What do I do if my cool career seems impossible?
What's crucial is to take a realistic assessment of yourself. Let's say you wanted to be a ballet dancer. You know, about two thirds of the kids who are in ballet lessons, the teacher's very encouraging. You never ever make a career decision based on what your teachers tell you. You make a decision not based on who you're paying, which is the teacher, but you make a decision based on who would pay you. So if you think you want to be a ballet dancer or an actor or any of those cool careers, put yourself out there to twenty or thirty people with the potential to pay you directly: the producers, people who could hire you. And if all of them are ignoring you, and they're not willing to pay you, that's a damn good sign that that's really a career you should not be pursuing. What you might want to do is say, 'well, I'm not ready yet.' That's fine. Give yourself a fixed amount of time. Let's say you've finished, you've majored in ballet at college and now you've finished and you say, 'I really want to give it a shot.' Fine. Circle a date on your calendar one year from now and say, 'if I am not getting paid at least some little bit of money that's going to give me some sign that I am going to succeed at this, I am going to make my dancing a hobby.' I am not saying giving up, that you should give up these cool careers. Make them avocations. We live in a capitalist society, there are ten zillion people who want to be professional dancers, and there are about eight paying jobs. So after a reasonable amount of time, if you can't get paid to do it, there are still great opportunities to do it as an avocation. I love acting but I'm not going to get paid to be an actor. So I do it as a volunteer and I do it in community theater plays and I have a great time. I love directing, I direct plays. If I wanted to be Steven Spielberg my chances are one in a million. But I direct community theater plays and I'm directing the play same time next year, I have all of the benefits of being a director wihtout any of the pain.
