Some girls take courses at all the best schools in France
Riding their horses and learning their modern dance.
They’re clever and cultured and worldly wise.
But you see the world through a child’s wide eyes.
Their dreams are grand ones, you want what’s just in reach.
Some girls you learn from, some you teach.

—“Some Girls” from “Once On This Island”

Some girls grow up fighting about things like:

• Their choice of boyfriends
• The way the dress
• Maybe they get bad grades in school / didn’t get into the right school
• Drug or other alcohol related problems
• Going out/partying too much/too late
• Getting into trouble with the law
• Cheating on significant others / backstabbing friends

I have fights which are work/career related. Not “I’ve decided to become a stripper” or “I can’t be bothered and want to work at fast food counters” type fights. Just “I know what I’m doing right now is not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life because as crazy as it may seem to the rest of the world I really do want to write Broadway musicals so I would really like to get some reasonable sort of work/life balance and more time to myself so I can work on this” fights.

I like to think – and hope that I am not alone in thinking – that I am a reasonably mature, stable, high-achieving, independent, focused young woman who knows what she wants but doesn’t foolishly chase after it without triply thinking things through and several contingency plans. I’m well aware of the sheer virtual impossibility of this dream; and thus the proportionally greater effort that needs to be applied to actually get anywhere with it.

Unfortunately, I still have the same five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes as everyone else. On any given day, work and work related activities (including work done before, during and after the commute to/from work) consume 840 minutes; other activities necessary for survival (e.g. sleep, eat, personal hygiene) take up 600 minutes; leaving me with a scant – let’s see now – oh, ZERO minutes left over to do anything.

The insightful reader will probably point out that I’ve not specifically mention weekends at the moment. Kudos to you, I’m just going to say that I’ve not really had a full weekend off without doing any work since I’ve been back from New York. Not to mention also teaching piano on the weekends, dealing with massive issues with an apartment and somehow trying to fit some sort of social life in. The insightful reader might also point out that I obviously do not want this bad enough if I am still trying to fit a social life in. To you, I’m going to say two things:

1. We need rest and relaxation to produce anything worthwhile. No wonder I can’t write anything good – not only am I really new at this, I’m also sleep deprived and stressed.
2. If you thought that was an excuse, try this instead – I refuse to believe that in this day and age, we have to choose an extreme of one or the other. Yes, I am Gen Y and frankly, I don’t think it is so unreasonable of me to want a career that I love and that I am passionate about which still leaves me with ample non-work time for a social life.

Should I choose the smoothest course, Steady as a beating drum? Is all my dreaming at an end? Or do you still wait for me Dreamgiver? Just around the river bend.

Anyway. Somehow whenever the discussion about me taking my current job part time so I have time to pursue what I really want to do with my life comes up, I inevitably come across two viewpoints:

1. “THAT’S SO AWESOME YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO FOR IT!!!” (thanks all who fall into this camp…much morale support needed and appreciated)
2. “…” – such silences can be split between
   • Those who think I’m an idiot for even considering it because how could you possibly contemplate a deviation from the tightly structured career path at a Big Four Accounting Firm (with all capital letters included) and that I must be lazy; and
   • those who think it means I’m not serious about and/or committed to whatever it is I am taking part time.

The former group of detractors normally come from the point of view where in their mind it is incomprehensible to take any sort of reduction in monetary benefits (i.e. salary) to gain in other benefits (i.e. work/life balance, time to pursue your life’s passion). This attitude is also welded to the concept of “sacrifice now, enjoy later” and the need to “secure the future”. A few problems I have with this argument are:

• Monetary benefits are all well and good, but as a senior manager I admire once said to me, “past a certain dollar value, it doesn’t matter how much more they pay me, it doesn’t make up for the extra time at work”. Of course, I’ve also spoken with partners who have said the exact opposite (“it’s certainly worth it, I get paid a lot”) but I question how in tune that is with my own personal values and the way I want to live my life.
• I appreciate the need to plan for the long-term but really, when is enough enough? Past a certain point, the dollar value earned just doesn’t give the same incremental gain to happiness or fulfillment. And it’s not like I’ll be able to take any of it with me anyway.
• This is all based on the premise of living for a very long time. Not that I am trying to jinx or ill wish anything, but we can make all the plans we want but we really have no idea what will happen tomorrow. There is No Day But Today. I don’t want to be forever working and waiting until that far off “someday” when I have enough money/security/other such and such to start pursuing my dreams. I don’t want to look back and have massive regrets that I’ve wasted my life.
• I don’t think just because I want to do something part time means I can’t be serious about what I choose to do in the time I’ve allocated to that part of my life or that I’m not committed. Although there is a positive correlation between time invested and seriousness/commitment to the task, it’s not necessarily causal; strategic focus, discipline, efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility are better measures.

Sometimes I think I’m stuck living in the future so much that I don’t know how to enjoy the present anymore. I feel physically and mentally drained and utterly exhausted every moment of every day. I dread every morning because I know I’ve got a massive stack of things left undone that I’ve already pushed back and need to be done because I can’t push them back any longer. I’m feeling guilty sitting here and writing this instead of working, because I had originally planned on doing work tonight but I couldn’t bring myself to. Just like how I was meant to work last Sunday but couldn’t force myself past the massive headache and then subsequently felt deeply guilty for not working.

Most of all, I wish I didn’t care as much about not letting other people down. I wish I could just let go of it all and not feel a thing. I wish I could bring myself to go on and buy a plane ticket right now and just…leave…

In a cruel twist of irony, I get this in my inbox today from Velocity Rewards, telling me about the great V Australia sales fares from Sydney to LA.

Coming back to Sydney after spending months is New York is always such a bittersweet thing for me. It’s so hard for me to describe the dichotomy of the person I become when I’m there and the person I am away from it all. Life in New York just seems more vivid and more real; sometimes I drift through the days here in a grey haze and nothing registers. Even with the ridiculous working hours (ridiculous because they really aren’t necessary), when I leave work at 10 or 11 PM, it still feels so early because your evening plans start at midnight. Leaving work at 6:30 PM in Sydney – early as that is – still feels incredibly late. It’s dark, everything is closed and I’ve got a horridly long commute home. Most of my waking hours – except for a few cherished moments on the weekends and some times after dinner during the week – kind of feel like this intellectually interesting puzzle which is both surreal and meaningless.

