What compromise can you make to join your passion to your job?
Last month, I had my photograph taken at a professional studio. Inside the small industrial bathroom, the walls were covered with avant-garde photographs. The waiting room was also filled with artsy magazines about photography.
She was a photographic artist. But it was clear that the real money came in from taking portraits of stuffy business types, weddings, and the occasional local musician.
In a perfect world, she is an artist. In the real world, she is both: part-time artist and part-time commercial photographer. It’s probably boring, at times, taking commercial pictures. But at least she is using her craft.
What compromise can you make to join your passion to your job? A smart compromise can help you keep a bit of the artist in your life and ditch the starving part.
If you can’t imagine a life without scholarly books, consider becoming a freelance academic editor. Tweed Editing, for example, is a cool academic editing business. I’m sure that editing monograph after monograph feels like work. But it does allow Tweed Editing to still work with intellectuals, consider ideas, and make some money from academic knowledge and skills.
Thunderdog is an agency that brought L.A. street art to the masses. They began by taking art on city streets and creating limited edition books and toys. Now, they consult and create art for big brands like Puma and Pepsi, helping these brands use street art to create visual identities that appeal to urban clientele. Thunderdog has an aesthetic philosophy, cultural significance, and commercial vision.
Or consider LateralAction.com. This site was started by a poet turned business consultant. The founder is a intellectual and creative person and has carved out a profitable career by selling his knowledge of creative processes to companies. This is creativity in the service of profit. It’s not perfect, but it leads to a comfortable and partly-aesthetic life.
Michael LaRocca, a freelance editor that I interviewed, writes novels (his passion) and edits for a literary publishing companies, as well as does freelance editing for businesses. I’m sure he’d rather just write his own stuff all day, but it is that compromise that allows him to be a writer and live a comfortable life. (Read about how to start a freelance editing business here).
You might not get to read Proust all day AND make a living. But the proximity can keep you happy.
How to Find a Career With Your Humanities Degree in 126 Days
If you are at a loss of what careers you can get with your BA, MA, or PhD in the humanities, then you are not alone.
How to Find a Career With Your Humanities Degree in 126 Days is a 18 week challenge (126 days) where you are shown the exact steps and actions needed to get out of ‘liberal arts career limbo.’
The 126 Day challenge begins right where you are—broke, no idea of what you want to do, working a crappy job, and nothing more than a degree on your resume.
Dear James,
I think your posts are brilliant. I just thought I should tell you this.
Having said that, there are quite a few blogs out there posting sad truths about higher education, and it looks like prestigious online higher ed websites are pushing forward the mass marketing of these problems, never giving solutions, only offering a social platform where we can all laugh and weep our eyes out. Then what? Apart from the jobless among us helplessly trying to find a job outside university…
What about challenging the evil, launching a free encyclopedia on the whole ugly truth in academia? Anybody up for it? We all know things…I know things about academics that would make your fans squirm. Such a waste, it’s a shame…Let’s share knowledge, disseminate results…dethrone the dishonourable ones…On a more positive note, what about creating opportunities, starting an organisation hiring pre-, current, post PhDs? That might be the think-tank of our time…What about a novel / scenario competition with awards and publication / film adaptation opportunities? I’d love to see an intelligent movie coming out, making me laugh and disturbing academics in their comfort. I read your posts, and I felt some sort of guilty pleasure, for laughing about it is just not enough. You’re lucky to have a job now, James. I hope one day you’ll be able to offer someone a job. That would be really cool.
Great blog. Keep up the good work !
Best wishes,
Tak
Hi Tak,
Thanks for your kind words, Sir! I love this: “launching a free encyclopedia on the whole ugly truth in academia.” It would be great to have a Wiki–a great collaborative effort. Love it.
Have you seen this blog? http://100rsns.blogspot.com/ It is a blog dedicated to 100 reasons not to go to grad school. An impressive collection.
Thanks your thoughts,
James from selloutyoursoul
Hi James, first-time poster here, but have been to your blog a few times over the past year or so. Thought maybe this post would be a good place to jump in.
First, let me say I respect your ideas on this blog and your decision to leave the academy and find other work. It’s a brave thing to do. Kudos.
I want to jump in on what I perceive to be an occasional…omission in some of the posts on here.
