S3 E39: 12 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting My Creative Career (Part 1)
There are many things I wish I had known when I graduated from music school in 2005, and was just starting my creative career, but all life experiences are part of our own personal evolution, and teach us so much. Listen in as I reflect on the lessons I’ve learned (and will continue to learn) along the way, and some advice I might have for that earlier version of myself that you might find helpful, too, no matter your creative discipline!
✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨
If you’re not quite sure what steps to take next so you actually follow through on your creative goals, I’d love to help you get unstuck!
My coaching rates are going up June 7, so if you've been thinking about working with me, now's a great time! Book a free (no pressure, ever) discovery call to experience a tiny coaching session firsthand, see if we’re a good match, and hear (at least) 1 specific strategy that you can use to get started with solving this on your own.
RESOURCES DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
MORE FROM REBECCA
Sign up for the free Feel Good Creativity Unchallenge (5 days of super easy creativity + wellness prompts)
Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity workbook
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everyone, welcome to Episode 39 of Being A Whole Person. Today I'm going to tell you about some things that I wish I had known when I graduated from music school and was just starting my creative career. A lot of these things are related to being a musician, but a lot of them are applicable to lots of different disciplines and life lessons.
But first, I have a couple of announcements. Number one is that my coaching rates will be going up on Monday, June 7. So if you're thinking about working with me, this is a great time to start. As long as you inquire before then, you can still get in at the old rates.
If you are trying to finish a creative project and keep getting stuck, or you're just feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, and you're not really sure how to get more energy, you're not sure how to organize your time and your life, all that kind of stuff, I'd love to help you out. The best way to get started is to book a free no-pressure discovery call with me, and we'll talk about what's going on. You'll leave with at least one strategy, probably more, and resources to get started with solving this stuff on your own, and we can see what might be a good fit. So I'd love to talk to you if you're curious about coaching.
Number two, the summer edition of my workshop Build Your Seasonal Self Care Survival Kit is coming up next Wednesday, June 9 at 10am Pacific. I'm super excited that, this time around, I am co-presenting it with the Feely Human Collective, which was started by Non Wels, who runs the You, Me, Empathy podcast which I have loved for a long time, and I was a guest on, talking about the workshop about a week ago. It is a safe online space for healing, learning and connecting that promotes and instills empathy, vulnerability and emotional wayfinding as foundational components of the human experience, which I love, and Non always refers to himself as a feely human. We are all feely humans. So this is going to be a really fun collaboration.
We will get together, it's a 90 minute workshop, we'll explore nine different types of rest, and then we use that as a framework to distill it down into your own menu, not a checklist, of bite size, manageable actions that won't stress you out, won't add to your to do list, but that are truly supportive. That really impacts how you feel and what you can accomplish, and how you show up in the world. So this is the real deal kind of self care. This is not your instagrammable, your commodified, obligatory, none of that stuff.
Everyone who has taken the workshop in past seasons has found it super helpful and applicable to real life situations - real imperfect self care, because that's what we all are, right? Perfectly imperfect. So I hope you can join me for the workshop next Wednesday, June 9, at 10am Pacific, and there'll be a link in the show notes to go sign up for that.
And my usual plug to please rate and review the show if you've been enjoying it. It's so, so helpful for independent podcasters like myself, to have those ratings and reviews, in order for this podcast to be found by more people. So it's a great free way to help out the show if you've been enjoying it. Thanks in advance.
So let's get into today's topic. This is going to be a two parter. This originally was a blog post that I wrote five years ago in 2016, fall of 2016. I was reflecting on it, inspired by knowing that the Ithaca College Alumni Weekend was happening. At that point, it had been 11 years since I had graduated, and it made me start thinking about what I thought my life would be like, that many years later (I had no idea), and what advice I might have for the 2005 version of me. In May I just turned 38, which made me reflect on 20 years of adulthood, 20 years since I started college, so it made me want to revisit this post and see if I still agree with it, see what I would add to it.
You know, I do agree with most of it still, and I definitely wanted to add to it, too. So I'm going to share six things with you this week, and six more things next week. Number one, these are in no particular order, but they have numbers.
