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Parallel careers can be crucial despite today's precarious economy.

Parallel careers are prevalent in creative industries.

Keep your eyes open for limitations in time, resources, and potential conflicts of interest.

The beloved author Ann Patchett is getting rave reviews for her new novel, Whistler. Along with her writing career, she is the active owner of Parnassus Books, a bookstore in Nashville, and founder of a related nonprofit organization, the Parnassus Books Foundation.

That makes her an example of what the father of modern management advocates. In his prescient 1999 book Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker declared that “developing a parallel career” is an answer to the second half of one’s life. This is good advice for anyone, whether or not they are in or near that stage of life.

For many years, Drucker maintained parallel careers in writing, teaching, and consulting. When I interviewed him in 2002, three years before his death at 95, he said that “if you want to diagram my work, in the center is writing, then comes consulting, then comes teaching. I’ve never been primarily an academic. I like to teach because that’s the way I learn.”

Psychological and Financial Rewards

A parallel career can potentially provide both psychological and financial rewards for people who devote time, effort, and thought to working simultaneously on two (or more) jobs or activities. Thinking of your alternate pursuits as parallel careers can be more of a mental commitment than adding a part-time job, though technically it........

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