Almost every working artist has a love/hate relationship with The Day Job. It’s the job we begrudgingly refer to with the tagline, “Hey, it pays the bills.” Is having a day job a hindrance to a creative career, or can it help an artist discover new competencies and diversify their skill set as well as income stream?

I think artists need to stop beating themselves up about their supposed failures to make a full-time living in a particular craft and instead, understand that by working in a day job or in a variety of industries, they are diversifying their skill set and making themselves much more valuable in all their career pursuits.

For some artists, the concept of a day job is not a problem, but finding the time and money to practice their art is. There was a time when I told myself I would be willing to go broke to become an opera singer. I quickly realized I was not cut out for the lifestyle and fiercely competitive world of a hopeful young emerging artist and decided that some combination of day job with flexibility to perform when I could was ideal for me.

There is no magic formula to deciding how much of one’s time and resources can be devoted to beginning and maintaining an artistic career, which I think is akin to the capital investment needed for a small start-up company. Each new fledgling artists is an unproven idea. Even if they are exceptionally talented, no one knows about them yet and exposure is one of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur.

I came across an article of interest for those of you who are struggling with leading the double life of an artist with a day job.

“Managing the Day Job” asks, “Does being a creative only half the time make you less creative than those who are creative full-time?” The article goes on to discuss the demands of balancing a creative career with the demands and expectations of the day job career. I know many artists who excel in their day jobs, and get opportunities for advancement they have to turn down because it would mean “marrying” their job, and they are not willing to do that, even if it means a pay increase. These are the tough decisions many artists have to face until they can make their creative pursuits a full-time career.

Some of them never do – and that’s okay. I’m one of those people, and ever since I graduated from my undergrad in music I’ve had some combination of day job/creative job in various proportions, but I’ve never taken a foot completely out of either. I’ve always thrived on having a variety of jobs, so this type of career balance really suits me.

Tags: Business of Music, Creative Careers

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 7:50 am and is filed under Creative Careers, Goal Setting, Work/Life Balance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.