I am creating this blog with a very specific purpose in mind: to help you get to the point in your life where you are able to fully support yourself financially through work that YOU are passionate about.

If you are like the majority of folks pursuing an artistic career, you probably have a “support job” to make ends meet. You act plus you wait tables. You’re in a band plus you telemarket. You write plus you substitute teach. At best, you have a part-time job that’s flexible and only partially annoying. At worst, you have an 8-hour brain-numbing, energy-draining weight around your creative soul.

As someone who used to act plus make copies, I know the frustration of having to squeeze your creative expression into the nooks and crannies of your weekly schedule and, on occasion, having to shove it to the side of your life altogether. I also know that this kind of daily grind, if it continues for too many years, can utterly deplete your creative spirit. And once your joy and passion start to fade, burnout (and its nasty cousin, bitterness) can invade. Haven’t we all met one of those “I have been in this rat race TOO long to get out now – the world owes me one and it better pay up soon – now, where the Hell is the craft service table” artists? (Yeah… not pretty on any level.)

If you honestly and whole-heartedly want to get out of – or avoid ever getting into – the slog of dead-end employment and build a successful artistic career, then you must do at least one of two things:

1) you must develop a support source of income that you like and that offers opportunities for financial and personal growth

AND/OR

2) you must start pursuing the goals you have set for yourself as an artist in an intelligent, strategic, efficient manner that produces increasingly successful results.

How to accomplish those two things is exactly what I will be writing about here.

But why a blog now?

Well, in 2005, during the creation of the earlier version of this website, one half of my design team – the brilliant Rahul Gupta, urged me to start a blog. I instantly recoiled and told him never to mention it again! He nudged, I whined. But I could not conceive of spending time writing short, pithy posts about how fun it is to listen to my cat snore. (Even though it really is fun to hear to him snore.) Back then I obviously had a very narrow point of view of what a blog was or could be.

Gradually, what did start to sound appealing was having a forum for topics not covered in my other written materials (my column, my newsletter or my book). A place where I could share my advice on the most common issues that my career strategy clients have struggled with – and do so in a medium that allowed me to address readers in a more personal and spontaneous way. Here, I can dissect my own glorious shortcomings and failures so you can benefit from my mistakes (as I certainly have!)

I plan for the posts in this blog to be a little longer than the norm. I have lots to do, so I am only interested in spending my time this way if I can provide in-depth, valuable content. I’m aiming for two posts each week so neither you nor I get overwhelmed. I love business and marketing and organization and I am excited about distilling and translating my knowledge in ways that cater to creative folks, like yourself. I want the info you find here to be easily digestible so that after spending time at this blog, you leave with practical information you can immediately apply to make your career move forward faster. My own background is in acting, but I have many clients in other performing and visual arts fields so, no matter what your creative outlet, I hope you will always find guidance here that can be applied to your particular circumstances. If you ever have a question, a comment or a suggestion for a particular topic, please feel free to email me.

Lastly, I see this blog as a venue through which I can give back to the community that I came from. Without the decision to pursue acting, I would not be where I am today. And today, I am fortunate enough to wake up every morning able to make my living doing things that I love to do. I hope the same will soon be true for you as well.