Anyway. The reason things have been so quiet here (apart from the usual refrain of work, etc) is I’ve been planning a trip to NYC (surprise, surprise) to study at Tisch over the summer (northern hemisphere summer). I’ve wanted this so badly for so long – pretty much ever since I found out more courses like the Musical Theatre Writing Workshop focusing on the three different components of musical theatre writing are offered over the summer session. While EY is reasonably accommodating as far as large employers go, the full two year Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at Tisch has never been a realistic option.

Summer school, however, was totally within reach, after all the scrimping and saving, and begging to get time off work. And as soon as I knew I could afford it, I spent – goodness only knows how many – hours talking to managers and partners and clients, rearranging my portfolio and the timing of my jobs so it could all happen. My time off has been booked in for months and months in advance. All the paperwork had been done. While I was in NYC for work, I’d done my homework and gotten internships at theatre companies lined up.

Originally I had enrolled in three courses – plus internship time – which was probably a little too ambitious to begin with (classes from 1 through 7 PM, Monday to Thursday for four weeks, plus additional classwork and other stuff on top? Bring it on! Yeah…I never learn). So when I got the first email, I actually breathed a little sigh of relief:

Cancelled - Crafts of Musical Theatre: Bookwriting

Just over a week ago, after finalising all my visa paperwork and getting the visa appointment scheduled, I got this:

Maybe Cancelled - Crafts of Musical Theatre: Music

Yesterday, at 6:12 AM, I was sitting here, shivering in the pre-dawn winter freeze, about to walk out the door to catch the bus so I could make my visa appointment at 8 AM in the city, and I get this:

Cancelled - Crafts of Musical Theatre: Music

Too good to be true. I am not paying ~$3k in flight and visa costs and 1 month off work to study 1 subject. Thanks, common sense and economics. I think a lifetime’s worth of careful planning – with said planning paying off – has spoiled me. There’s only been once other instance in my life where perfect planning did not get me what I wanted. I remember being immediately and totally devastated. At the moment, I feel – numb. At least I think I feel numb. That’s when you don’t feel anything, right?

I’m not sure the full impact has really sunk in – I think I’m still in shock. Maybe it’ll start to hit once I start emailing my friends in NYC to let them know I have to cancel on the plans we’d been making (like all the restaurants we didn’t get to try the last time around, the events we wanted to go to or trips we were gonna take), or my cousin who has also booked in leave to fly down to NYC from Canada so we can hang out for the second time in the fifteen odd years we’ve been apart since we were kids.

Or you know, we could go with the “I’ve-grown-as-a-person-and-learned-to-be-mature-and-resilient” and I’m dealing with this in a rational manner. I kind of like that idea more anyway, but my gut is telling me that I’m in denial.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do. Everything at work has been scheduled with absolute precision so that I can finish everything by the end of June – since I’d wanted to fly in just in time to experience the crazy American-ness of the Fourth of July. It seems pointless now to take four weeks of leave, but I can’t think with all the noise going on. I feel like I need some time off just to meditate on what I’m going to do.

Maybe for once in my life I should do the irrational thing – caution be damned – and go anyway, just for the hell of it and see where I end up. You only live life once, right? It’s moments like this that I wish I could just let go of the constant analysis, weighing of pros and cons, drawing up budgets, logic, planning – all of it! – and just do what every single atom of my soul wants and run off to New York with nothing but $100 in my pocket, my laptop, keyboard and some clothes and live the life of a starving artist. Right up to the point where my inner cynic pulls a reality check on me.

Sometimes I really hate being the sensible and mature person. It feels like I end up with more work and having less fun. Usually some level of my mind understand that being sensible and mature pays its own dividends in the long-term, but this is not one of those moments.

This is an I am meant to be going to New York to study musical theatre in TWO WEEKS for a whole month where I don’t have to deal with numbers and accounting standards and audit methodology and being an intelligent automaton ticking off checklists and can actually go and do something creative but everything – EVERYTHING – I have worked for over the past year has just…collapsed…and there isn’t ANYTHING I can do about it moment.

This post has been really hard to write, in part because my thoughts are going everywhere and I have no idea how to structure this mess into anything cohesive; and in part because some of it I don’t really want to think about. I keep hoping that somehow when I go to sleep that I’ll find out I’ve really been having some sort of weird extended waking nightmare and this hasn’t happened; but even though it’s two in the morning now, I don’t – can’t – sleep because, well, that would make the next day come faster and facts are always harder to deny during the day, and the fact remains that I am not going to go back to New York for the summer.

A big thing I had really hoped for this July was to get clarity on what it is I want to do with my music – whether it’s something I can really look at pursuing as a viable career or whether it’s something that I have talent but no genius for. “Talent isn’t genius” and I’m so scared of finding out what the answer is that I half wonder if I don’t subconsciously make myself work stupid hours so I have all these excuses as to why I’m not trying hard to find out the answer here, that I have to push myself to go all the way to New York to find it (or maybe it’s just that I really, really love the city).

But now I think my thoughts are pretty much going in circles and I can’t really say anything else that I haven’t already said. I guess I should start the process of telling everyone that I’m not actually coming and try to get some sleep. Work and its deadlines make allowances for no one. Sometimes I wish I had less work ethic/scruples and more willfulness/self-interest; then for a penny I’d throw my arms up in protest and call in “sick” tomorrow…yet despite all of this, I’m still going to be at work by 8:30 AM.

C’est la vie.

Dropped - Crafts of Musical Theatre: Lyrics

At any rate, I guess it’s always easier to show progress at the very beginning, because there’s so many steps you can take – and most of them are fairly easy. But when you’ve gotten started and you’ve dived in, it’s sink or swim, and swimming for a long time gets tiring.

Anyway. I still want to try and write a song every two weeks. Since 30 September has just passed, my submission this fortnight goes out to my fellow auditors. We have survived another three months of the craziness that is busy season.

Image by Horrgakx on Flickr.

I originally wrote most of the lyrics in late August, right after I finished what has probably been my toughest engagement ever – and I think I’ve had some pretty tough jobs before. Every day, I got up at 6 AM to catch the 7 AM bus so I could arrive at 8 AM, worked through lunch until 7:35 PM at night so I could catch the last bus at 7:48 PM (and oh boy, if I missed this one, I had to take the train which would take even longer). I would keep working on the bus for another hour before I had to walk home, force myself to eat and fall straight into bed.

This would be the pattern of my existence for an entire month. As the deadline drew closer, weekends did not necessarily offer me any respite. It all culminated in what I can only describe as…hell. I will never, ever forget how it feels to start the day with a 7:30 AM meeting and work at a feverish pace in a meeting room, ticking and bashing my way through a set of financial statements until 3 AM (~19 hours). I got home at 4 AM, slept for 2 hours and went back to work until 1 AM the very next day (~17 hours). Yup. That’s nearly a full week’s worth of chargeable hours (which is 37.5 hrs) in just two days.

