Hi there First name / friend,
Tiffany here! I was recently talking to a colleague about her path. She’s fascinating, creative and resourceful. Her name is Cheryl, and I think she has a lot to teach us all.
Cheryl has an undergraduate degree in business administration and an MBA in marketing. After she got out of school, she worked for Taco Bell, White Castle, and other corporate giants. Unfortunately one day she woke up and frantically thought, "Why the hell am I helping sell tacos?" She decided it was a good time to fulfill her long-time dream of going to acting school and got an MFA from The New School in NYC. She’d always loved theater and decided it was time to explore what this path could bring to her life. She finished her degree and has since enjoyed writing and producing plays and acting in commercials and short films.
But, I’m sure you won’t be shocked to hear that Cheryl also needed to pay the bills, and acting wasn’t quite doing it. She began to look for work that could combine her love of marketing and theater and worked as an independent contractor, in the marketing department at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, and did work for friends and colleagues that needed help building websites and advertising for their plays and events. She taught herself Google Analytics, Adobe Suite and just enough code to get by.
Eventually, Cheryl took a job at Cal Performances, the performing arts presenter at the University of California, Berkely. That’s where I met Cheryl, which is a story for another day or this email is going to turn into a novel.
Yesterday, Cheryl and I were talking about the fact that there are opportunities you seek and opportunities you create in life. Cheryl has been great at both. She has sought out steady, full-time jobs where they exist but she’s also created opportunities for herself by writing plays, acting, putting on productions and doing independent work that uses her unique skill sets.
Yet all of it aligns with one mission: help bring art into the world.
If you’ve heard of the
Great Resignation, you know that more and more people are jumping corporate jobs and becoming independent contractors. There are now hundreds of millions of people in the US that work for themselves in knowledge-intensive industries and creative occupations. The majority of them are seeking freedom and fulfillment. But, this is a life musicians are already intimately familiar with. Even if you have a full time job, you likely do or will teach on the side and take additional gigs at the minimum.
But here's the thing. Instead of looking at a life as a musician as inevitably unstable or worse, impossible, where the odds are stacked against you, what if you looked at it as a rich and incredible opportunity to create independence and fulfillment using your skill sets?
How can you be a little more like Cheryl and explore opportunities to stack your interests and begin to create financial stability in your life while doing things you care about?
Grab 4 ideas about how to start thinking about that in the blog post today!
