I’ve often noted, in passing, similarities between being an academic and being a musician, from the hierarchy at conferences to comparing presses to record labels. Recently I’ve started realizing that there are some things I’ve learned in my first career (academia) that give me perspective on, or help me navigate, my second career (music). Here are a few that come to mind. Both music and academia are extremely self-directed. Yes, when you’re teaching something you need to show up to actually teach or you won’t have a job for long. But what you teach in a class (at least at the level at which I teach) and how you teach it is up to you. And the rest of it even more so. What’s the next book or article going to be about? (is there even going to be a next book?) When it is done? Write songs! Record CDs! Get them out to radio! Book gigs! All these things have to be done to have a successful music career, but there’s no one there to give you a schedule and a due-date and require that you do them. You need to get yourself to do those things, and since, sometimes, they’re not easy and sometimes they’re not enjoyable, you need to find ways to create deadlines or habits or rules to get yourself to do things even when you’d rather not. Because if you don’t do those things, you won’t actually have much of an academic career or a music career. And that’s ultimately, your choice. A corollary to that first observation is that you have to be willing to let go of what you’re working on and send it out into the world. It (the article, the book, the song, the CD) will never actually be perfect and if you spend all of your time working on it and worrying that it isn’t good enough (or isn’t as good as the first one you wrote/made) . . . well, it won’t be, because no one will have seen/heard it. I suspect there are as many musicians with only one CD as there are scholars with only one book . . . the second big project is the real hurdle, and being willing to send imperfect work out into the world is a necessary part of the endeavor. But also, you need to get used to rejection. And then get up and put yourself out there again. You submit things to journals that don’t take them, apply for jobs you don’t get. You send CDs to radio stations that don’t play them and submit to gigs you are not chosen for. There is probably more rejection than there is success, for all but the most accomplished people in these fields. And that’s just part of the endeavor. If you allow fear of rejection to keep you from trying, or actual rejection to keep you from trying again, you won’t have the chance to succeed. It also means that the most important thing you can do is make friends in your field. When I was first introduced to the concept of “networking” I ran the other direction, because I hate self-promotion, am basically an introvert, and find people who did what I thought of as “networking” to be slimy. But in both academia and music I’ve learned that what successful networking is differs from that image. Find the people whose work you respect and with whom you would want to hang out. And then hang out with them, support them, bounce ideas off of them, tell other people that you think they’re great scholars, teachers, songwriters, performers. Do good things for them without expecting a quid pro quo, and there will be other people who do good things for you. There are people you’re genuinely happy to see at conferences (either academic or music conferences), and hanging out with them, exchanging ideas, collaborating . . . that counts as networking, and it’s actually enjoyable and useful Finally, you’re never off-duty. Unlike a 9-to-5 job, you can’t leave it “at the office” and there’s no point in time at which you’re “done.” It’s one of my pet peeves that people outside of education don’t understand that part about academia – not just that the amount of time you’re working isn’t just (or even primarily, or even close to) the amount of time you spend in the classroom, but that once you have a research career there’s never a time when you’ve finished your work. Even when the book has been written, it needs to be edited, page proofed, etc. . . . and then when it’s out and published between covers you start on the next one. The same thing is true with writing songs or making a CD. You’re never done, you can never stop. Which means that you have to, in some ways, both love and believe in what you’re doing, even when there’s rejection and exhaustion and parts of the job you don’t always enjoy. So my final observation is that both are meaningful endeavors that permeate your entire life -- they pretty much have to be. And I’m extremely lucky to have two such careers.