As you can imagine, I was in a really weird head space when I wrote these lyrics. I was feeling so overwhelmed, exhausted, angry, frustrated, fed up and yet giddy, light headed and perversely satisfied that I had gotten through the torturous experience with no visible damage (though how many years I’ve lost off my lifespan and mental damage sustained due to the stress…well, I have no idea).

Audit Busy Season by Leng

Audit Busy Season

Stumble outta bed in the morning
Walk in with my eyes closed and yawning
Triple shot of caffeine while my empty stomach’s reeling
How I hate that busy season feeling

At nine o’clock my phone starts ringing
By one, all I’ve done is nothing
Every fifteen minutes my internet is dropping
How I hate that busy season feeling

It’s dark on my way in, dark on my way out
Got a massive suitcase I’m carting about
“We’re not ready” goes the client’s tune
They didn’t read the audit pack ’til today at noon
How am I gonna get this done?
I gotta get this done!!

It’s three and I’ve finally got something
The client says “We’d better be signing”
Deadline’s moved ahead two weeks to Friday evening
How I hate that busy season feeling

It’s dark on my way in, dark on my way out
Got a massive suitcase I’m carting about
“I’m so sorry, I gotta cancel again”
“Think I’m gonna be working at least until ten”
‘Cos I gotta get this done
I gotta get this done!!

It’s seven P.M. we’re still reconciling
These TB accounts don’t agree to a thing
This formula’s wrong and the spreadsheet’s confusing
And now my computer’s crashed without saving

It’s a quarter to three A.M.
Finally signed the accounts for them
I’m collapsing into bed
Is this what it’s like to be dead?

It’s dark on my way in, dark on my way out
Got a massive suitcase I’m carting about
“I’m so sorry, I can’t come in today”
“Think I’m gonna be going somewhere far away”
‘Cos I’ve finally got this done
I’ve got this done!!
I’m done
—Music & Lyrics by Deborah Lau

Lyrically, I wanted to experiment with identities. The first real song I wrote with one of my classmates from the NYU Tisch Musical Theatre Writing Workshop (hi Chiara if you’re reading!) had these fantastic lyrics that all ended in “-tion” in every line. It gave the whole song this driving rhythm and a frenetic feeling. I don’t know how to shorten “They didn’t read the audit pack ’til today at noon”; one day when I figure it out, I will come back and fix it.

Formwise, I was tossing between the classic AABA and verse-chorus-bridge. In the end I went with a compromise – the chorus doesn’t kick in until the verse has been repeated twice. The bridge is in two parts, which I guess is kind of weird, but it was the only way I could think of to convey the surreality that is working at 3 AM. Seriously. The chorus was originally going to be the same every time, but since there’s a built in narrative, I thought it would make more sense if the middle lines changed every time.

Musically, I had a few things running through my head as I was writing the lyrics. For a long time, I’ve felt like everything I write musically is always very lyrical or classical (thanks, 15 years of classical piano lessons) so I tried to do something a bit different. In my head, I had a cross between Smashmouth’s “All Star”:

…and Busted’s “What I Go To School For” (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. At least it’s not the Jonas Brothers’ version).

Somehow when I ended up at the keyboard, Ben Folds Five snuck in with “Brick” and it ended up being a lot less pop/rock and more soft piano rock:

Here’s to surviving another busy season.

Jonathan was struck by inspiration and composed this beautiful piece of instrumental music a few weeks ago for me to write some lyrics to…and I am very, very late (I’ve got a myriad of wonderful excuses, revolving around work, being busy going out, being busy going to uni open days, etc etc etc). I wish when I get inspired, I write stuff like this.

Anyway. The first image I got in my mind when I listened to this piece of music was “Final Fantasy” (and I promptly was very jealous of Jon being able to channel Nobuo Uematsu), as one of those poignant, wistful character themes…but the more I thought about it, the more the music sounded full of regret/melancholy.

When I initially wrote these lyrics, I was thinking along the lines of when Kim sings “I’d Give My Life For You” in Miss Saigon. I first saw a fellow student perform that in our Broadway music production and it took my breath away. Thinking back about my grandparents and my parents growing up and growing old, thinking about how I grew up and will grow old and how – when I have kids – my kids will grow up and grow old and what kind of world it would be…it reminds me life has become so much “easier” on the surface but so much more complex, competitive and difficult. Then I started thinking about what it would be like to grow old and simultaneously look back at my past and into my children’s or grandchildren’s futures. And a few weeks ago, when I saw “Gwen in Purgatory“, the picture that was painted of growing old in today’s society was truly bleak.

The scene in my mind as I wrote this was an old woman cradling a sleeping child and singing a lullaby. Her husband and the friends from her youth are long gone, her children are grown and have grown distant, busy with their own lives. But while she sits here, this small scrap of humanity in her arms makes her feel as if she is not alone. The past is a hazy golden age lost to the passage of time, which has stolen along more swiftly than she thought possible. And already she can see the babe in her arms grown into adulthood and herself fading away.

Image from Wisconsin Historical Images on Flickr.

I thought for a long time about whether I should post this and I almost didn’t:

1. It would have been easier to just…forget all about this project. To be honest, I haven’t seriously worked on project 26 Songs for the last few weeks.
2. I have never been a really good singer, nor have I done any serious singing since high school. I am so embarrassed by my shocking vocals that words fail to describe my mortification (poorly pitched, poor breathing, poor diction, poor/strange accents, very bad “switching” in registers…the list goes on and I won’t bore you by going into detail, I’ll let you fill in the blanks).
3. Criticism always feels personal (even when it isn’t) when you put a lot of your soul into something, so I hate sharing things I’ve created when I feel like they aren’t good enough.
4. I am really bad at expressing myself eloquently through words and hence one of my goals for doing this challenge was to improve my lyric writing. There aren’t a lot of “real” songs that I have written. In fact, this one would be something like number…6. I look at the lyrics I’ve written and I just want to cringe, but I don’t know how to do any better yet. Please bear with me.

In the end, I decided I would go ahead and blog this because:

1. I really need some sort of kick in the pants to keep myself accountable. This is just one way of getting it.
2. This isn’t about my singing. This is about me trying to become a better songwriter, and I need feedback.
3. One day when I write a real Broadway musical, some people will like it and some people will hate it. And they will write mean, awful, hurtful things about my songs, my music and about me and I will probably cry about it. I figure I could use some practice in getting used to it, getting over it and working on drawing out the valid criticisms and points for improvement.

