Kenneth Atchity - How to Quit Your Day Job and Live Out Your Dreams: A Guide to Transforming Your Career

HOW TO QUIT YOUR DAY JOB AND LIVE OUT YOUR DREAMS

HOW TO QUIT YOUR DAY JOB AND LIVE OUT YOUR DREAMS

A Guide to Transforming Your Career

By Kenneth Atchity

SKYHORSE PUBLISHING

Copyright 2012 by Kenneth Atchity

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN 978-1-61608-686-2

Printed in the United States of America

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

The difference between myself and a mad man Is that I am not mad.

Salvador Dali

Dream abides. It is the only thing that abides. Vision abides.

Miguel de Unamuno

I used to think people doing things weird were weird. That was before I realized that people doing things weird werent weird at all. It was the people who were saying they were weird who were weird.

Paul McCartney

I think the only immoral thing is for a being not to live every moment of his life with the utmost intensity.

Jos Ortega y Gasset

ALSO BY KENNETH ATCHITY

In Praise of Love

Eterne in Mutabilitie: The Unity of The Faerie Queene

Homers Iliad: The Shield of Memory

Sleeping with an Elephant: Selected Poems

Italian Literature: Roots & Branches

A Writers Time: A Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision

Homer: Critical Essays

The Mercury Transition

Cajun Household Wisdom

The Renaissance Reader

Writing Treatments That Sell

The Classical Greek Reader

The Classical Roman Reader

How to Publish Your Novel

Rainbows for Hana

Seven Ways to Die (completed for William Diehl)

The Messiah Matrix

For Kayoko
"for the duration

CONTENTS

Go for it!

Our Maddening Type C Personality

Accountant, Visionary, and the Minds Eye

Whats the Plan?

Stealing Time for Your Dream

A Day in the Type C Life

Money Mania

Your Mind/Body Asset Base

Dealing with People: Family, Spouses, Best Friends, Ex-friends, Associates, Winners, Losers, Saviors, Naysayers, White Knights, Black Knights, Clay Gods, and the Little Red Hen

Failing Forward

Go for it!

JUNG: Neurosis is no substitute for genuine suffering.

ATCHITY: Take pride in your pain.

H ow many times have you felt as if you were hurtling toward a brick wall at ninety mph, and someone supposedly dear to you gave you the advice, Slow down! or Relax? As many times as Ive been advised to slow down, Ive wondered whether hitting the wall at thirty mph was truly preferable to hitting it at ninety. If youre going to go splat, make it a complete splat! How else will you find out in time whether that wall is, in fact, as you imagined, the secret door to your dreams?

This book is about the speed and shape of your creative lifeand about the wall that so often becomes a door. Your chosen speed and trajectory are precisely what distinguish you, a Type C personality, from the others who are saying, Relax.

If youre one of those fortunate souls whose attitude is always perfect, who goes through life with an eternal smile of confidence, and who has never found it necessary to scream or cry, this book is not for you. I wish I could say, through the years of my midlife career transit, that Ive always been up. The truth is, Ive had to build my upness, sometimes from what felt like scratch, nearly every day. I like to think its because the life Ive chosen requires me to do things Ive never done before, things Im not always certain I can find a way of doing.

What Makes You an Authority?

EINSTEIN: The punishment fate has given me for my hatred of authority is making me one.

ATCHITY: Authority comes from describing the clear pattern things reveal in retrospect.

Once upon a time I resigned my position as tenured professor of comparative literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles to pursue a new, full-time career as freelance writer, independent producer, literary manager, and entrepreneurial story merchant. I exchanged a thirty-year comfort horizon (how much of the future you can envision as being covered by income-generating contracts presently in hand) for one that has ranged from a mere twenty-four hours to twelve months at the very bestnormally hovering precariously between forty-five and ninety days. When people told me that my midlife career change was insane, I reminded them (and myself) of Salvador Dalis taunt: The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad. Regardless of how that struck my interrogator, it made me feel better.

My decision to resign from my tenured position became final in the middle of a December snowstorm in Montreal, where I was taking a leave of absence from Occidental College to supervise the production of the Shades of Love series of romantic comedies, which I had conceived and was producing for Lorimar-Warner-Astral. The decision followed on the heels of an event that brought the familiar sensation that everything happens for a reason: I was scheduled to play the extra part of a professor in Mort Ransens Sincerely, Violet, but had been delayed by a snowstorm. By the time I finally arrived on the set, the scene had already been shot, using an extra. I decided right then and there that I simply wasnt meant to play a professor, even in fictionthat it was high time to resign my tenure. My appearance as an extra was rescheduled for the next day: I ended up playing a graphologist.

Although the incident in Montreal provoked immediate action, the decision had been a long time in the making, first conceived twelve years earlier while I was serving as a Fulbright professor at the University of Bologna. On Valentines Day of that year, I received a telegram from Occidentals dean of the faculty informing me that Id been granted tenure.

My immediate reaction to this news surprised me: I became depressed.

The depression continued for at least a year, compounded by my difficulty finding colleagues who could relate to such a bizarre reaction to what everyone else considered good news. I should have been ecstatic.

I finally figured it out for myself: I felt trapped, suffocated. My oldest recurrent nightmare as a child was of being suffocated by an enormous blanket not of my own weaving. Yes, the box I now found myself in was a comfortable one; but it was still a boxa gilded cage. As much as I loved teaching, as much as I had succeeded at it, I was having trouble with the thought that for the next thirty-nine years Id be able to predict my schedule twelve months in advance. I felt that my life was spinning out of control, coming to an end, and that without knowing how, I had prematurely become a zombie.