Ethan Crane

This Career Realities interview is with Matt Callard, who is a mentor at speech therapy group the Starfish Project. Since attending the project for his own stammering eight years ago Matt discovered a passion for speaking and advocating for the project and speech therapy. In the interview he talks about his criteria for finding both paid and unpaid work (and how pay is not the important factor), about how people are much more approachable regarding unpaid work than you think, and how trying out ten jobs unpaid for a day is much better than trying out one job paid for six months.

Of particular interest was Matt talking about how the fulfillment you take from work is also down to the frequency with which you do it – that even work that you love pales in enjoyment if you begin to do that work repeatedly, day after day. Although Matt was not talking about artists here, this feels particularly relevant to artists: how you might strive to get paid for the particular art that you enjoy, but once you come to do it as a paid job, it becomes just that, a paid job, and the pleasure from it disappears. (It’s something I’ve had a problem with in keeping this website, and this podcast. I haven’t found the answer.)

(More about Career Realities interviews here.)

From the podcast:

On asking yourself the question ‘what do I like to do?’

David Brooks

Marianne Cantwell, author of the blog Free Range Humans, on what it feels like when you become self-employed – when you decide that you want a self-made career.

My latest Career Realities interview is with Dave House, musician, founder of Edinburgh music studio Noisefloor and graphic designer.

Dave has always made music, but talks about how it took him a long time to actually refer to himself as a musician – in fact it took doing a music course to actually think he could refer to himself in that way. We also talked about the gulf between the idealism you have about your design ideas at art college and the actual stuff you are asked to design when out in the real world...

(The Career Realities podcast series attempts to uncover the hidden realities of day-to-day work culture in various careers – the hours, the workload, the shift patterns – and questions the often-repeated assumption that paid work is our primary source of life fulfillment.)

Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine in Upside Down, the Creation Records Story

After 4 years of trying. 4 years of not thinking you are very good could be the first 4 or however many years of every single person who ever wanted to make their own music, do their own writing, run their own non-profit, or whatever.

Most people give up before 4 years. Most won't even start because they think they'll be terrible forever.

Even if the trying lasts for 8 or 12 years (think I'm up to 18), those years of trying are not terrible. They are beautiful and purposeful. And beat doing work that someone else has told you to do.

Mr Money Moustache, in his latest essay If I Ran the School, Things Would Be Different

Mr Money Moustache is a Canadian blogger who lives a fine life on $25,000 a year and retired in his early thirties, and who is my new personal hero of frugal living. 

His latest post details his decision to home school his son (something he is more able than most to do now that he is retired), and this essay considers how he is able to choose to teach his child in a way that means he will not grow up to think of himself as nothing but an employee, a worker for someone else. Because employee is the default mode that we are all taught at school – ew are taught that we are going to be working for someone else.

But the self-made career is all about not being an employee. Not Being An Employee, at least in the most important work that you do for yourself, is the goal. We may be employed in subsistence work, but that is not the focus of our education, or of the valuable work in our lives.

A teacher, obviously one who wants to teach well but is unable, tells us all the things they are not allowed to say during their work day.

I'm wanting to send this to my 12-year-old daughter, but I know that's just making my own life harder...

The next Career Realities podcast is now available to listen: a series of interviews about the day-to-day realities of work culture, and starting a self-made career. (More about the podcast series here.)

This week interview is with Paul Richards, founder of charity Stay Up Late, a charity that promotes the rights of people with learning disabilities to live the lifestyle of their choosing. Paul spent fifteen years as a musician in the band Heavy Load, and he talks about combining being a musician with actually earning money, how the band lead to the opportunity to set up Stay Up Late and to work he really valued. Along with how he discovered he really didn’t want to work in a bank… He keeps a blog called Pressure Drop about how to run a charity off your back table. (more)

Listen to the podcast | listen via iTunes

On setting up a charity