One man’s story of reinvention and an empty tank

Published 10/11/05

When I decided recently to re-invent myself, I had to face the fact that I was no visionary along the order of, say, a Benjamin Franklin or a Thomas Edison. Knowing that I needed some help, my first stop was the Official U.S. Vocational Guidance Office…

Vocational Guide: OK, Mr. Williams, as a highly trained vocational guide, I’ll be asking you some personal and probing questions related to your professional and vocational aspirations. So, let’s get started. How do you want to spend the rest of your pathetic life? And make it quick. I’ve got other baby boomers to re-invent today.

Me: Well, to be honest, Vocational Guide, I’ve spent most of my life moving words around, you know, just kind of tinkering with sentences—

Vocational Guide: Hold on, let me turn to the Book of Jobs--

Me: You mean the Book of Job in the Old Testament??

Vocational Guide: No, you dolt, I mean the Book of Jobs, the Master Database of Vocational Opportunities…let’s see here, tinkerer, tinkerer, tinkerer…Nope, no openings for tinkerers. Guess, you’ll have to go with Plan B. And let’s stay in the T section because this is one monster of a reference book.

Me: Now that you mention it, Mr. Vocational Guide, I-I have always wanted to work for a think tank, you know, as a hired head, a professional ponderer--

Vocational Guide: Are you serious? A think tank? Hold on, let me find one here. Okay, Brookings Institution, Hudson Institute, Hoover Institute, Manhattan Institute…Hmm, pal, I’ve got some really, really bad news for you. There are no think tanks in Madison County. I guess you’ll have to start your own. Here, take your typo-laden resume with you…

So that day, I left the Vocational Guidance office empowered to pursue the road not taken, the office not opened. Just days later, in an empty Fortune Management building in downtown Anderson, I threw open the doors to my startup, doing business as “Jack’s Tank.”

As you may know, until 1970, there were perhaps only a couple dozen think tanks across the country, most of them providing non-partisan policy and military advice to the U.S. government. But after 1970, the number of think tanks exploded. I don’t mean the tanks exploded—which might happen if one of the senior fellows, as tank employees are known, lit up a Lucky. What I mean is that the number of tanks expressing various partisan, political and ideological views and doing policy-relevant research, data analysis and dissemination multiplied exponentially. Well, relatively exponentially. Today, there are 300 such think tanks around the world!

For a short while there were 301. In the first few weeks, life at Jack’s Tank was a vocational dream. You’d go in to the tank each day, sit with a furrowed brow, scratch your head a few times, maybe play around on the Internet, take a long lunch hour and leave early when you’d finished thinking. Oh, the life of intellectual entrepreneurship, just tinkering in a think tank.

In those days, in spite of our casual corporate culture, the research at Jack’s Tank was informing, if not impacting, both foreign and domestic policy. We had so much walk-in business that we had to open a think tank drive thru so people could order and pick up their research without leaving the convenience of their cars. The drive thru distinguished us among think tanks throughout the world.

And then the rent came due. As theorists, scholars and thinkers, we just weren’t accountants. We had forgotten to hire a CFO. Well, you can probably guess what happened to Jack’s Institute. You’re right. It tanked.

Presently, I’m back in the land of re-invention. And I keep thinking about the poster I saw on the wall of Mr. Vocational Guide, one which offered some life planning advice that all of us “re-inventors” should take to heart. It was a quote from actress and comedienne Lily Tomlin, who said, “I always wanted to be somebody. I guess I should have been more specific.”