This Is Not the Death of Your Ambition
When people who know me as a technology and business professional ask me what I do now, the last thing they expect to hear is that I'm an artist. Their reactions almost always indicate an assumption that I practically retired. Unfortunately, this assumption—or rather, projection—is the reason some people refuse to consider a new career path. They know anything they’d love to do is likely to be creative and/or unstructured, and that means putting their ambitions aside and going into semi-retirement with a career that is more of a hobby, as I did.
The logic in my case is clear:
She's too old to start a career in art.
Even if she weren’t, it's nearly impossible to succeed—most artists starve.
It takes forever to learn the craft, so how good could she possibly be when she started so late?
Therefore, she's clearly fine with selling a couple of landscapes to some tourists in a local gallery on occasion—i.e. retirement.
The same applies to anyone who wants to build an audience, start a company in an area they love but don't know much about, or otherwise has an uncertain path ahead.
It's true that people in creative or nontraditional careers have a harder time. The journey is uncertain, there's no template, and mediocrity doesn't pay $200K-2M a year plus benefits, as it does in a middle management corporate job. A successful career demands a lot: Initiative, innovation, consistency, courage, blind faith, coloring outside the lines, and living outside one's comfort zone. The reason people assume I'm in half retirement is that they don't believe I have all this in me. It's not personal; they don't believe they do either.
But what if I do?
What if I'm willing to do all the hard things (even at my advanced age) because they make me so excited that I do them on weekends too? ("What is a weekend?")
What if I choose to look at the advantages I have (business experience, life experience, a stronger financial foundation, and a network of potential buyers, to name a few) rather than the disadvantages?
I'm as ambitious as ever. But this time, my motivation is to keep doing what I love every day AND to do it in the best way possible AND to be able to afford the kind of life I desire AND to inspire others to do all that too. I don't want to have to choose.
A nontraditional or creative path doesn't need to be the death of your ambition. It might be the death of other people's beliefs that you're ambitious.
I can live with that. Can you?
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