My Self-Made Career - So Far

Ten plus years into my "music career", and with growing frustration about my day job, I picked up Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.

Wait - let's back up.

It's actually been a slow progression to this point.

In 2008, recently back from Taiwan, and deciding to invest myself in politics after a seven-year slumber, I started blogging in earnest.

In September of 2008 I learned I had narrowly missed acceptance to Stern School of Business. The next week, Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Feeling I'd been given a "sign", I decided to spend the next three years seeing how music would work out. The answer was bifurcated - it's worked out well from the standpoint of my ability and my fulfillment. It hasn't worked out great - yet - from the standpoint of "acceptance" or commercial success.

During the intervening several years, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with my job at a university, and what direction my career might take. I started listening to podcasts. First Adam Carrolla. Then Joe Rogan, which eventually led me to London Real. I was listening to London Real's episodes on ayahuasca the night Hurricane Sandy hit New York.

Sandy shattered the last of my illusions about my day job, but something had happened. In my efforts to find another job, I happened across a position description that required video lesson experience.

Why don't I simply make that experience on my own, I wondered.

Over the next three months I taught myself videography. First with the iPhone, then with a growing array of toys. What I wanted to do hit me one day when I watching the Vice channel on youtube. I'd been blogging about the state of jazz. I'd been playing sessions and gigs. I'd been conducting interviews for the blog, and I'd been making short videos of myself playing. Why not combine the three into a Vice-style jazz documentary show.

This still didn't solve the issue of how to make money, however.

It just so happened that London Real featured a guest named Tim Ferriss on one of its podcasts. The next week I picked up Mr. Ferriss' book Four Hour Work Week, and became convinced that his ethos was the way forward. With echoes of Seneca and Steven Pressfield, Ferriss recommends readers decide what's truly important to them, and use efficiency tricks to decople their income stream from their dreams. Sure it was complicated, but here was a way to live as Steven Pressfield would recommend (with maximal emphasis on my "calling"), without starving.

The journey deeper into the rabbit hole of Ferrisian lifestyle led to two discoveries -

First, I could indeed "unplug" myself from many inefficient systems at work, allowing greater flexibility to do what I wanted, and second, perhaps I could incorporate my other major passion, travel, into the schema.

As such, my blog dedicated to escaping New York, be it for overseas jaunts or weekend getaways, was born, partly as a way to play Tony Bourdain on the internet and call it a job, partly as a (maybe) truly viable way to make money.

It's going to take more, though. I need to become an expert at a small sector of e-commerce, then, as much as possible, outsource it.

Still, I'm not doing so badly for four months' progress. My dreams, to travel the world and write about it, and to make music and share it, seem within reach finally.

I hope the next time I publish here it's with further happy news, whatever form that may take.