Ask YC: Should I quit programming to pursue the arts?

I recommend doing something you love even if you make just enough to keep you from starving instead of doing something you hate just because it pays well. But make sure you really love it first. Chances are you'll enjoy it less than you imagine (but maybe still enjoy it enough to justify leaving your job).

The guys on the stage look like they're having a lot of fun, but maybe they only do so because it's their job to look like they're having fun. After a while a job is a job and it can start to suck simply because you HAVE to do it.

Maybe you can try out your artistic side in your spare time for a while and see how you really feel about it.

I figure that doing a startup is an ideal solution: It "solves the money problem" (as PG puts it), after which point you'll have the liberty to engage in the arts -- without ever being in the position where it becomes a job which you're forced into doing every day because otherwise you'll starve.

By taking this route you make sure you have enough to pay the bills. Then maybe some day you'll make enough from your artistic pursuits to quit your day job and pursue the secondary career full time. At that point it'd probably be much easier to break it to your parents.

And I don't think you should make any impulsive moves, because what you love today, you might get bored with in a few years. Who knows, maybe in 5 years you'll love programming more, or you'll develop a taste for architecture, or you'll want to be a doctor. Or you may end up being a career artist. In any event you should follow your dreams... but minimize risk as much as possible by using a practical strategy.

Funny what you say about your parents. Mine will be disappointed to know that I'm "just" doing programming.

Rest of your life in front of the computer? What will happen when you get too old for your performance arts career? You won't just be able to sit around doing nothing while you rake in the cash as with a programming/engineering/science career.

And are you sure that doing the same performance over and over wouldn't get extremely dull?

Also, don't underestimate how much a lack of money can cause problems once you find your girl.

One week, they purchased a large number of lottery tickets as a group, and found that their excitement for winning the lottery (and therefore quitting Riverdance) was more than their excitement for the job itself.

Here's the link -- act two is the one that you want:

http://thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=306

This way you can zoom in on the problem. HTH.

make things that artists like :)

The trick is don't think and/or. There are factors that will work against you though. I noticed after switching from the visual side of my brain used in fine-arts to the predominantly textual side used in programming, it pretty much killed my drawing instinct. The instictive need to draw and scribble. I've only just lately tried to balance the two. Not easy since each require different ways of thinking & looking at things.

Anyway, I will say that when it comes to making a go out of arts as a career, I'm watching a lot of my friends and acquaintances struggle hard. They're art students, musicians, actors and comedians, circus performers (my housemate; the place is littered with stilts and facepaint and whatnot) and despite some fantastic dedication to it they struggle to make a go of it. All work day jobs, some of the more talented and dedicated are in low paid arts-related jobs - administration, promotion etc. Most, now pushing into their late twenties and early thirties are starting to think about settling more permanently into the day jobs. Of course, north-west Ireland isn't Boston, so YMMV...

As to having your cake etc, do you do any such activities currently? If you're currently performing in plays etc or gathering the work needed for a gallery show and you can deal with the grind that entails, then I'd be more inclined to say go for it. If not, do so; I'd guess the best barometer of whether you'll have made the right decision is if you can cheerfully dedicate a few evenings a week over the course of the months to years it can take to get something into production.

The thing is, usually making ends meet working in the arts isn't very sexy. I taught bass, played at business parties, and did studio work for a while. It paid well, but I was teaching 14 year olds to play Limp Bizket songs and playing cheesy bass lines for TV commercials. There were definitely moments of coolness, but most of it isn't.

As a day job, programming was more engaging and laid back, and has a more flexible schedule. The stuff that I really liked in music I could do anyway.

Being in the Blue Man Group would probably suck. You'd have next to no artistic freedom, do the same stuff over and over again, and all of your evenings where you'd want to meet with other artists would be taken up.

First, doing a startup is a really enjoyable form of technical work. You're working on what you want to, and that is fun in itself. It's also multi-disciplinary and thus you get variety and some quite arty bits of work. For example, How can we ask a question that will get us honest, interesting, succinct information about a user's personality?

Second, if your passion can't be your job (for whatever reason), make fucking sure you indulge your passion in your free time. I found that working a job that sucked hard to be an excellent motivation for making full use of my spare time by throwing myself into playing in a band, political activism, squash and programming my own stuff. If you don't get similarly motivated, perhaps forcing yourself to work on your passion will help.

Here's what I learned:

The reality is far different from what it appears to be. Instead of nights full of laughter and fun, it would probably be monotonous nights of the same thing over and over, except for 10% of the money I make now, if that.

Most stand-up comics barely scrape by, spend a lot of time in their cars, a lot of late nights in the bar, and eat a lot of fast food. They do the same 5, 10, 30, or 60 minute routine night after night, while they work their way up the ladder from "opener" to "feature" to "headliner". Every one of them plays a bad room once or twice a week. Many of them spend half their time looking for work. And less than 1% ever really "make it" and less than 1% of those "make it big", no matter how good they are.

No thanks.

Then I redirected my thinking to figure out how to take what I currently did and make it something I'd love. Pretty straight forward solution to that: my startup. And I'll save the laughs for friend and family get togethers.

Don't mean to scare you. You SHOULD do what you love. But you should also get a clear idea of what it'll be like before you flick the switch. Sometimes, the grass is NOT greener on the other side.

I've recently stumbled across the "casual games" scene, and I think there are really interesting things going on. I always thought of games as art, but some of these games take it to a new level. Another example: http://www.10gnomes.com/02.html

I'd say there is more artistic motivation than traditional gameplay in that game (photography).

Making a living in the arts is excruciating. Classical musicians today tend to live in an unstable patchwork of part-time gigs, private teaching, side jobs lacking health insurance, etc... and that's if they're lucky. Only a few manage to obtain full time jobs. As others have noted, the day to day life of a musician isn't as glamorous as it might seem. I loved Beethoven's 5th as a child; but after playing it for the N-teenth time, I began to see how a career in music could grow tedious.

