Advice to a former student
“Do it. Or don’t do it. But you know. You know.”
Recently, I received an email from a former student who has been on the front edge of carving out a niche in the entertainment business in Los Angeles, confronting several possible options as to how to proceed including giving up their creative dreams. Here is my response:
Lots to consider. Reminds me of when I had taken a year off after getting my masters degree to see if my interest in music / singing / songwriting / performing had any merit whatsoever. I had made my way to Aspen, Colorado and was living in the Tyrolean Lodge, a dive at the edge of town. I had done a couple of hoot nights at Jake’s Abbey and had been embraced by some of the local musicians, so I had gotten positive feedback on that front. But how to survive? Plus, it was the fall and if I were to apply to doctoral program, I needed to start getting my act together. And oh yeah, my few thousand dollars savings was dwindling despite surviving on peanut butter and pop tarts.
As I think back on it, when faced with various choices, I ended up taking a two-pronged approach. One was quite logical. I took a yellow legal pad (that’s how I wrote lyrics) and made two columns:
Go back to school
Play music
I listed pros and cons for each pathway. I spent an entire afternoon alone in my motel room, writing down each point and reflecting upon them. Frankly, the pros in the ‘go back to school’ column outweighed the pros under play music’. And as you can imagine, the cons were vice versa.
So logically speaking, it was quite clear: Go back to school.
Then I took another approach. I went for some long walks. Over a couple of days. Now I say this as if I had formulated this process, but that’s not true. I was being led by some instincts, not just logic. You know my affection for Joseph Campbell and you’ve heard me ‘preach’ about the importance of ‘follow your bliss’. Well, I think that’s what was going on: I was in my own youthful, stumbling way attempting to peer beneath my well-developed intellectual approach to life and get in touch with my bliss. Or as Obi-Wan might have said, “Go with your feelings, Scott!”
