- There's this rich question
of how you figure out what your career should be.
And we all carry these pictures,
largely they've been imposed on us,
or we've kind of imprinted it
from the way other people have done things
of what like a normal career looks like.
Well, in fact, almost nobody has that normal career
that we all piece it together very differently.
And even if you talk to those people
who've had a normal career
their description of it's very different.
Let me give you a little example from my own background.
I was, I trained at Stanford university,
got my MFA in theater and went for the theater track.
And in fact,
I used to refer to being a member of the art police.
I was Mr. Art for art's sake in New York city
and you know, nothing but the finest.
And I was going to do art,
and not commercials and all this sort of stuff.
Well, that eased up a little bit when the rent became due
and I kind of expanded it.
And then one of the part-time gigs I took
was being a teaching artist.
And I noticed I was really interested in this work.
So, I started to do more of it
in relation to piecing it together
with my performing career.
And over time I was noticing
I was getting more and more interested
in the issues that came up around education.
I actually liked that more than doing eight shows a week,
which was the thing I was supposed to be doing.
I mean, shows on Broadway,
this is like what you're supposed to want.
Except this was actually more rewarding for me.
And I noticed over time that I was doing something
that we used to refer in the 1960s,
we aging hippies used to read Joseph Campbell,
who had a phrase,
which was follow your bliss.
Now, this didn't mean go become, you know,
a hedonist living for pleasure only.
It meant start to listen
for that little quiet buzz that says,
yeah,
that when you feel creatively utilized,
when you're more interested at the end of an event
than you were at the beginning,
when you're answering questions that are,
that are really important to you,
that that is the indicator for the road to follow.
It's been my experience
that every time I have followed that impulse,
it has taken me to more interesting work
that has been rewarded with paychecks.
That in fact, as I'm following what I'm passionate about,
the world is saying yes to me.
They want somebody who is, who is fully invested
in pouring everything I've got into an area of work.
The world somehow has found a way
to support my continuing that work.
Whereas, if I were just doing shows on Broadway
going up for auditions,
getting angry that I wasn't getting gigs I should get,
or because such and such an actor got the gig,
or I don't know how to audition for such and such a person,
I'm getting further and further away from my bliss,
even though I'm supposedly still doing my art.
So the bottom line, I think,
in sustaining the long picture,
is keeping exquisite sensitivity
to the quality of your experience
when you're engaged around music.
Not just saying that's the track they told me to take,
but what is the step-by-step set of interests
that is right for me?
Too often I see in young musicians
at Julliard and elsewhere,
they suffer from the fact
that they've been working their tails off
for a lot of years,
but maybe not for their own reasons.
And that as they start to grow
into their maturity as adults
they find they actually have different interest areas,
or they want to take that work
in a different way that doesn't look like the normal track,
and they need the courage to follow that.
And they need enough commitment to know
that is the one that's going to pay off
in a life well lived.
That this one, you know, you can probably do it,
although increasingly it's difficult
to get anything that looks like the normal career track.
The one that's going to work both personally and financially
is, is following that unpredictable channel of events
that keeps taking you where you want to go
creatively, artistically,
following your bliss,
your artistic impulses, your interests,
the questions that matter for you,
placing those in a very high priority
and not sacrificing that
in order to do what seems like the normal thing to do.
Follow your idiosyncratic path, your questions,
and you end up in both a better personal place
and a way better financial place.