Lessons from the new world of quicksilver work, where “career planning” is an oxymoron.
Adam Hasler looks like a footloose millennial. He’s worked as a model, waited tables, and lived all over the world. But at 28, there’s more to his résumé than meets the eye.
He earned a dual degree in history and international relations at American University. After graduating, he and two partners–boosted by a $10,000 stake from his parents and an investment from a local restaurateur–took over the coffeehouse where he had worked since age 19: Modern Times, inside the Politics and Prose bookstore, a beloved Washington, D.C., institution. “I was 22 and naive,” he says now. “We got our asses handed to us.” Still, working 16-hour days for weeks on end, “living on cookies and beer,” Hasler and his partners increased the shop’s revenue in three years from less than $200,000 to $500,000.
Then Hasler got restless. He started a personal project, writing his own history of the entire Western arts canon, from music to architecture. He began to conceive of software that might allow him to visualize the connections between artworks, but he lacked tech skills. So at 26, he left the coffeehouse, paid off his investors, and plunged into Washington’s media-arts scene. He taught himself programming. He wrote case studies for Innovations, a journal of international development founded by Phil Auerswald, a professor at George Mason University who was also a regular at the coffeehouse. Then it was off to Buenos Aires for a year, where he created an apprenticeship at an interactive media-arts lab called Estado Lateral. “My first job for them was literally folding electrical cords,” he says. In his spare time, he traveled the country playing polo.
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