MandMAud - absolutely no offense taken whatsoever! =)
I just never pay any attention to people saying "you can't do it", ever, with anything. If I want to do it, I just do it & I don't read the instructions or how others have done it.
And I'm an insanely happy person! XD
So cool to hear you talk like that - great start to my Wednesday!
I love how we're agreeing on everything AND saying opposite things. Life does that, throws opposites at you, self-contradictory stuff, and makes perfect sense.
Seven Stars makes several good points, but like MaudMaud's son, if you can do it and live on little enough to manage to survive, you do what you WANT. It is a live to work situation that rarely becomes a real (good) living. All outsiders see it as "glamorous" but that is the definition of Glamour: an illusion. Those of us that have been inside, know better. But if you can do it, I say DO IT!
Actually my son's thoughts of acting were an example of what NOT to think
but then, he's a gifted musician and IS making a living from that. Almost enough to live on
but it's very early days, and he is incapable of a day job, just can't stay in them. However the acting... he'd never shown any interest, all his life. He had a period of writer's block (composer's block?) and began to fear he'd lost music altogether. Suddenly he read one of these rags-to-riches stories and was going to be famous and rich. The thing he suffers from in life is wishing to be rich.
The only "feedback" he'd had was a friend who'd done an acting course and said my son acted better than him. I narrowly stopped him paying the train fare to Leeds (would have been £100+) for an audition for a TV lead. With zero CV... no experience since being a camel in the school nativity at the age of five.
(Very like the writing novices who don't understand that it's a craft as well as a gift, and you don't send off your first draft without cutting out all the cringefully bad bits, without noticing that your ideas are the same as everyone else's (so many retired people writing their memoirs!!), and get a three-book deal that way... I've "helped" friends by critiquing their novels - a real struggle to get through the first 50 pages because nothing happens except description, the main character's past history, and repetition. But they still don't see that they may be writers, as in: they write - but they're never going to be paid writers.)
(I have lost the skill myself - or my posts would be more concise apart from anything else! But I was there, and would get back there if I decided to.)
I think the acting is out of my son's system now...!!
BUT as i say, music is another thing you mustn't do unless you Can't Not. To make enough to live on is so hard, that the passion for the actual doing of it has to be there. Committing to a life of any of these activities = a marriage, and has to endure the fallen-out-of-love, for-better-for-worse times which WILL happen. A reason not to give up the day job!
And the other reason is that when you haven't got anything else to live on, it's hard to avoid that change of attitude to the "loved" job. It becomes something you measure, something you do thinking of the reaction it will get, rather than what it used to be to you.
your questions may not apply, but still the thought is correct: can you handle the lifestyle however it works out for you? And you are right, MaudMaud, never assume you can move into a bootstrap business easy and make lots of money...you may never. But if given a chance, should you try? SURE just get rid of all expectations.
Yes yes yes.
One last thought: When I first went pro and started at Psychic Fairs, I was given a piece of advice. Don't quit your day job. I pass that on to ANYONE starting their own business. That and learn to live VERY CHEAP. But still, I say: given a chance to try for it? GO FOR IT!!!
Barb
Don't quit the day job, exactly. All this waffle could have been said in those five words.