And to be honest, I don’t really know how many people actually read what I write here in any great detail, so without further ado, here it is.

With (my terrible) vocals: Remember Me (Music: Jonathan Ong | Lyrics: Deborah Lau) by Leng

With only Jonathan’s beautiful music:
improvisation 1 by Jong85

Remember Me

I remember me, a girl begun to dream
Long before you came to be
I remember me, when life used to seem
Full of roads I’ve yet to see

I remember songs, the melodies we made
Stories from before your time
I remember sunlight, I remember shade
Summer rain and star shine
Before today
Before decay

You could spend your life in vain
In grasping for the sky
Or you could spend your life in pain
As every chance bids you goodbye

So many paths, unsure and shadowed
Many choices and mistakes
Some sacrilegious, some hallowed
All yours for you to make

I could tell you which ones to choose
Which ones where you would lose
But I know for sure that you’ll refuse
Want to walk in your own shoes
In your own shoes

Remember me, when I’m too old to dream
And the songs we used to sing
Remember me…
When my memory takes wing
Remember me
My memory

—Music by Jonathan Ong. Lyrics by Deborah Lau.

Not the standard Broadway AABA structure (more of an AABACA rondo form with a long extended instrumental bit in the middle), but worked alright. I think some of the phrases are odd:

• I’m still cringing at the false time/shine rhyme.
• I like idea of shadowed/hallowed but honestly…who says that?! And quite frankly “sacrilegious” is a stretch.
• When I was playing it over and over in my mind, the words sounded okay, but when I got around to singing them, some of them didn’t feel natural to sing.

So plenty of room for improvement! But I’m happy with where it stands as a first attempt.

A few things have happened over the last two months to keep me busy and too tired to blog, not the least being passing my final CA exam and audit busy season hitting me like a ton of bricks.

Now everyone knows to be any good at anything, you either have to have talent or a lot of practice. To be brilliant at anything, you need both. Since no one starts off chasing their dream with the intention of being less than brilliant, theoretically I should be spending all my spare time practicing writing musicals.

Which I have not. Because not only do I succumb to procrastination far too often (and generally on the pretext of exhaustion from work), I am also too scared to write anything that is less than brilliant. I am terrified that all my years of drilling in classical piano has retarded my ability to improvise and create and I’m left only with the ability to interpret what other people have written. I am petrified that my long hiatus from anything musically serious has killed off what little ability of that is left. I am convinced that whatever I write is inevitably going to sound horribly cliche, awful and bland.

The fact is I have never written a song music first. Ever. This majorly bothers me. Someone who aspires to be a composer like Stephen Flaherty or Andrew Lloyd Webber should be able to write music first.

The other thing that bothers me is I feel like I can’t write lyrics first either. The last time I wrote anything creative was six years ago in my final year of high school. I’m paranoid that the last six years of being analytical and writing boring technical accounting memos and business reports have killed my ability to write creatively and to express emotion. As you can see by this long-winded ramble, I am horrible at expressing myself.

Anyway. At the beginning of the month, I got talking with a friend from my piano eisteddfod days about these debilitating fears and we decided we would stop whining and do something about it. Every week, one of us will start off by writing a rough set of lyrics and the other person has a week to come up with some musical ideas then we’ll work together on both music and lyrics until we have a half way decent song. Hopefully at the end of a year, we’ll end up with around 26 songs, some of which I can put in the 20 minute portfolio I need to get into the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at Tisch, New York University.

We’ve started working on our first song already and I’m feel very, very rusty. Things I have realised over the past month include:

• I can’t write music for unstructured lyrics, at least nothing that ends up being a cohesive song. It must be in some sort of variation of a song form. I like the typical AABA structure of musical theatre numbers.
• I do not have a gift for melody, unlike some other people I know who have this marvellous God-given talent for coming up with great melodies. I have to work really, really hard to come up with a passable melody. I am also horribly unoriginal because everything I am writing comes out sounding the same. The accompaniment is pretty blah. I have a total of like…3 chords in the song. Ugh.
• I fail at writing bridges. At first, the “B” sounded so much like the “A” and actually reprises the middle bit of the “A” towards the end that I don’t really know if it qualifies as a proper “B”. I left it for about 2 weeks while I got smashed during audit busy season and came back to do some more work on it tonight. Now the first part of the “B” sounds okay, but I can’t bring it back to “A prime” in a way that musically makes sense.
• I think I might be trying to go for something too fancy with the complicated rhyme scheme. I am crying inside for using the false “time/mind” rhyme. I’m also cringing a little at the use of “page/stage” since it sort of feels like it’s there just to fit the rhyme scheme.
• I fail at improvising awesome piano instrumental solos. I tried for a few hours on my keyboard and just didn’t really get anywhere that I wanted to get so I’ve given up for now and written “placeholder” in my notes. It’s really the highpoint of the whole piece though so we need something much better. I hope Jonathan has some ideas!
• I fail at bringing a song to a satisfying conclusion. The ending is horribly weak. It sounds unresolved and then the ending sounds way too sudden. I feel like it’s not musically interesting enough to drag in a B prime but the way the last A just tapers off and has no real conclusion sucks.
• The best songs, just like the best prose, show, not tell. I think part of the problem is we have really obvious lyrics at the moment, like “I am going to do XYZ”. The line is not inspiring and so I can’t find any inspiring music for it. More rewording of lyrics to follow!
• Hammerstein and Sondheim are right on the money. You cannot write what you don’t feel; if you don’t feel it, then you don’t believe it and the whole song comes off as fake. And it is really, really hard to write music for a lyric you don’t believe in.

Anyway. I will be posting up the stuff we write…when it’s a bit more polished and I don’t feel like I want to die on the spot any time someone hears it. At the moment, only 3 people in the world have seen the first iteration of the first song and it’s all I can do not to try and dig a very, very deep hole in the ground whenever I think about it…

Originally posted on Wed, 23 September 2009 at 01:12 while listening to “At The Beginning”, OST ‘Anastasia’ and feeling Inspired.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to start doing things about my current…situation of not being in the ideal job (promotions and all aside). So this year, during the week of my birthday, I took an afternoon off and got myself was a ticket to the Talent Development Project‘s “Start Me Up” Master Class.

