The other day I was meeting with my local writer’s group (small plug for them here), and afterward a younger guy who was finishing a creative writing MFA came up to me. He was new to the group and had a lot of good ideas, and that night he had a deliberate look in his eyes and an important question he very badly wanted to ask:
“So, what did you do, like, for a job after you graduated?”
The question caught me off guard because it had been so long since anyone asked me that. It brought me back to when I was twenty-two and my friends and I were all graduating and heading off into the world, some with set jobs and careers while others moved on to temp gigs or more school and still others had no plan at all.
That was a time of both curiosity and nervousness: curiosity about the choices other people were making and the opportunities they’d come across, and nervousness that things might not work out. Fortunately, a lot of the intensity that surrounded that time has faded as we’ve become more comfortable with our jobs, our careers, and who we are—but in the moment, that uncertainty was still very much alive.
My actual answer was a lot simpler: I told him how I’d used to work as an editor with an agricultural science lab and had picked up more work in the team’s actual laboratory and greenhouse because I needed a job while I figured out a bigger plan. I also told him about stumbling my way into jobs in environmental science, marketing, and secretary work at various times when I needed them.
The actual jobs I had, though, were less important than something more important I tried to impart: if you wanted to make your way in the world as a creative person, you had to be on the lookout for your own opportunities, use whatever contacts and talents you had at your disposal, and push the limits of the work you were willing to do.
Earning Money on a Creative Path is Different Than on Other Career Paths
A lot of us grow up unconsciously (or consciously!) embracing a viewpoint about careers that’s grown into a myth since the days of the GI Bill and post-WWII college boom:
- After high school, you should go to college
- College will prepare you to get a high-paying job in a specific career field of your choice after graduation
- That job will then allow you to advance through that field on to higher-paying jobs
- Eventually you’ll be able to retire and live a work-free life on a golf course somewhere
Lots of people in lots of fields do things this way: I know programmers, engineers, graphic designers, vets, nurses, and a host of others who are all on this path and doing fine—but those aren’t the kinds of jobs I’m talking about here.
The Google Maps allusion I made in the title refers to the idea that earning money, making your way in the world, and becoming the person you want to be involves a set series of steps that everyone can follow by filling out the Destination field and hitting Go. In this version of life, the process looks pretty much the same for everyone, since the directions are all laid out for you and you really just have to do the driving with very few judgement calls (e.g., college applications and job searching). In the Google Maps version of life, the bigger, scarier choices about HOW to explore and combine these elements have all been taken care of.
It’s that HOW that can feel extra overwhelming when you’re not sure how to get where you want to go—or even what the place you want to go looks like. It can make you feel lost, anxious, depressed, fearful, and pessimistic about the future, maybe to the point where you give up your creative goals entirely. And that’s not something to take lightly.
I feel like I was lucky enough to have a few people lay this out for me early on, particularly during my undergrad days at Bennington College where we all designed their own majors and avoided letter grades (a philosophy I first read about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). Going to Bennington wasn’t like going to other colleges where you selected your major and were given a checklist of classes to complete and a few career fairs to go to: instead, we had to decide for ourselves early on not only what we were going to study, but how we were going to build it into something bigger. There were plenty of people around to help us with those questions, but they never gave us the answers—figuring those out was our job.
The college’s mandatory internship term also showed me how separate work and education really were—none of the internships I worked ever directly involved the Irish literature and theater history I was studying in my classes, but taking those classes made me a more capable thinker and individual who could then tackle the challenges of work. The internship paths most people followed were fairly random because the goal was to develop the skills necessary to find work and make your way in the world—all without a set of Google Map directions.
What Does It Mean to Make Your Own Way in the World?
This concept is really confusing to explain because this process is going to look different for everyone, but here’s a few bits of advice…
Get Creative with Your Skills
Because you might not have the career-ready credentials that other people do, you’ll have to be creative with the ones you do have: and that means finding things your bachelor’s degree might qualify you for that you maybe hadn’t thought of. Your prior work experience will be helpful too—my first job out of college was a paid environmental science internship I got despite my barely having taken any science classes, but the organization hired me because I’d worked for them before as a lake host boat checker and they knew I was familiar with the program.
Developing different kinds of skills to help you through life is the old model of the Renaissance Man (or Woman!) who possessed expertise in a variety of areas. Back in the days before overspecialization, embracing different skillsets was somewhat of a necessity, but in today’s world, unless your chosen specialization is guaranteed to bring you in a lot of cash, the Renaissance model still a smart one to follow.
Ask Around for Opportunities
The people you actually know in real life are immensely and unbelievably helpful: talk to your family, your friends, your teachers, and literally ANYONE you meet about opportunities they’ve come across that you might find helpful. Not only will these people provide you with opportunities that would otherwise be closed off, they’ll also open up new ideas that you might not have thought of.
Look Around—A Lot!
There’s lots of opportunities out there, but a lot of them are hard to find, and very rarely do you just stumble upon them accidentally. A lot of things can pass by you if you’re not careful, so it pays to actively look around wherever you can. If you’re still in school, keep an eye on all those bulletin boards where people tend to post jobs and internships, and actually read those emails that your department sends out—that’s how I got my first two editing jobs!
There’s also Craigslist, Indeed, and even plain old Google to hunt around on—type in anything you can think of just to see what comes up, because after all, what harm can it do just to look?
Don’t Be Afraid to Temporarily Compromise
Work can suck pretty bad, but it does help you pay the bills. As long as you have the courage to leave a bad or mediocre situation when the time comes, a shitty Day Job can serve as a stepping-stone to bigger things, or simply give you the bill-paying income you need to get you through the current stage in your creative work.
This model of having a completely unrelated Day Job and working for your weekends isn’t for everyone and is something I’ve related to Superman disguising himself as Clark Kent, but it’s definitely preferable to giving up—or sitting at home sulking.
Be Your Own Motivator
I save the most important tip for last—none of this stuff works unless you’re willing to push yourself every single day along this path of your own choosing. No one’s going to do it for you and you can’t just mindlessly follow the voice directions from your phone until you reach your destination—you have to be constantly finding the trail yourself.
Not only does this mean that you have to know your own goals, but you also have to push yourself to set your own deadlines along the way, which takes constant focus and determination, and isn’t easy.
Not For the Faint of Heart
Finally, I can’t stress this enough—blazing your own path isn’t for everyone, something that’s become clearer to me over the years as I’ve met more people. Maybe your career goals really are best achieved via a set path, maybe you have other things you want to focus on, or maybe you just don’t trust yourself to take the hard steps—and that’s OK. It’s always better to acknowledge this no matter what stage of life you’re in so you can act accordingly, rather than getting caught up on a journey that isn’t for you.
The rest of us, though, have work to do.
Yeah, I know you’re as busy as the rest of us, but don’t forget to keep in touch!
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