Say you have a great new idea for a business, a book, a website, a research project, or a documentary film. You do some preliminary work while holding down your day job, but you’re frustrated at how slow the progress is. Are you missing opportunities because you’re not devoting full time to the project? Or would it be foolhardy to put all your eggs in your new and unproven basket?
Welcome to the agony of the cliff edge and the leap. It’s one of the persistent challenges creative artists and entrepreneurs face, and it’s a tricky, tricky call to make correctly. Up to a point, the existing job provides the economic stability to make everything else possible. But a “real” job also takes time and energy to sustain. So there is always a point at which the stable job actually becomes a bit of a boat anchor, draining the new venture of the energy and attention it needs to get up “on the step,” as it were.
It also can be exhausting to try to keep a foot in more than one world, regardless of what those “worlds” are. Any time I embark on an adventure, even if the adventure is a challenging one, my life simplifies tremendously as soon as I actually depart and leave all the old or “normal” demands of my daily life behind. Then, and only then, can I focus completely on the adventure at hand, and allow myself to immerse in all the joys and travails of that experience.
But making that leap is scary—especially if the adventure is a professional one, requiring severing ties to a paycheck or lifestyle. What if you can’t make the finances work out okay? Will you regret what you’ve given up? Will you end up sleeping on a Lexington Avenue subway grate?
Ah. See, that’s the thing. Nobody can guarantee you that it’s all going to work out okay. You have to make it work out okay: gauge your progress and needs as you move forward well enough, and budget, adjust, adapt and scramble for fill-in work well enough, to make sure that you don’t end up on a subway grate.
On the other hand, there’s a reason someone, somewhere, came up with the saying about having to leap off a cliff before you can fly. Cutting the ties that hold you to your old world/job/lifestyle can also free you up to do what it is you really want, and perhaps were meant, to do. It can also and open all kinds of new and unexpected doors, as a professor named Katherine Wentworth Rinne found out when she pitched her stable academic teaching job to become an “independent scholar,” which means, basically, “person pursuing research full-time without a real clear idea of how in heck they’re going to pay for it all.”
Rinne wrote an interesting essay about her leap from stability to freedom in the Sunday New York Times, a couple of weeks ago. And it’s worth checking out if you’re wondering whether to leap, yourself. Rinne’s research sojourn stretched into a 15-year odyssey as her research project morphed into something that, she acknowledges, “has taken over my professional life.” But it sounds, from how she writes about it, that the reason her sabbatical has turned into a lifestyle is because she’s so passionate about her subject and has found so many rewards in the life she found as an academic nomad. (Even though she says she’s been in Berkekey, California for the past three years and fervently hopes she never has to move again.)
The nomad’s life isn’t for everyone. Having said that, Rinne says she found a vibrant community of fellow nomads out there, so it’s obviously a viable choice for more than just a few. But making those trade-offs in lifestyle allowed Rinne the time and freedom to pursue something she loved—and did, eventually, lead to the publication of her first book.
Rinne says, at the end of the essay, “Had I known at the beginning what I’d have to endure to reach this point, I doubt I would have had the courage to plunge ahead. Fortunately, I was utterly oblivious of the consequences.” Almost every entrepreneur or adventurer would say the same thing, of course. So perhaps all those unexpected turns in the road are a good thing. They keep us from seeing too far into the future, so we have the courage to live the distance in between.
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”
–W H Murray, inspired by a *very* free translation of some lines from Goethe’s Faust:
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
The hunt, the search, the quest; all of it seems to be the domain of entrepreneurs. The academic side is well understood since it brought me across multiple disciplines and two degrees over more years than I would have believed.
Now it is taking a life long aviation interest and developing to an r&d company. What took so long? Doesn’t matter, as now a lifetime of learning and experience finds a home.
Thank you for mentioning me and my work in your blog. The work continues as does the passion.