Number one is: anything having to do with business. I learned lots of things at music school, but I did not learn any business skills, or really, anything that would prepare me to work for myself and have a career in music. We had this one token class called Career Orientation. We took it as freshmen, and you just kind of listened to someone in the music business talk about their job once a week, then you wrote a one page summary of what they said. So I basically was like, “Well, I don't want to be a band director, I don't want to be a recording engineer, how is this helpful for me?”
I get that music schools are already cramming so many classes into the curriculum, but it would be so so great, if I had had training on like how to do my taxes, or how to market myself as a piano teacher or a musician, like most musicians, and artists end up being self employed at some point in their career. So it really seems irresponsible to me not to teach stuff like this. And I've learned all this stuff along the way - how to do my taxes, now I hire someone to help me. I know that if I'd learned about marketing in 2005, everything is different now, because of how the internet has evolved. But it feels like schools should have prepared us for that. So that would have been nice.
Number two: Look for community and connection. Of course, this is something that happens naturally, you build your social circle. When you're in school, you learn so much from your friends and peers. Maybe as much as you learn from your teachers sometimes. As an introvert, I kind of avoided the whole networking scene, because I was told it was important, but I didn't necessarily want to do it, because I imagined a roomful of sleazy business people. I assumed that that was the only way that networking happened.
When I first moved back to Minnesota after college, I went to a local piano teachers association meeting. I was the only person there under 30, by far, and no one talked to me, no one welcomed me, and I felt super, super awkward. So I think that kind of set the tone for me with networking for a while after that. I really shouldn't have given up so fast. If I had kept looking, I would have found more people that were like-minded, doing what I was doing.
The support really would have helped me figure out what I was doing, and maybe a lot of the stuff that I mentioned before, asking about all these kinds of things, and, you know, just learning more as a new teacher at that point. I think I did it the hard way. I mostly didn't ask for help from other people. I just did a lot of internet research. It would have been nice if I had connected to a community and had people to check in with in real life. If I had just admitted to myself that yes, I'm new at teaching, yes, I'm inexperienced and that's okay. I couldn't really get the support without being open to receiving it.
Now I am much more open to meeting people in general, my idea of what networking is has changed so much. Now I just view it as I'm meeting people who are interesting, it can happen organically, and that's what feels best. It can happen in face to face real life, or it can happen in internet life.
I know I've mentioned this before on the show, but my word of the year in 2018 was Connect. I went out of my way to make a consistent effort to connect with people who I thought were interesting. That year, a lot of those connections that I made with people ended up being long term friendships, long term collaborations, things that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't made the extra effort to reach out and just say, “Hey, you want to get a coffee,” or “Hey, you want to go jam for a little while.” and share each other's music and play through it.
So, I wish I had known how important to me that was going to be in the future. I could have eliminated some of that lonely figuring-it-out phase.
Number three: Start before you're ready. I laughed about this a little bit to myself, because I'm definitely a recovering procrastinator. 2005 Me is like, “You're crazy, you can't start before you're ready! You have to prepare and research and make sure everything's good.” But really, you can just start today, because today is where you are right now. It's not going to be convenient tomorrow, or more convenient tomorrow. I'm still really good at finding reasons why that's not true.
Now I know that the procrastination idea is this great myth that you kind of convince yourself that whatever task it is you don't want to do today, it'll definitely be easier and more appealing and less scary tomorrow than it is today. It's a trap! Our brains are setting a little trap to keep us safe.
So my main strategy for that is either to trick myself by setting a deadline when I'm feeling more inspired, and safely far from that deadline when it gets real. Or, I also like to remind myself that maybe it is actually scarier to know, I haven't done the things I really want to do in life. None of us know how long we have in life. And it may sound a little morbid, but the litmus test of, “if I found out if I were dying, would I still really want to do this?” is a good way to find clarity. I think it's good to acknowledge death in order to enjoy your life.