Talent Development Project: Start Me Up – Master Class

Essentially, this was a two-hour Q&A session with a panel of music industry representatives across artists, A&R executives from major recording companies, representatives from copyright/royalties bodies, music publishers and music teachers, with some free musical entertainment thrown in (no, Jessica Mauboy did not perform. Yes, Wes Carr did perform!).

The event was very much targeted towards young performers trying to get into mainstream music, but they did have two members of the panel (Darren Coggan and Jonathon Welch) who are or have been involved in musical theatre. Most of the session consisted of the host, John Foreman, asking the panel a series of pre-determined questions aimed at facilitating discussion, with the last 15 minutes or so reserved for open questions. I wavered for a split second, decided I had nothing to lose and got to sneak in a very specific (and long) question at the very end about how to get into writing musical theatre.

And thank goodness I did. Had I not asked that question, I would not have found out about the…

APRA|AMCOS presents: Songwriter Speaks Evening – With Lynn Ahrens & Stephen Flaherty

Yup. Two weeks ago, I managed to get an invitation (courtesy of the generous Milly Petriella from APRA|AMCOS) to an intimate evening with Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, directly as a result of asking that question in the Master Class. One of 21st Century Broadway’s dream teams who have multiple nominations for Grammy Awards, Academy Awards and Golden Globes, and have won multiple greatly coveted Tony Awards. For those who don’t know them, Ahrens and Flaherty are the team behind the music of the animated feature, “Anastasia”, including the theme song “At The Beginning” as sung by Donna Lewis and Richard Marx. The whole evening was an incredible opportunity as they talked about their backgrounds, their early careers, how they got to where they are today and performed a few of their wonderful songs.

It was really inspiring to hear that Lynn Ahrens used to work in a completely unrelated field, then got to a point where she found that she was meant to be writing for musical theatre, gathered her courage and made the jump to abandon her career in advertising to work as a freelance jingle writer. Stephen Flaherty’s story is also tremendously inspiring – having known what he wanted to do from a very young age, he pursued his dream through formal university music studies doggedly despite growing up in a state (state, not just suburb or city, state) where there was very little in the way of a musical theatre community, eventually making his way to Broadway, New York, New York.

And just when I thought the evening couldn’t get any better, I managed to meet both Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty afterwards to ask them for some words of advice (my paraphrasing) and get some pictures:

Education will only get you so far. My studies weren’t related to musical theatre at all and I didn’t find them helpful. Study the greats – like Sondheim, Hammerstein – and learn from them. Musical theatre relies heavily on collaboration; get out there and meet people, get involved in musical theatre clubs and societies, develop and use your network. Don’t be afraid to take your chances when you get them – just remember to find a way to keep paying the bills!
—Lynn Ahrens

(a very bad picture of) Me with Lynn Ahrens!

I found my formal education studies extremely relevant and valuable – to the extent that they arm you with the technical knowledge and skills to write music. Once you have those basic skills, you can continue to hone them on your own. But musical theatre is all about the art of storytelling; so in fact, I would suggest you study playwriting and drama to develop your storytelling skills and learn to marry them with music.
—Stephen Flaherty

Stephen Flaherty and (another very bad picture of) me!

…I know, I know…I’m such a fan girl. Honestly, I was so excited and nervous that I found it really difficult to sound intelligent and form coherent sentences since the words “OMG IT’S LYNN AHRENS AND STEPHEN FLAHERTY!!!” kept buzzing around in circles in my mind.

In summary:

• I’ve always believed it never hurts to ask and it never hurts to try. This past month has definitely confirmed this philosophy for me.
• Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty are awesome and I hope I will get the chance to meet them again in the future and maybe even show them something I’ve written.
• I need more time to go and write stuff and learn and study stuff and join musical theatre groups and keep moving this forward.

Fast forward 11 months and $131.50 AUD a piece later, all 5 of us were seated in Star City’s Lyric Theatre last Saturday night, looking down at a gorgeous, fantastical set:

The stage of "Cats" at Star City's Lyric Theatre is a gorgeous, fantastical larger-than-life junkyard. The full moon, with wisps of cloud drifting across its face, looks down over a painted stage mural featuring a large tiger which is surrounded by a broken down car, dustbins, sewer pipes, an electric oven and other bits and pieces of people's discarded lives.

My personal philosophy is a truly great musical should be able to stand on its own. The audience should be able to understand the characters and the story with just the music, lyrics, book, stage design, costumes and performers; without the need of any accompanying souvenir programs or other explanatory aids. I was also determined to have no expectations, since my aunt had warned me strongly of how she had been quite disappointed when she watched it many years ago, due to the show not quite living up to all the hype she had heard about it.

As a result, I went into Cats knowing virtually nothing about the show, except that it was an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about cats and it’s where the theatre standard Memory comes from. Through the years I’ve briefly heard bits and pieces, like the term “Jellicle” and the Jellicle theme, but nothing in detail. For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a quick reminder. I’ll bet you most people in the world will recognise this song instantaneously.

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals I’m acquainted with to date are works like: The Phantom of the Opera; Jesus Christ Superstar; select songs from Sunset Boulevarde, Tell Me on a Sunday, Evita, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Musicals which are all very much through-composed with beautiful melodies, brilliant counterpoint and sweeping, dramatic scores. Musicals with unforgettable songs like Memory (think the title song from The Phantom Of The Opera, Any Dream Will Do, or Don’t Cry for Me Argentina). Even the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar was quite true to strict harmony. As a result, I was quite surprised by the stylistic range of Cats.

Cats is very different from the other Lloyd Webber musicals I’ve seen to date. Being based on a T.S. Eliot collection of poems for children, it has a Seussical feel to it, full of wild imagination, and doesn’t really have a plot-focused story line. In fact, the story is almost a backdrop for character exploration, kind of like how A Chorus Line is about exploring the dancers rather than the show. Going into the musical and not knowing this bit of information made it really hard for me to understand what was going in the first half as character after character was introduced and I kept wondering when the plot would start moving forward.

Once I did figure it out, I was able to strop stressing and actually relaxed and enjoyed it. Cats is a really fun musical, full of humor and whimsy. My favourite numbers (other than Memory) have to be Mungojerrie And Rumpleteazer, a song about two mischievous cat burglars and Growltiger’s Last Stand, an old cat reliving the glory of his youth as a reknowned actor in his finest moments. And like A Chorus Line, Cats is a show where the choreography is the focus. Instead of showstopping song after showstopping song and despite being based on poetry, it’s full of wonderful instrumental music which really lets the audience concentrate on the incredible acrobatics being pulled off by the performers, sometimes while singing! Some of the cast members are literally singing while doing back flips and somersaults without their voice wavering the slightly bit. Truly. Amazing.

