Careers Syndromes Nine: Unsustainable

Part One.
Part Two.
Part Three.
Part Four.
Part Five.
Part Six.
Part Seven.
Part Eight.
Part Nine.
Part Ten.

Know when to give up. Don’t try too hard for too long – especially to be an actress, or write a novel. (Oh, I don’t know, though...)

I had driving lessons for five years. I might have succeeded if I'd stuck at it, but would you set out on a course of action if you were told it was going to take ten years and cost £30,000? A plan to gain confidence and learn social skills needs to pay off within a few years, not a few decades. So Freudian analysis will sort your problems? But it takes thousands of pounds and 20 years? So it’s no use at all, really. You want a solution NOW! Because youth’s a stuff will not endure. (Robert Herrick)

To pay his sophomore year tuition, he opened a pizza business, working 12 hours each night and attending class during the day. But it was unsustainable. (Jeff Chu, Does Jesus Really Love Me?)

You have a business idea and set up an operation. The idea is good, the product is delicious – but margins are just too small. 

I spent 6 months sending 3-4 carefully crafted query letters per week to potential agents whom I vetted via the Internet. I kept a spreadsheet that logged all of my submissions, dates, potential agent names, addresses, profiles, and their responses. On average, of the 100 query letters I submitted in total, I received 20 boilerplate responses (“I’m sorry, but your manuscript is not right for our list, blah blah blah…”). The rest of my queries landed in a cyber black hole. It was about this time that despair was starting to set in. (Via the Web)

Celebrating hitting 100 rejections (for story and essay submissions, residency and fellowship applications, pitches, queries). The milestone represents hard work, wild hope, and believing in my work enough to risk disappointment. Here's to the next 100. (Rachel León)

Growing up I always wanted to be an actor. It never happened cause of my stutter and I just grew out of that dream. (Photographer, messynessychic.com)

Inevitably many students of limited talent spend huge amounts of time and money pursuing some brass-ring occupation, only to see their dreams denied. (Web. Live the dream, eh?) 

In her first autobiographical novel, One Pair of Feet, Monica Dickens recalls a year spent at a small, shabby drama school. The principal is only really interested in the good-looking boys, and encourages them to “wear out their youth in agents’ waiting rooms”. 

That little flame of ambition (to be an actress) guttered quietly for years and finally went out. (Elizabeth Jane Howard, Slipstream) 

Dreams were “beginning to fade and curl at the edges” (Joanne Drayton, Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime). 

The end-stage versions of the lovable slackers. (Time magazine)

A man has a lovely life spending most of his time sitting in a café in the square of his small Italian town, discussing philosophy. One day he wakes up to realise that he is bald, fat and middle-aged and has never achieved anything.