No Regrets
Click to viewI had coffee the other day with a friend I haven’t seen in well over a year. Don’s an indie musician (check out a few tracks from his latest album here) who lives life-a very good life-on his own terms.
One of the things that came up in our hour together was how lucky we both feel to be doing what we love. We are energized by what we do, as patched together as our careers are, because we don’t ever know quite what’s around the next corner. It keeps us nimble, keeps our minds nimble.
Following a more stable and secure career path is something we are both capable of-he could be well established in academia if he chose (as he once was) or an in-demand studio musician (as he also once was), and I could probably be an administrative assistant to a vp or dean or some such. Any of those would be jobs with security (such as it is these days) and benefits. But we stepped off those tracks to follow our passions and neither of us has any regrets (hence the Edith Piaf).
I’ve been thinking about living a life in the arts a lot lately, because our governor, who I generally think is doing a good job, recently raised the subject of the attracting more young Vermonters to the University of Vermont to study the sciences and engineering, because those are the fields where the good jobs are. It’s an argument I’ve heard all my life, because it’s an argument that governments have been making for one reason or another, ever since Sputnik in 1957.
Don’t get me wrong-if you have any interest or ability in the science or engineering, those are great careers. But even if your abilities are good, if your interests aren’t in those areas-if your heart isn’t going to be in the work, I don’t think you should go into them simply because they are practical. Because there’s something you aren’t told about making so-called practical decisions: if your heart isn’t in them, they turn out to be not so practical. Or at least, that’s how it worked for me. If my heart wasn’t in a job, no matter how practical it appeared to be (we’re talking jobs with benefits here), I couldn’t stay in it for the long-term.
Not only that, but as Don pointed out during our conversation, the arts have been shown to play a key role in entrepreneurship. (Read one report on the research here.) In one of those lovely moments of cosmic convergence, after coffee was over I went to hear a lecture by Benjy Adler, co-founder of The Skinny Pancake, a successful restaurant business that supports the local foodshed. One of the questions he was asked after is what his business training was. The answer: he majored in music in college and didn’t take a business course until after he was thinking about moving from a food cart to a restaurant. He also said he thought that the music helped him develop creative thinking.
As for me, being a freelancer, means I’m a business person, too. These days every artist needs to be; patrons (other than spouses) are thin on the ground.
What it comes down to is this: We need all kinds of people doing all kinds of jobs, including seeing new ways of doing things, in both the arts and the sciences. Because we don’t know where the solutions (note the plural) to our current problems are going to be found-we need all the help we can get. Before we regret it.