The other advice that I would have for my post-college self sounds kind of cheesy, but, fake confidence, if you don't have it yet. Fake it till you make it, because you're legit, even if you don't fully know what you're doing, you're legit. You know a lot. I'm talking to Past Me, and I'm talking to you, when I say “you”. You can handle the discomfort of being a beginner or a “not as expert as whoever you're comparing yourself to.
Yes, it might be uncomfortable, but it gets more and more comfortable, the more that you forge ahead with it. 80% of life is showing up, that quote, I think that's the quote. Again, it's a cliche, but it's true. If you don't show up, then nothing will happen, right? So any effort that you make automatically sets you further down the path to whatever it is that you're working towards - finishing that project, making a connection with someone who can connect you with an opportunity. So if you keep putting in the work, at any rate, it's inevitable that you'll keep moving forward, even if unexpected stuff comes up along the way, as long as you keep starting and restarting as you need to.
Number four is related: Trust in the process. When I had just finished college it seemed like my whole life was in front of me, without any meaningful professional experience yet. I just assumed that everyone else had it all figured out, and maybe I would eventually achieve the state of “figured it out”, and that having figured it out was this destination that everyone reached at some point. Obviously, that's not true.
There are always new challenges and things that you have to keep figuring out, and the people who look like they've figured it out maybe don't feel that way on the inside. It's so easy to compare your insides to someone else's outsides, and comparing their product to your process, which is not a fair comparison. We don't have to compare in that way.
Some of the wisest advice I got when I was in school was from my theory professor, John White. I think he's still there at Ithaca College. I took some jazz piano lessons with him during the summer after graduation. I remember talking to him a little bit about being anxious about moving back home and starting over, and, you know, trying to find work, and all this stuff that happens when you finish college. He said, “The fear doesn't really go away. You just have to work through it.” I was like, “What kind of advice is this? I want you to tell me that the fear is surmountable, and that I'll just graduate from it at some point.”
Of course, that's not true either, but it's always harder to face your fears of things that have never happened to you yet than it is to say afterwards, “Oh, yeah, that didn't kill me, I made it, I did it, I'm fine.” Life experience is the thing that makes everything easier, and you can't get it until you get it.
I was really uncomfortable with the idea of doing things wrong, also. That's very arbitrary, I realized now that, you know, what does wrong mean, anyway? Wrong for one person can be right for another, or something that you think you did wrong can lead you to something more interesting, because you just don't know what's going to happen. Sometimes trial and error is the best we can do, right? We can learn from our mistakes and move in that interesting direction.
I feel more clear now about my life direction, and career path, and all this kind of stuff, but I've changed so many times since then. I still don't totally know what I'm doing, where I'm going, which I think we really need to normalize. We are all growing and evolving as humans. We all are continuing to learn, even until we are old, hopefully, until we are old. So it's better to choose to be fascinated by the process instead of intimidated. Of course, that's going to happen sometimes, too, but curiosity is really a great guide.
Number five: You have to make your own path. That has been a tough one for me over the years. I've always been a person who is most comfortable reaching for the instruction booklet first - just tell me how to do it, tell me the rules, tell me the directions. When there wasn't an instruction booklet, I kind of made my own safe instructions, so to speak, by doing tons of research, following paths that had been modeled by others, like building up my piano studio to 30 students, or trying to go to grad school for collaborative piano. I don't regret my classical music degree at all, it was great training. I still enjoy classical music, I still earn money from it, and that will continue in the future, but I never felt that it would be fulfilling enough if that was all I did. I think that to be really successful in a more traditional way, which is what I'd been presented at that time, you have to be top of the top, and I just couldn't do that. My skills weren't, like, sell out the concert hall level, and I didn't want to do that, anyway.
After graduation, I saw many of my peers either pursue more schooling or become educators. So those were the safe paths that had been walked many times. I didn't see a lot of examples of other career options that seemed safe or appealing enough. So I was like, “Well, they're doing that, I should probably be doing that too.” This is partly from lack of confidence, but partly just not knowing what was possible.