Although on one hand it’s really important to point out, as you do on this blog, that there’s something about academia that needs urgent, serious fixing, I think it’s also important to not think of graduate-level academic work as a waste of time–I use that phrase cautiously. And sometimes I sense that your blog implies that it is. Like wanting to go to graduate school is, in so many cases, something to ‘wake up’ from.
There are many reasons to not to pursue graduate work in the humanities. And many people heed them and decide to pursue other opportunities, while others might foolishly ignore them. But either way, it’s often the case that there’s legitimate reasons in both scenarios to leave the academy.
Putting many of these reasons aside–money, relationships, family, and so on–there are many others who happen to be able to make graduate school work. This is especially the case when it’s funded–at least enough to live a nice, albeit financially disciplined, life (much here depends on what each person is willing to put up with, of course. But perhaps this just specifies the subset of people actually cut out for funded graduate work: those that don’t mind living rather frugally). And for these people I think, quite strongly, in fact, that graduate school isn’t a waste of time; nor do I think one should regret it when he’s finished, even if he can’t find a job (again, depending on no other major life events like marriage and children, which certainly shouldn’t be expected not to happen).
I’m not sure if you would agree with me here or not. Perhaps that’s a result of my having a hard time to tell the difference between these two attitudes towards graduate school in your blog.
Let me know what you think,
Ryan
Hey Ryan,
In response to: “Although on one hand it’s really important to point out, as you do on this blog, that there’s something about academia that needs urgent, serious fixing, I think it’s also important to not think of graduate-level academic work as a waste of time–I use that phrase cautiously. And sometimes I sense that your blog implies that it is. Like wanting to go to graduate school is, in so many cases, something to ‘wake up’ from.”
I see your point and this blog can only speak from my perspective. I’m guessing that your larger point is that there is something inherently valuable in graduate education–and even if it does not directly translate into a job, it still is an intrinsically valuable thing to do.
I would probably agree, however, more from Pannapacker’s suggestion that you should only pursue grad school in the humanities if you are independently wealthy. That said, yes I did, for example, enjoy many of my seminars about modern poetry, had some great talks with very smart professors, and enjoyed sitting in a bright field trying to write an essay on Coleridge while my peers had to be stuck in offices. So I guess, metaphysically, I agree with you.
And I’d also agree that if money, family, and relationships allow it, there are people who have been able to make grad school work. I think it can be a matter of luck. I mean–if I had landed a great job 1 month out of grad school this blog probably wouldn’t exist.
I don’t think grad school is a complete waste of time. But it definitely has some large issues. I just think that it can be better. And part of making it better, for me, is academia facing up to the fact that their graduates have to find careers after the intellectual journey ends. And that is not a bad thing. If the majority of grads don’t end up working tenure jobs, then the programs should take that into account. Instead of learning Old English, an internship in the private sector would have been helpful.
So, for me, it’s yes and no. And I guess one of the things grad school gave me was the ability to be comfortable with nuance and ambivalence in my thinking. So I do appreciate the intellectual growth that happens there.
I really appreciate the comment–thanks Ryan.
James from Selloutyoursoul.com
[...] Adapting Your Academic Skills to the Real World: Passion Versus Money [...]
To add to what James said, I think that part of the reason we don’t see these improvements he talks about – ie having better connections to the private sector – is because, in some ways, it would involve a radical restructuring of the system that would eliminate many tenured positions. I get the impression that many individuals study English with the assumption that they can work, in some capacity, as a professional writer when they don’t become a professor. A deeper acknowledgment of the professional world by English departments could easily facilitate their absorption into professional writing programs, which, I imagine, is already a concern for many (just as philosophy has long been defending itself against absorption by the social sciences, which, in the opinions of many, would be a good thing).
Hey B,
Amen to this: “I get the impression that many individuals study English with the assumption that they can work, in some capacity, as a professional writer when they don’t become a professor. A deeper acknowledgment of the professional world by English departments could easily facilitate their absorption into professional writing programs, which, I imagine, is already a concern for many (just as philosophy has long been defending itself against absorption by the social sciences, which, in the opinions of many, would be a good thing).”
Part of the problem is that you are young when you begin grad school, and old when you leave–and so, a 21 year old thinking about grad school, tends to think they can just “do something else” if the PhD doesn’t work out.
And thanks for your other comment as well. All good points,
James
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