How to leverage both artistic and durable skills to achieve
greater financial success
… Singers, join the chorus you’ve heard from adolescence: Talent is overrated. Talent only gets you so far. Yet just like creativity, opera defines this loaded word narrowly. What if instead, we quantified all of our talents and earned with them? Not simply for individual wealth, the ripples of this newfound agency could transform our industry. In retraining and reframing the value of talent as abundant industries do, we too could compete, innovate and be more self-sufficient. “People conflate a lack of focus with a lack of talent, but the strongest predictor of future success is your perseverance or grit”, Scott Galloway, NyU, Stern School of Business. “But don’t mistake focus for passion. People who tell you to follow your passion are often already rich. Follow your talent. The accoutrements that accompany being great at something–relevance, admiration, camaraderie, money–will make you passionate about whatever it is. Focus on financial success, as sector dynamics will trump passion.” We in the arts must start to do both. We develop enormous grit, through the discipline required to practice classical music. We could be leveraging both our artistic talents and durable skills in the broader marketplace for far greater financial success and psychological security. And in so doing, educate a broader audience and change cultural attitudes across many strata of society.
Money is not a five-letter word
How best to develop talent in a talent-rich industry plagued by scarcity? And how can we balance financial security as a worthy goal alongside the philosophical and spiritual ones of self-expression and beauty? As my friend, director Kelly Robinson would say, verb this intention into action. Let’s dismiss the myth of the Bohemian, the starving artist, somehow morally superior to other professions. In Italian, we would say cazzate. Look it up, I’ll wait…Most artists I know lie awake worrying about rent, student debt and future earning potential that shuts them out of home ownership, retirement savings and for women especially, forces them to defer decisions about having children. Galloway elaborates: “There is an algebra to long term wealth creation. Find your focus, something you’re good at that has over 90% employment. Work hard and get into the top quartile and you will make a very good living. Wealth isn’t about how much you make, it’s about how much you save. Discipline.” We didn’t choose an industry with an employment rate of 90%. But our talents, if we were to empower ourselves and fill our skills gaps, give us major opportunities for earning well, around and between contracts. Classical Singer Magazine wrote about the rise in portfolio careers in 2019. Kelly Hill of Hill Strategies, a resource for performing arts statistics in Canada, explains: “My work has shown that workers in the arts are much more likely than other Canadians to hold multiple jobs.” 68% of artists are self-employed and the majority of singers remain underemployed, quietly teaching and temping between opera contracts.
Agency for Artists
We are overcoached and undereducated and ironically we lose our sense of wonder and curiosity to understand how it all works, including the business of opera. No complaining here, let’s solve this. The catch-all advice to those of us wanting to understand the whole is “go get an MBA!” Tosh. We need mentoring and a course or two–we artists have many durable, marketable skills already. The uncertainty of our contracts, the relentless, public criticism, the discipline required in practice, our solo work on interpretation and vulnerability, our risk taking–unlike accountants, coders, academics–we are resilient. We think nonlinearly, we tell captivating stories, we can parse and integrate feedback, we are charismatic. We own the mental game, too, with nerves in high-pressure situations.
Ask bigger questions
In order to leverage all of our talent, especially in earning outside of the arts, we must first reconnect with the curiosity that drew us to perform in the first place. Do you know how your industry functions? How does your theatre pay you? What’s the breakdown of revenue, government versus private sector? Do you agree with this model? We must prove our worth to a public with limited access to music as education or as a public good and to institutions perennially skeptical of our contribution. Canadian culture does not value artists, but we ourselves do an abysmal job of understanding the whole and articulating why our skills matter. Human Resources best practices, though a distant abstraction for us in the arts, are instructive here. Carolyn Leering, AVP HR Business Partner at Sunlife Financial explains: “We place a high priority on developing talent and ensuring we are building a diverse workforce full of unique capabilities and different perspectives. One-size-fits-all rarely works – we are looking for that creative spark that will help us deliver innovative solutions while building an environment that attracts, retains and develops top talent.” Educating ourselves provides a foundation to understand how organizations in any sector are structured, how they engage with their community or how siloed they have become. This becomes self-sufficiency: earning power both inside and outside of our shrinking sector. This enables new connections and expertise and a critical path toward our survival. When artists go into corporations and institutions, they prove themselves to a far wider (and more affluent) audience. They need us! And we in turn can bring their knowledge back to innovate for opera, not just as bums in seats. And this is the most creative part of all–on stage we constantly solve problems in real time with agility and fearlessness and poise. Time to stop waiting for Opera Directors to solve our problems for us. With just a little education, we’d be better at it, anyway. An opera singer is very often perceived as the most interesting person in the room. Let’s prove it.