Like I said a second ago, I took an expensive and time consuming detour when I was auditioning for collaborative piano graduate programs back in 2010, and I didn't make it into any of them. I could call this a failure. I could call it a waste of time, but really, I'm actually glad that it didn't work out, because I see that it was just this convenient way for me to follow another path again, to follow someone else's directions, and do something that had some degree of certainty to it, at least for a period of time.
I used to feel like I didn't really fit in anywhere, and I still feel that way from time to time. I wasn't completely a classical musician, I wasn't completely a jazz musician, I wasn't completely an accompanist, I had all these different worlds that I belonged to. Now that I have these different experiences, I see a lot of connections between the various types of musical skills that I have, and communities that I belong to, and how they really complement each other. I think I have this well rounded skill set with lots of variety that, when I was applying to grad school, they probably labeled as, “Oh, she can't focus on anything, and, you know, hasn't taken any one thing to a high enough level,” but, it all affects everything. Being A Whole Person is the name of this podcast, and, you know, that was me being a whole musician - doing all of the things that were interesting to me. They will continue to complement each other.
I think I was kind of forging my own path in a small way, not in a radical way, necessarily, but when I was in school, I did try to have as much diversity in my class studies as possible. I took several jazz classes, I took every non classical music class that I could fit in, and instead of just a minor, I did this degree that had an outside field, which is even bigger than a minor, and I concentrated in art history. Then once I got interested in ethnomusicology, I added anthropology to it, and made that kind of a complementary study area.
You know, taking all these different classes really influenced my life. It was actually a Latin American music class, just a survey class for non-majors, that made me realize how much I love Brazilian music. That was 18 years ago at this point, and my life has been fully shaped by that.
So, again, following your curiosity can move you on the path, whatever that path is. The more examples that I've seen, and the more that my life continues to evolve, I've become more comfortable with the fact that there is no model for my exact career path, because no one is exactly me. No one is exactly you. your path is going to look different from other people's, even if you're doing some of the same external activities. And that's a good thing, because there is a sea of musicians in the world, there is a sea of artists. There are so many people, on the surface, doing the same thing that you're doing, but nobody is doing exactly what you're doing. Being uniquely yourself is the perfect path.
The last thing I'm going to share today, number six: Don't be such a perfectionist. Just do stuff. That's kind of related to what I was just talking about, too. But, man, that's hard, right, if you're a perfectionist, to just let go of that and try things. It kind of goes along with “start before you're ready,” like I talked about earlier.
There's this quote from Ira Glass that maybe you've heard before, but I'll read it here too. He's talking about the gap between your taste and your ability. So when you're starting something, he says:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste, but there is this gap for the first couple of years that you make stuff. It's just not that good. It's trying to be good. It has potential, but it's not. Your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer, and your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this, we know our work doesn't have this special thing we want it to have. We all go through this. If you're just starting out and you're still in this phase, you gotta know, it's normal. And the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline, so every week you'll finish one story. It's only by going through a volume of work that you'll close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. I took a lot longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met, it's going to take a while, it's normal to take a while. You've just got to fight your way through.
So that's Ira Glass’s perspective. I don't think it's super helpful to be like, “We're just not that good,” if that makes you feel bad about yourself, but just to acknowledge that, if things aren't as good as you would like them to be, it doesn't mean that you're doomed forever. You're always improving and you're always growing, and that's amazing.
It's inevitable that we're going to make mistakes, right? Because we're human. Mistakes are helpful. They teach us things, as long as we give them the space and reflection to help us. I've played tons of wrong notes. I'm sure if you're a musician, you have, too. I'm sure you've put lots of scribbles on paper that you didn't like, and that's okay, that's totally fine. The more we do, the better we get, and the better we get at making work that is really satisfying to us, and that we truly like and feel at home in.
So I'm gonna leave it at that for today. I'll share six more things with you next week. I hope that's been helpful to hear my experiences and my lessons. Do you share any of these, too? I'd love to hear about that, if so. I think a lot of us have similar experiences, even when we feel like we're alone in it, we're definitely not alone. I always love hearing from you, so don't be afraid to reach out. Until next week, I hope you are well and be kind to yourself.
Pianist and composer