The modern classic "Rock Stardom for Dumbshits" [0] encapsulates this amateur achievement anxiety well. The target audience is musicians but I feel the aphorism has general applicability:
Level One: you do it for love, you do it for fun, you do it for friends, family and community. No expectations of making it big. Maybe you get invited to perform somewhere because of your skill and love of the craft. Maybe some lucrative opportunity emerges, but this is not the goal, merely a side effect.
Level Three: The big time. Private jets, mansions, groupies, free drugs, widespread recognition, adulation, and infamy.
Level Two: the vast purgatory between Level One and Level Three. The grind of trying to "make it." Self-promotion in a saturated or disinterested market; sleeping in the tour van playing to empty rooms on a Tuesday night; the endless parade of bookers, agents and promoters all promising one thing or another and disappearing when dry reality evaporates the wet dream. Sisyphean strivers, performing the same futile acts week after week, month after month; Tantalean hustlers dangling one ephemeral opportunity after another before hapless hungry mouths.
If you cannot jump directly from Level One to Level Three, Stay at Level One.
This reminds me a bit of the academic career path. I don't think it'd be terrible to spend 5-10 years at level 2, provided that you knew you would make level 3 (or at least had very good odds). I think the bigger problem is the uncertainty - not only are you pretty damn unlikely to make level 3, but also the selection process is kinda opaque and you don't really have a good grasp on your own specific odds. Obviously that situation is orders of magnitude worse in music, but it's why I left "professional" academia after PhD.
This really resonated with me, thanks for sharing. This lines up very well with my perception of success being composed of preparedness and opportunity. To me, Level One represents the cultivation of skill; preparing, said another way. Level Two is in the pursuit of opportunity and Level Three is the capitalization of opportunity. But the funny thing about opportunity is that it's mostly external to you. For sure, you can be in places where opportunity is more likely or try to find people who are passing on opportunities you'd like to capitalize on but I feel the most potent and useful opportunities are the ones that exist outside of your power.
All that to say that I don't think Level Two is fully intractable. I think it depends a lot on the opportunity density. In our field, for example, going through Level Two to work at a desk job where you don't particularly care where you end up or what you're doing is not that bad at all. In fact, it's just plain ole job hunting. But for sure in creative skills like musicians or classical art or any other skills where there are a few elite that have made it into Level Three, it is much more challenging to find your way through Level Two. There just isn't enough opportunity that can hoist you out of it.
As a middle-aged fogey, I hadn’t heard of Rock Stardom for Dumbshits so thanks for the comment. I’d be interested to see how it compares to the The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)¹ by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond (the KLF aka the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu aka the Timelords). I only vaguely remember reading it in the early nineties so could probably do with a re-read.
Haven't read op's comment, just wanted to +1 The Manual. I'm not a musician but it was a very interesting and illuminating read with some unconventional ideas. I'd recommend it for any creative person. KLF are worth listening to also, even though I was already predisposed to liking them thanks to being a big fan of The Illuminatus! Trilogy books they were inspired by.
The Manual is a fun read for its own sake, but the "one simple trick" turned out to be: take the backing music from one song, sample enough of the vocals from another song to have parity with the first, and merge the two. Thus: "Doctorin' the Tardis" is a mash-up of that Gary Glitter "Rock and Roll" song and the Doctor Who theme. "Whitney [Houston] Joins the JAMs" is a similar experimental medley.
Seemed to work for Fatboy Slim, Prodigy and the rest of the late-90s British DJs too. Not sure it's still a winning formula these days.
If you like all things KLF and want an interesting read, try Bad Wisdom (its sequel, Wild Highway, was "120 Days of Sodom"-level unreadable in my opinion). You'll have to find it on Libgen.
Level One: you do it for love, you do it for fun, you do it for friends, family and community. No expectations of making it big. Maybe you get invited to perform somewhere because of your skill and love of the craft. Maybe some lucrative opportunity emerges, but this is not the goal, merely a side effect.
Level Three: The big time. Private jets, mansions, groupies, free drugs, widespread recognition, adulation, and infamy.
Level Two: the vast purgatory between Level One and Level Three. The grind of trying to "make it." Self-promotion in a saturated or disinterested market; sleeping in the tour van playing to empty rooms on a Tuesday night; the endless parade of bookers, agents and promoters all promising one thing or another and disappearing when dry reality evaporates the wet dream. Sisyphean strivers, performing the same futile acts week after week, month after month; Tantalean hustlers dangling one ephemeral opportunity after another before hapless hungry mouths.
If you cannot jump directly from Level One to Level Three, Stay at Level One.
[0] https://www.sfweekly.com/music/the-phantom-surfers-pen-rock-...