If you are going to lay down your ambitions to make it as a professional artist for a career choice you perceive as safer, do me a favor . . .
Make sure the new career choice really is safer.
This is what I mean:
I have a colleague who stopped dancing professionally to focus on her alternative career.
The alternative career: breaking out the ol' English degree and trying to make it as a college professor.
But when you look at the realities of trying to make it as a college professor, i.e. the difficulty of making tenure, the huge competition for scarce jobs, one could make an argument that all she is doing is going from one risky career choice . . . to another risky career choice.
And since her heart is in dancing, not in teaching, you see the trouble this could cause.
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There are a lot of valid reasons to not try to be a professional artist.
There are a lot of valid reasons to not attempt to build a professional arts organization.
Sometimes it really is better that art and commerce do not mix.
But don't fool yourself into believing that dropping your ambitions as an artist to pick up a career in accounting is automatically the safer choice.
It may be the "easier for the outside world to grasp" choice.
It may be the "easier to see how the money is going to come in" choice.
But the safer choice?
Not necessarily.
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