Musically, Cats is kind of all over the place and not the usual Lloyd Webber fare. It starts off and is interspersed with a cacophony of urban night life (complete with cars revving, screeching, sirens, etc) which seems to inevitably meld into a very distinctive Jellicle Cat theme, which appears throughout the show:

It also features songs like The Rum Tum Tugger which are very pop/rock, jazz numbers (Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer), hymns (Old Deuteronomy, The Addressing Of Cats), comedic theatrical ballads (Growltiger’s Last Stand) and light-hearted fun pieces like Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat:

The great highlight of the evening was watching Delia Hannah perform Memory as Grizabella. For that one moment in time, she made us feel Grizabella’s anguish and yearning and when she sang:

Touch me
It’s so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days in the sun
If you touch me
You’ll understand what happiness is

Look
A new day has begun
—Memory, from Cats

there was this physical, soundless, heart-stopping instant where the whole audience sat breathless as the full emotional impact of the song came crashing down on us. Absolutely. Incredible.

Overall, I had a lot of fun watching Cats. It’s not going into my list of all favourite musicals – the trifecta of Rent, Wicked and The Phantom of the Opera is hard to beat – but I definitely recommend watching it while it’s in town. It’s a great production and makes for a really fun night out!

Cats poster by yuriybrisk from Flickr.

There’s an overwhelming expectation or assumption that if you’re good at something (i.e. you have aptitude for it), you must enjoy it (i.e. you have a passion for your aptitude). I think this is a fundamentally flawed assumption. We can be great at things we don’t like and we can love things we’re completely hopeless at.

I have great attention to detail, an ability to understand complicated issues or concepts quickly and analyse a set of facts. This makes me very, very good at being an external auditor. But I spend most of my free time buried in a fantasy novel, going to shows, playing the piano or reading design blogs. This means my job – where 90% of the time is about whether you’ve ticked a box in a checklist or not – is a horrible fit given my passion for the creative arts.

The logical conclusion is obvious. A lifetime of being good at something that you don’t like and not being allowed to express the fact that you don’t like it means you end up with a lot of issues, such as disliking your job but not being able to quit, thinking there is something fundamentally wrong with you for not liking something you’re good at and so you keep on trying even though you really don’t like it and internalising all your misery and end up depressed, burning out, having a nervous breakdown or all of the above.

Depression: Affects More People Than You Think

Since I officially moved out into my own apartment in August last year, I’ve been getting a lot of junk mail. Generally, it’s the usual run of IGA catalogues, real estate agents hounding me about either selling my place or renting it out, and pizza coupons and takeaway food menus. I also got pamphlets and handy fridge magnets from Beyond Blue, an Australian organisation dedicating to providing information about depression to the general population at large. At work, I also constantly see signs notifying everyone that there’s a free counselling service available to all partners and employees.

The most recent ABS study on mental health and wellbeing in 2007 found 1 in 5 Australians suffer from mental illness each year with depression being the second most common disorder. Running the numbers, that means over 650,000 Australians suffer from depression each year.

Up until recently, I pretty much shrugged off all the facts and figures and everything being shoved in our face about depression. It wasn’t until I started talking to my friends and colleagues and listening to my parents talk about their network that I really started paying attention:

• Most of my colleagues at senior accountant level and below are not happy at work. Accounting firms are in a high turnover industry but the recent spate of resignations at the level at which they are happening is ridiculous. Over the last 12 months there’s been more than 10 senior accountants and half of the experienced junior accountants have left in my division alone, with more contemplating their alternatives, like Matthew Caldicott who is a junior accountant in the Financial Services division and took a career break to go on MasterChef Australia 2010.
• My managers at work appear to be generally content with staying in their jobs, even if they are getting hammered by client deadlines.
• My partners at work love it. Probably because they get an average cash salary of $500k.
• Most of my ex-colleagues who have left are far, far happier than before and don’t regret a thing.
• Most of my colleagues who are still here have stayed because they like their colleagues.
• In every single farewell speech I have ever heard and departure email I have ever read, everyone always mentions the great people they worked with – no one has ever mentioned the great work.
• My happiest friends are not the ones with the flashiest cars, most expensive clothes or highest-paying jobs.
• My happiest friends are the ones who are in jobs where they have both aptitude and passion, or the ones who still have no idea what they want to do but are out there doing their best to find out.
• My unhappiest friends are those who haven’t worked out what they want and haven’t done anything about it.

A Google Trends search on depression, happiness and career shows some interesting results (out of curiosity, I threw in global financial crisis just for kicks).

A Google Trends search of depression, happiness, career and global financial crisis shows a close - almost 1:1 - relationship between depression and career. A huge spike in depression happens as the global financial crisis sets in while more people are looking for happiness over time.

Obsession: The Pursuit of Happiness

I don’t think anyone will find it surprising that people are obsessed with being happy. We grow up listening to fairy tales where everyone lives happily ever after. We’re brought up with the idealised Great Australian Dream of a house on a quarter-acre block, 2.5 kids and pets. We think having a stable 9-to-5 job, a house like the ones in Better Homes & Gardens magazines and more money than we know what to do with will make us happy.

A whole industry around the pursuit of happiness has developed with companies such as The Happiness Institute providing seminars, training and events based on the science of positive psychology. There’s over 1.3 million research papers on positive psychology and articles in management publications and at least 50 TED Talks on understanding what makes us happy.

What does surprise me is unhappy people can be so 矛盾 (máodùn). They’re unhappy with their lives but they refuse to acknowledge it or, worse, they acknowledge it but refuse to do anything to change their situation or, worst of all, they place their hopes in things which aren’t going to help at all, like lottery tickets or hoping their dream job will fall into their laps from out of the sky or thinking if they wish enough it will come true.

Change is difficult, I know that. I know how difficult it is to fight against your upbringing, what it feels like to contemplate leaving the certainty of a well-paying, stable job and the sense of being overwhelmed by a seemingly unreachable goal. After all, I’m probably crazy in thinking I could go from being an external auditor to writing Broadway musicals.

Repression: The Disconnect Between Aptitude and Passion

By virtue of competition and the laws of supply and demand, most of us end up in jobs where we have some degree of aptitude, but not a great deal of passion. Some of us are not so lucky and end up working dead end jobs where we don’t have any aptitude or passion just to make ends meet. Others decide they’ve had enough – only to fail horribly and/or gain internet/popular culture infamy when it becomes evident they have no aptitude for it. A small group are able to find their dream jobs, but even then, they need to work hard to stay there and some come to realise dreams are not what they seem.

