Cynthia Gregory:
Planned-for Obsolescence
Cynthia Gregory, 46, one of the American Ballet Theatre's most celebrated prima ballerinas, was 17 years old when she started planning how and when she'd leave her dance career. "I saw so many dancers continue beyond their prime," she explains. "They were artists who couldn't keep up with their artistry."
After pirouetting beside Rudolf Nureyev and almost every other international dancer of note, Gregory ended her 30-year dance career a year ago and is now busy writing children's books and coaching up-and-coming dancers. But she still misses the stage. "There's an invincibility that you feel when you're doing what you're naturally good at. You ask yourself, 'Will I ever be that good at anything else?' " And despite her years of planning and her full life today, Gregory explains that leaving dance "is like a death -- one that I'm still grieving for."
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:
Taking Comfort in the Long View
"You have to see yourself as part of a continuum," says Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the 46-year-old former center for the L.A. Lakers. A six-time winner of the National Basketball Association's most-valuable-player award, he sees himself as just one "in a series of players that push the envelope." Abdul-Jabbar quickly points to past players as inextricably leading to his own success. For example, he cites the 1940s and 1950s star postman George Mikan as the one who proved that "a big guy could be tough and competitive. Without Mikan I couldn't have done what I did."
In June 1989, after helping bring his team to the finals of the NBA championship series for the eighth time, Abdul-Jabbar retired. "Mentally, I see it as a long-distance race," he says. "You have to know when you're approaching the finish line." That doesn't mean leaving was easy, though. For any peak performer, "it's hard to walk away from the position that defines you," Abdul-Jabbar says. "Suddenly, you're an average citizen."
Mel Ziegler:
When Reality Collides with Your Vision
Mel Ziegler, who founded Banana Republic in 1979, knew it was time to move on when his company no longer resembled his original vision. "I started with the idea of building a small company; suddenly, I was overseeing 110 stores." When Banana Republic was sold to the Gap, the publicly traded casual-clothing empire, in 1983, Ziegler found his energy consumed by answering to thousands of shareholders and influential analysts. "I no longer owned a business. It owned me," he says. "It was the reverse of what I'd intended when I founded the company." Five years after joining the Gap, Ziegler decided the disparity between his vision and reality was too great and left his company.
Despite the twists and turns any business will take, a leader, Ziegler contends, "has to have a clear idea of what the business will be and won't be" from the start, in order to know when it's time to call it quits.
Beverly Sills:
Letting Go, Eased by a Focus on Family
Former world-famous opera singer and New York City Opera general manager, and now corporate-board mogul Beverly Sills has never had a problem saying good-bye to one career and hello to the next. Her trick? "My identity was never tied up in what I did, because I've always had an enormous family life," she explains. "What I did was the icing on the cake." Mother to two children with severe birth defects, Sills says her family had to come first.
She says it helps to move from one post to the next quickly. For example, when she left singing she reported to her position at the New York City Opera the very next morning. And as for keeping the passion alive from one career to the next, Sills never worried: "A person's nature travels with her. I knew that anything I took on I'd develop an obsession for."
Peter Lynch:
The Discovery of New Priorities
For Peter Lynch, the epiphany came at his daughter's soccer game. "I remember standing in the rain, cheering her on, and thinking, 'I want to see more of these,' " says the 46-year-old former portfolio manager of Fidelity's Magellan Fund, which grew from $20 million to more than $14 billion in his 13-year tenure.
In the time leading up to his decision to quit as portfolio manager, Lynch felt increasingly frustrated and anxious. Father to three daughters, then ages 16, 12, and 7, he was actively managing money for a number of Boston charities while running a growth fund with more than a million shareholders. "You know you're in trouble when you need a Cray computer to arrange your free time," he says about those days.
Of course, the multimillionaire admits that "financial freedom makes it easier to consider other options." Ultimately, Lynch based his decision to leave on what he calls the hot-fudge-sundae index. "For me it was all like hot-fudge sundaes: I liked my job, I loved my family, and I liked working with outside charities," he explains. "It became a matter of, How much can you handle without getting a stomachache?"
