’s opinion, careers are not linear and neither are career transitions. Her life and life decisions prompted her transitions. The change from corporate to a government agency was not as radical because the agency was small and run more like a company and also served the private sector. The move to non-profit was definitely different, since there was no longer a focus on profit but more on the mission.
She has been fortunate to build on current skills, starting with writing and communications pretty early on. Moving on to managing; people, time, projects, way of thinking and doing.
Nancy feels it’s easy to feel stuck. She feels so in her current transition and the reason is the struggle between competing ideas to fully immerse herself in a role as opposed to continuing to find time for new and interesting roles including volunteering. She also feels that feeling stuck in her late stage career is different from what one might feel in early stages of career.
She also talks about her identity shift. From being a Mom to have a clear and defining title. To one where she no longer has as definitive a title as she had in the past. And how it’s taken her about 6 months to be OK with the new shift.
The transition myths Nancy would like to debunk are:
You have to know what’s next. This seems to be a common assumption, though she doesn’t think that we always need to.
Transitions are really hard or easy. She thinks they are generally neither.
Her advice to pre transition self. Is to follow the V, like one does in river rafting. It leads you downstream riding currents and keeping you out of trouble!
Her recommendation in encouraging female entrepreneurs is to reward their curiosity. And to make sure they know it’s great to ask questions and pursue different lines of thinking.
She wanted to share her notable failure, and what she learned from it. She thinks she was more focussed on what she wanted to get to, rather than enjoying the journey.
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