Career: Painter, Baker, PhD, Language-Educator… or What?

you all already know though I spend a
lot of time thinking about my long-term options in terms of career and education and I have to have a very different paths opening up in front of me sometimes I think I should just go back to Canada and enroll in a course in a beacon there is one College in Canada that I know of that doesn't just have a general you know certificate program you know practical college certificate program in baking running a bakery but they also have a specialized course within it on vegan baking thing I should do that take on that direction you know possibly work in bakeries for Fears possibly run my own vegan bakery or some kind of food service linked to veganism as a result I mean at the opposite extreme of course I could get a PhD in almost any formal academic discipline linked to politics sociology history Asian Studies wouldn't quite a number of different fields that have a background in and you know I've been thinking too but whether or not I should get an MPA MPA is masters of Public Administration and that might be useful for running a vegan nonprofit for organizing a foundation or institution for the movement but also it could be useful for running some kind of educational business linked to teaching languages at this point studying and teaching languages is a lifelong burden for me could I run a school in Canada as a nonprofit that taught Chinese to white people and black people taught Chinese to non Chinese people basically taught Chinese as a language to adult students I'm presuming or you know university aged students or what have you I'm not assuming a children's school but uh you know fee-for-service based private sector educational institution similar to many a visited in person and similar to the one that I was myself a student at when I was in command and then would it be possible long for me to match that career path and running that kind of small foundation small business small institution to match that with my own interest in endangered languages including Korean a Ghibli so in Canada what I imagine is you have a foundation like that maybe your main thing is teaching Chinese maybe you also take on some teachers to teach French Spanish German whatever the market is looking for whatever this shortage of teachers and educational options opportunities and maybe you can take on other languages but then maybe you can apply for government grants and funding and do fundraising and on a charitable basis also offer education and outreach for Cree a Jib way Mohawk or other languages that are native to Canada those of you have been following this channel for a long time would know I really do have an interest in that now to be clear I do not imagine myself ever being a Chinese language teacher but I think I could be a manager who is managing a foundation like that and hiring and selecting the teachers what have you so I mean I really think about a tremendously diverse range of jobs some of them very directly linked to veganism as a movement like baking I wouldn't be interested in becoming a baker at all if I wasn't vegan or if it didn't have the potential to be a positive part of you know my future in the movement and etc etc all the way over to totally academic Dennis PhD work or something like the Masters of Public Administration between his master's Republican administration you should learn how to run a non-profit foundation or agency how to deal with all the government paperwork how to do how to do every every element of running that kind of Foundation agency if it's a good program and if it's a bad program who knows what you're gonna get and you know there were other options that I've even talked to openly on patreon that are really outside of the box this may surprise some of you guys but I did have enough of background of the Arts I feel confident that I could good enough living if I went back to arts college and got a degree have simply got a college degree in painting there's a small private well all the school all the private schools in Canada actually receive government handouts so I don't know if it's called a private or public for anyway but there's a small arts college in in Victoria called Vancouver Island School the arts and I actually do feel confident that I could just take some courses there in painting and sit down and work seriously on you know my skills of my skills as an illustrator and that I could pretty quickly be turning over canvases on the art market and making a reasonable amount of money doing so now you know I have that expectation rightly or wrongly partly because of the many painters I have known face to face in my own life and probably because the history and experience of read of affairs of painters uh I have no claim to great manual skill in painting things but some of the painters have known were successful what's also true of and you know so often you see painters who do have that skill but don't really have something to say don't really if something interesting or brilliant or provocative to offer on the canvas so you know this question of the medium versus the message and what is it that makes your already interesting and also look I said this to my girlfriend the other day a lot of people involved in the arts part of the problem is that they perceive the role of the artist in the same way that schoolchildren perceive the role of the fireman or the role the policeman they often have an idea of what it means to be an artist that they invented in their own minds eye when they were children they never challenged that and I'm very much at the opposite extreme because my experience is in museums and galleries and the art market and just reading the Art Newspaper and looking critically and constructively at how the art market works and how artists really survive so even though that may seem shocking to some of you guys like what I'm going to finish this degree in Asian Studies and then turn around and become a creative artist become a painter to me that is actually much more reliable route to earning money than say opening a restaurant there are a lot of question marks there but open restaurant including is having the capital the startup money do that or starting the foundation in education there are a lot of hurdles talking about finishing two different university degrees and then going to a bank with a little bit of money I've got and trying to get a bank loan to start that kind of institution that's actually a relatively long and uncertain road and in fact getting some credentials taking some courses and really working hard which I'm capable of doing just wake up early and go to bed late at night working on your own skills as a painter and taking courses at a college building that up and you know having the humility and the pragmatic attitude to recognize that you are producing canvasses especially early in your career that are gonna hang in hotels and motels and office buildings and boardrooms you know what I mean and people's private apartments you know understanding you know the function of the fine arts not so different from the decorative arts you know having that that kind of attitude I'm actually much more confident that within a couple of years I could be paying my own rent through the fine arts than I am that I could be doing it through the tortuous route of taking my political science background putting it into masters of Public Administration than putting public administration to a productive career in basically nonprofit education and language education and I don't know if I go into baking I think my career prospects as a vegan Baker or exactly as good as the money I've got my own pocket because I don't think anyone else is gonna give me startup capital to startup or operate that kind of business so that is what I've been thinking about lately and I'm making this video as I warned partly so I can share it with my own mom what a mom