Hey! Good to meet a fellow artist. I made it to 40 before I sold out. You?
One thing outsiders don't understand is that, for actors, auditioning IS the job. Getting cast, and working on a show, is a joy (some more than others, of course!), but the rest of your life is nothing, nothing but looking for work.
The were two things that made that "it's all cool" shift happen for me. The first is that once I'd been in the industry long enough I could pretty much guarantee that when I went in for an audition I'd see someone I knew, or at least with whom I had an immediate second-degree connection. Auditions stopped being a grind, or mainly about courting rejection - instead, they became an opportunity to hang out with some cool people for a while. I started looking forward to them!
The second was realizing that choosing and performing my audition pieces was the only time that I was in complete control. No one was telling me what to do or how to do it: I could make my own choices, and take whatever creative risks I wanted.
I think both of those approaches made me a much better auditionee than most. My batting average was a lot higher than most of my peers - even some that I thought were better actors.
I don't know how well those insights generalize. I've never (thank god!) had to do leet-code, but I'd hope that (though maybe only in a second screening?) taking a creative approach - if you can talk about it sensibly, and pivot if it doesn't ultimately work - would impress fellow engineers. I strongly believe that adopting a "what can I learn from this experience, and these people?" mindset is a good way to reduce the pressure you'd otherwise put on yourself.
> I made it to 40 before I sold out.
Do you mean you sold out in the arts or in the sense that you changed careers? If the former, I’d be curious to hear (well, read) the story since that’s not an admission one typically encounters.
I changed careers. Wrote a bit about it here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44699388
I never met a professional with a conceptual category of "selling out" within the industry. Scraping together any kind of living in the arts is a massive struggle, so everyone takes "money jobs" when they can get them. During my 10 or 12 years as a working actor I had two consecutive years during which my sole income was from performing, and maybe a couple of other other five or six month periods where I was able to drop restaurant (or whatever other) gigs for a tour. This was in the early-'oughts, and I'd have to look at my social security records to be sure, but my income during those years was somewhere around $30k. I was single, and really, really good at being poor.
By the way, that's like a 98th percentile result for an actor. Most people never come close to making a living, however meagre.
There's an old, old interview (maybe Michael Parkinson? Don't remember) with Joss Ackland - a wonderful mid-twentieth century British character actor, on stage and screen - where the interviewer asks him why the hell he did some crappy science fiction film, and Ackland says something like "that was 1962? Oh, yes. Well, my mother needed a new kitchen." No actor will ever fault him for that!
What does disappoint me is seeing actors with tremendous talent who take nothing but money jobs. I get why they do it - especially for the ones at the top of the commercial heap it'd be awfully hard to say 'no' to an easy gig that comes with a boatload of cash - but I can't help but feel sad that I'll never get to see them working at their best.
Even so, my response when I see a truly bad film is generally a shrug: "a lot of actors [and associated professionals / craft services] got paid." The artists among them will learn from even that experience, and many (many many) among them will invest that income back into doing work that they believe in.