A Venn diagram showing where jobs lie between aptitude and passion.

Progression: Keep Trying New Things

千里之行始於足下。
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
—老子 Lǎozǐ, Tao Te Ching

One of the hardest things to do is to look at yourself critically and acknowledge truths you don’t like.

I don’t like the fact I’ve spent 720 hours in high school, 3 years at university and another 500 hours and $10,000 towards a career I have a lot of aptitude for but zero passion.

I don’t like being torn between wanting to pursue my dreams and the constant internal voiceover telling me music is not an acceptable career path and I should stick to something I’m good at, that’s stable and pays well.

I don’t like the idea of looking back at my life when I grow too old to dream and find that I’ve made no difference at all on the world.

The next hardest thing is doing something about it.

It’s been two years since I came back from New York. Since then, I’ve watched a few shows, started a web design business with a friend, picked up two clients at work in the music/performing arts industry, attended a Talent Development Project workshop, met Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and negotiated a flexible work arrangement to allow me some time to figure out what I want to do and I started a piano blog which I’m still not too good at updating.

It’s been exactly one month since I started my flexible work arrangement. In the last month, I closed down my old blog and started this one to keep me accountable to myself so I don’t end up doing nothing at all, watched more shows and went to the UNSW Post Graduate Expo to figure out what my options are. I’ve talked to more people about what I want to do and how to get there and feel like I’m making really slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

My EBA exam is happening in the next month so I don’t expect to get a whole lot done, other than going to more shows and keeping this blog updated. Loathe as I am and as much as I’ll harp on about it, I need to focus and get this done because at this point, the incremental benefits of completing my CA far outweigh the costs.

One step at a time. Get the CA done, then get back on track with figuring how to get to Broadway.

Rent is a through-composed musical by Jonathan Larson. Based on Puccini’s La Bohème opera, it took Larson seven years to write and he tragically died the night before the off-Broadway premiere. Set in the early 1990s, Rent deals with a number of controversial issues of that decade, such as homosexuality and HIV/AIDS. It is the eighth longest running Broadway show and closed shortly after my stay in New York.

I grew up listening to the soundtrack of Rent on repeat. I knew all the songs by heart – and consequentially the story – before I ever saw the stage production. Rent is arguably my favourite musical of all time (Wicked and Phantom can give it a good run for its money) because I can identify with it so strongly and it strikes so many personal chords. I am so glad that Sony decided to preserve it forever in the Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway DVD and I strongly recommend you to watch it.

Originally posted on Fri, 27 March 2009 at 08:44 while listening to “Without You” by the Original Broadway Cast, OST ‘Rent’ and feeling Reminiscent.

Now the rush of busy season is over and I’ve handed in my FIN109 EP, I’m finding more and more that I get home incredibly tired (thanks to a day of doing something I don’t enjoy), totally unable to study for FIN and instead thinking about how awesome my life was this time last year, because I was in New York.

So I figured, what the hell, it’s not like I’m doing anything else. I’m going to indulge and reminisce about how awesome New York was by writing up some waaaay overdue blog entries.

Jan 20, 2008: Times Square, 42nd Street and Rent

The words that come to mind when I think about Times Square will always have to be the immortal lyrics of “Broadway Baby” from Follies, all hopes and dreams, bright dazzling lights and marquees and music and life.

The 42nd Street Subway Station.

The famous Times Square skyline, with musicals splashed all over prominent billboards and constant ads flickering over the massive outdoor screens.

A slightly more closer up of the Times Square billboards.

Buskers at Times Square!

So where was our first stop in Times Square? Why, the M&M store of course! Apparently you can get custom M&Ms made with your name on them or whatever message you want. We walk in and we’re greeted with walls of brightly colored coordinated chocolate…

Walls of M&Ms.

The M&Ms go everywhere, including the ceiling.

…and some very distinctive characters.

Green dressed up as the Statue of Liberty. You know, in case you forget that you're in New York City while you're in the middle of Times Square.

A very angry looking Red dressed as a high rise window cleaner with a very large pigeon.

...and finally a rather more friendly looking Yellow who obliged us with a photo, being the only M&M actually situated on the ground. L-R: Amanda, me, Yellow, Dewi and Kat.

After we’d bought our front row mezzanine seats for only $54 a piece, Kat and I went to brave the hordes of crazy women mobbing the Victoria’s Secret store at Herald Square while Dewi and Amanda went in search of the best cheesecake, chocolate and pastry shops in New York City.

Herald Square, at W 34th Street and Broadway.

Victoria's Secret, Herald Square.

Australians think the Boxing Day Myers and David Jones sales are savage. They’ve got nothing on the Semi Annual Sale at Victoria’s Secret. The store was so packed there was hardly room to move, with clothing thrown over every available surface as women scrambled around in a frenzy to snatch every last bargain. The lines to go to the change rooms wound all around the second floor of the store and had a minimum wait time of 30 minutes. It was so crowded in there that Kat and I lost track of each other, which resulted in a very frantic couple of hours when Dewi, Amanda and I thought some horrible mishap might have befallen her and were unable reach her since her phone had died.

Anyway, after we grabbed some dinner, we headed out to the Nederlander Theatre at W 41st and 7th Ave. By this time it was freezing cold:

Me in front of the Nederlander Theatre, all rugged up in a fleece ear warmer/headband, wool scarf, gloves and overcoat.

Amanda and Dewi with their playbills.

Me and Kat with our playbills.

The stage design was stunning. There was this totally stark, utilitarian, industrial looking set, which was convincingly able to convey upstairs, downstairs, apartment, cafe, street, hospital, carpark and more, all in turn. Apart from moving around a few chairs and tables, there was very little moving around of major stage elements.

The stage of Rent.

When the lights dimmed and the show started, I sat right on the edge of my seat and I didn’t move a muscle – didn’t breathe – until intermission. I don’t really have the words to describe how amazing it was. I grew up listening to the soundtrack of Rent, before I ever knew what the musical itself was about and I knew every song of the musical by heart. It was the first musical that I watched while I was in New York and it is a musical that is so intensely New York. It absolutely blew me away.

Laughs

Rent is one of those musicals that do the impossible and combine very serious themes and achingly sad moments and yet have parts which are just bursting with fun and energy and humour. I absolutely loved the voicemails, the “Tango Maureen”, that moment when Mark walks into “Life Support”, and the whole role of Angel. But the key moment that stood out for me was the juxtaposition of Roger’s soul searching (Adam Pascal) in “One Song Glory” which was abruptly interrupted by Mimi asking him to “Light My Candle” (Tamyra Gray). I have to say that Tamyra has been the most convincing Mimi who really took a very difficult role and made it her own.

