Scattered, fragmented, fractured, frenzied, spinning, doing-doing-doing and doing too much: it’s a great sign.

It’s a sign that you’re being practical.

It’s a sign your vision is so large, grandiose and wildy impractical that you’ve backed away from it because how do you make a living at that?

(Please tell me you viscerally resisted agreeing with that last line.)

It’s a sign that you have a calling. (Callings are rarely practical.)

I’m being unfair. I dig practical. We’re homies from way back and Practical has almost always had my back.

You know this drumbeat: Ditch your job. It’s a prison. It’s shackling your artistic impulses.

Well my trumpet has a clarion call answer to that:

HAH!

IF your job IS a prison and it’s killing you, then by all means ditch it. Just have a way to eat. Starving won’t serve your art.

Sometimes it is better to quit. Better to exit the profession that’s killing you and find a temporary gig that’ll keep the bills paid while your Real Career begins to blossom. Better to paint all day and sling beer in a bar on Friday nights than serve time five days a week as a ___________.

BUT.

Having a day job, having an interim career – or a decades-long one – that keeps you fed and clothed and watered and well WILL serve your art if you let it. I find freedom in security. I created a business and grew my skills as an artist while working five days a week in an office job. And knowing that each month my bills were paid (and then some) is what allowed me the freedom to create. It also allowed me to buy books and tools and courses and coaching and childcare.

A moment of reverence, please, for children and childcare.

It also gave me something to push against. It gave me structure. After the kids went to bed, I had two hours a night, five days a week to create. And that was it. If I let those hours waste away, they were indeed wasted. They were all I had. And like a stubborn boyfriend who warns you that he’s like a train and only goes in one direction – forward – once those available hours are gone they won’t come back.

And so I cancelled my cable and most of my social life and I got down to it. Writing. Creating. Learning. Getting better. Getting a business together. Every night.

So: you don’t have to quit your day job to be an artist or an entrepreneur. You can do both or all three until someone in the threesome demands more – and offers more.

Offering more, and being more is an answer. Doing more just to do more is not.

Contradictory, yes? Perhaps even paradoxical, since I just said, do more. Do your day job and your art and your business all at once.

Here’s when doing more is effective and productive: when all three serve your Big Blue Sky Mission.

When developing your skills as an artist and entrepreneur requires a certain level of security and solvency, your job can be an act of devotion. It can be consistent with your Big Blue Sky Mission. And when that’s the case, all your activities, your doing, your busy-ness cohere. They’re foundational. They’re serving – and subordinate to – your calling.

And here’s the thing. Six months of twice-daily Red Shoe Blogger sessions with driven dreamers and ambitious revolutionaires and mild-mannered malcontents (oh how I adore the malcontents: they quietly insist on sitting in the front seat and resist scaling back their wildly impractical dreams of justice) has taught me something profound:

You already know what to do.

But the magnitude of your magnificent vision intimidates you. Or it doesn’t offer a clear money-making path. Or it includes a controversial element that is daring, destabilizing, taboo-breaking.

And that element is essential.

And so there will be fallout. It’s predictable. You can predict it. Your neighbour will be astonished. Your best friend will be scandalized. Your mother will send you concerned e-mails. Your sister will raise her eyebrows. Your lovers – all of the former – will worry. The haters – and oh God, sometimes your lovers and haters are one and the same – will hate.

And your accurate predictions force you – you think – to neuter your dynamic, daring, generative mission into something practical and palatable.

Because if you commit to kissing the sky you will abandon safe ground. It will be impossible to please everyone. You will polarize. You will pioneer. You will often be alone with only your vision to comfort you. You will spend long low times in The Dip, otherwise known as depression. Financial. Mental. Social.

But you will do that thing only you can do.

And you already know what it is.

Give yourself permission. To dream, to do, to dream, to do, to do too much for your dreamy dream. Devote all your practical doings to your wildly impractical dream.

That’s what I do.

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This piece is dedicated to an extraordinary Red Shoe Blogger who heard – really heard – and then acted on the hard and true thing I told her: that she was fracturing her efforts and needed to focus all of her activites – even if they continued to be many – on realizing her Big Blue Sky Mission. You can do many things and flounder and hope one is a winning lottery ticket and, well, you know how that usually turns out.

Or.

You can be and do many things – and yes, sometimes you have to – but you must ensure that all your activities and efforts interlock into a wall that holds up your big blue sky.

And that’s the test around doing too much. Only do too much if all the doing is an act of devotion to your dream.