When I decided to go into CS it was because I realized that the people who had successful music careers tended to be a.) either so insanely talented that it was obvious they'd be catapulted into the inner circle (eg, full time gigs) fairly easily or b.) so monomaniacal in their dedication to their craft that they simply had no other choice. Anything other than being a musician would have meant having to curl up and die.

Since I was neither of those, I decided to turn to something that'd I'd been quite good at in high school (math/science) and rather enjoyed, and I would describe myself as much happier now. Vastly happier, and financially secure. Music is still a part of my life as a fulfilling hobby.

Whatever you decide, I'd highly recommend reading Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness," before making any irrevocable decisions. Gilbert is a psychologist whose research suggests that people are generally extremely bad at predicting the future and figuring out what actually will make them happy. It's a cautionary tale for anyone who might think "If only I could do X I'd be happy..." Follow that with "How to Want What You Have," by Timothy Ray Miller, and you have a prescription for happiness.

Do you have any responsibilities?

Are you young enough such that you can go into something more stable if things don't "work out"?

If your answers are "no" and "yes" then go for it. You'll be better off for having done something different. It might set you back some years if you were to pursue your career like everybody else (in case it doesn't work out as planned), but when you're stuck in a cubicle looking back you will know what it's worth.

I hope you make it doing whatever you are aiming for so that you don't have to look back - and that brings up another point: don't look back if you choose to do something risky. It's do or die!!!

YAY!

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Now for the real answer to your question:

If you need to ask somebody if you should or should not, then you probably shouldn't.

Until you believe in yourself to be able to make it then don't commit. The fact that you are asking is telling me that there is some self-doubt, and this will be your biggest obstacle. When things seem darkest, your mettle must be such that you stick it out and see it to the end, no matter what the results are to be.

First overcome your self doubt and then see if you need to ask anybody your question. The choice to do one thing over another must come from within yourself, not from the advice of others.

I'd rather be brutally honest with you instead of sticking to the line above my real answer...if you had the courage to go for it, then you wouldn't be worried about "breaking the news" to your parents because there would be no question in your mind about your success. Yes, I'm being harsh, but this is NOTHING compared to what you might encounter out in the wild, or from your parents... ;) If you believe in yourself, then nothing I could say would change your mind.

I'm not advising you to be pig-headed or stubborn but rather seek a state of mind called "self-confidence". Your question is indicative of the fact that self-confidence to pursue this direction is lacking. I would rather you reflect upon this fact instead of responding because I'll only tell you in response: you don't need to justify yourself to anybody but yourself.

Read "The Unfettered Mind" by Takuan Soho. If you can understand "immovable wisdom" then you have taken the first step in a long journey towards becoming more confident with what you want to do.

Being at peace with the outcome of your action (both good and bad) is a totally separate issue!

EDIT: First step to becoming more confident: capitalize the 'I' in any sentence that refers to yourself. It speaks volumes when you capitalize other proper nouns but don't do the same for yourself!

There are many of us that tried to make a go of it in the arts scene, but ended up going in to technical fields. I think that there is a correlation.

I've had a day job as an ER nurse for 15 years. I knew it was not what I wanted to do for a living, but it paid the bills. I, too thought that vocational happiness was to be found pursuing the arts, so, I studied art formally and on my own in a lot of different forms: interior design, sculpture, painting, photography, computer graphics, video editing, animation, 3D modeling and animation.

Any one of those things can be done to pay the bills, and there are career paths for each one of those. But, at some point, I found that I had to trade my passion to someone else for cash. And, doing that was impossible for me. I wasn't able to stay sane and edit the industrial video about the history of SmallCo's dialysis machines. I wasn't willing to create the logo like the client wanted, because I knew that what the client wanted was aesthetically wrong and ugly. I wasn't willing to put in 16 hours x 6 days a weeks just to be a visual effects artist in Hollywood.

It's one of the reasons that Hackers and Painters made so much sense to me. There is a creativity in programming, and in hacking that is very close to the creativity that one gets while painting or sculpting. Especially when the hacking is done on your own business.

It's the reason that I'm not going to work for someone else as a programmer, too. Why should I create value for someone else, when I can create value for myself? Why should I spend 8-10 hours a day at a desk so someone else's company can increase in value, when I can spend 8-10 hours a day on my own company making something that people want.

As an entrepreneur, I get the creative control. I get to be the decider. I set my own hours. I financially benefit from my own work. And, I get to do a bunch of different things. That's why I'm going to be a founder instead of an artist. It's a lot of the same benefits and risks, and a lot greater upside. At the same time, had I never knocked on the arts door, I would have never ended up being an entrepreneur.

Credit for this piece of wisdom goes to a very smart kid who I knew when he was wee tall - delivered as part of his HS Valedictorian address.

He's also very sensitive to the larger market - he knows that people don't like to have stark pictures of despair in their living room. It's not his favorite picture to take, but that's his brand. This enables him to work maybe ten days out of the year. He lives in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Pacific. He's a darn good photographer, but there are many as good who never hit it big. The reason people hit it big in the arts (just like anything) is marketing and developing a well-crafted brand over time. He went for where the big money was - the galleries who deal with very upscale clients - and he never deviated from that brand. Being in tech means that you can save up enough to make the transition right and jump in at a higher market. Take the time to evaluate several different markets before you decide - figure out your best approach and then don't be stingy funding it. You can be very successful.

One advice I would give is try to have some sort of income from somewhere else, so you can finance your artistic pursuits, because most likely you won't be making any real money from it.

Anyway, sorry for the sob story. Had to vent.