Showstoppers

Big moments which stood out were “Rent”, the close of Act I with “La Vie Boheme” at the end of Act I, “Seasons of Love”, “Take Me or Leave Me” and “What You Own”. It probably seems very biased but again, Tamyra”s “Out Tonight” totally blew me away with how powerful and dynamic it was.

Tearjerkers

I’m the first to admit I’m a sucker for sappy moments in music/stories; books, movies, TV shows, concerts, Broadway musicals, it makes no difference. “I’ll Cover You (Reprise)”, “Goodbye Love”, the second half of “Finale” when Mimi is dying, “Your Eyes”, I cried in all of those songs. But it was “Without You” that struck the deepest chord.

I had incredibly high expectations for Rent and it surpassed all of them. It completely blew me out of the water. I. Love. Rent. No day but today.

We say “I might as well” for a lot of reasons, but mainly because:

• We think it won’t take a lot of additional time or effort, OR
• We lack direction and don’t really know what we should/want to do
• We can’t bear the thought of throwing in the towel after spending X amount of time and Y amount of money already on something (because that would be like failing)

Most people who have studied economics would be aware of the terms “sunk costs” and “incremental costs”.

“Sunk costs” are those costs which have already been incurred and no matter what you do, you can’t change that and get your money back. In accounting and finance, when we learn about what information to include in a decision-making models, we exclude “sunk costs” since no matter what is decided, those costs cannot be recovered and therefore shouldn’t affect the decision one way or another. It’s easy to condemn bad decision making when it’s presented in textbook format but it’s very hard to acknowledge it when it comes to sunk costs in your own life. In other words, you’ve already invested time and resources into your situation, so you “might as well” go through with it to the fullest extent.

“Incremental costs” are those additional costs which you will incur in order to do XYZ. You can avoid incremental costs by deciding not to go through with XYZ as they are future costs which you haven’t committed to yet. If you’ve committed yourself to those costs and you can’t do anything about it, they become sunk costs.

Mistake #1: Failing To Consider Incremental Costs When Deciding What To Do

When I was selecting my subjects in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I hedged my bets and took mainstream subjects which were supposed to give me a higher UAI score. Lo and behold, before I even realised it, 8 out of the 10 minimum units were taken up by 2 subjects, 1 of them maths. I don’t even like maths!

According to the Board of Studies NSW, each unit of study requires 60 hours of classroom study per year. I ended up wasting a lot of time.

That’s 18 hours of class that could have been spent on more relevant subjects that would have helped considerably and that I enjoy:

• Drama – I could have learned about dramatic structures and techniques
• Design & Technology – I could have learned about set design
• Textiles – I could have learned how to design and make costumes

Or 18 hours that I could have spent on extracurricular activities like:

• Joining a local musical society
• Staying involved in choral activities in high school and producing the third instalment of “A Night On Broadway”
• Trying to write a high school musical like so many great Broadway composers (side note: apparently it would help tremendously if I were also male and named “Stephen”; maybe I should change my name to “Stephanie”)

None of these were sunk costs when I was selecting subjects. They were all incremental costs that I should have thought about when I was making my decisions.

Mistake #2: Considering Sunk Costs When You Shouldn’t

I am still stuck in the “I Might As Well” trap today. You would think after coming to the realisation that I didn’t want to be in accounting I would have stopped right then and there and figured out what I could do with my life. Instead, I thought “I have a steady job so I might as well go back to work while I figure out what I want to do.” I then thought “I might as well start my CA while I’m here.”

2 years comprising of 500 hours of study and about $10,000 later (5 modules at approximately $1,200 tuition fees plus $600 in study support), I’m now in the middle of studying for my final EBA exam and my care factor is non-existent.

After every module, I would kick myself. What was I doing, continually racking up these study costs? But I couldn’t stop, not only because that would be admitting failure but because it seemed like such a waste of my undergraduate degree and my entire internship. It also seemed like a tremendous waste of the modules I had completed to date, especially after I had completed the FIN and TAX modules, since they were perceived as the “hardest” and by then I was halfway through my technical modules.

What could I have done with 500 hours and $10,000?

• Finally learned how to read and write fluently in Chinese
• Paid off a significant chunk of my mortgage
• Saved 5% towards a 2 year graduate musical theatre writing degree at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU and completed a significant portion of the 20 minute portfolio requirements
• Gone on an awesome holiday in Europe
• See 100 shows with awesome seats

I continually kept thinking about the costs of my degree, my internship and the modules I had done to date. These costs would only be relevant if I am going to continue to pursue a degree in business. But the moment I decided I’m going to pursue my dreams of music, these costs became irrelevant; they were sunk costs. I would have been much better off disregarding the CA altogether.

The Root Cause: Forgetting The Opportunity Costs

We all know we should weigh the pros and cons of each decision, but most of us are pretty terrible at it since humans are naturally both loss adverse and risk adverse, “a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush” and all. Thus we always tend to choose the safe option of what we know, rather than chasing the uncertain dream. But we forget that in doing so we tend to overvalue what we have.

“I Might As Well” Is Not Good Enough

It’s really easy to just go through the motions every day, forget why we’re doing things and just go along with the flow because you “might as well”. But a day becomes a week which becomes a month and before you know it years have gone by and all you’ve done is live life by going through the motions.

I look back at my life for the past two years and I can count up the total number of meaningful things I’ve done that really mattered to me on a “this is my reason for living” level on my two hands. Assuming each meaningful thing takes an average of 1 day, that’s at least 355 days out of the year on which I am not doing a single, meaningful thing.

That’s a pretty miserable way to live life. It’s not life at all, it’s a waste of a life. I think Jonathan Larson summed it up best in these lines:

One Song Glory

From the pretty boy front Man
Who wasted opportunity

Every time I hear Adam Pascal sing those words I get a chill.

Some people might be lucky enough or focused enough or self aware enough to be doing meaningful things every single day of their lives.

Another Day

There is no future
There is no past
I live this moment as my last
There’s only us
There’s only this
Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss
No other road
No other way
No day but today

The rest of us are generally too afraid or too complacent. We lose sight of the big picture and get stuck worrying about these sunk costs. Or we get caught up and forget to consider incremental costs. And so we end up with a really big bill in opportunity costs.

I don’t want to keep putting off living life to “another day”. There’s “no day but today“.