10 No-Joke Career Questions

1. What do you want to do? 
2. Why that? 
3. Do you have the skill, knowledge, and psycho-emotional makeup for that career? 
4. What evidence proves you have "the goods"?
5. Can your skill and knowledge be objectively measured, or is it based on others' opinions?
6. What market demand matches your skill, knowledge, and psycho-emotional makeup? 
7. Are you willing to serve that demand? 
8. What else do you need besides skill, knowledge and a certain makeup? 
9. Is there an under-served market or untapped niche that you can prove exists? 
10. Are you willing to be a businessperson and serve that market or niche?

Does the Muse Recycle?

Hello. My name is Steve Burks, and I'm a recovering wannabe media mogul. Being broke and unconnected didn't dissuade me. Inspirational quotes were my life rafts. Martin Luther King, Jr. shared this quote. "If a man makes a better mouse trap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." The writer of the movie, "Field of Dreams," co-signed. "If you build it, they will come." 

Madison Avenue calls bulls**t. They don't work on spec.

If you had the cure for cancer, for A.I.D.S., or for reality television, would the world turn your street into a parking lot? Maybe, if you could overcome the scam perception. But if your product or service failed to delay flat-lining, or was irrelevant to the bottom half of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs? You'd live out of a shopping cart full of trash bags.

Some good can come from playing the entreprenurial "Little Engine That Could." It can help you stay out of your own way, when it comes to negotiable obstacles.

As it turns out, requiring the equivalent of a small country's GNP for start-up capital, isn't on the negotiable-obstacle list. That's on the psycho-neurotic list. People who believe that literally anything can be done, suffer from a strain of popular insanity. It's all the rage. Ask the publishers of The Secret. Ask some preachers. I've never been that far gone.

I had, however, contracted the virus of perceived self-uniqueness. Being a creative loner preserved the illusion, which shattered when I entered a convention center, filled to the brim with thousands of writers, "born" to do the same thing I was "born" to do, hawking screenplays just as "inspired" as mine. Does the Muse recycle?

These were the droves of me's that Gatekeepers deal with every day, the herd of self-help consumers, fancying the supposed global relevance of our output. The avalanche of career how-to books share the blame for public naivete. Gurus tell me that I can be a Spielberg or a Quincy Jones, and I believe them. So do the millions of other suckers who buy the books, see the interviews, attend the conferences. (I'm exaggerating, but only a little.)

"Bitter much?" Go ahead. Say it.

I can't blame how-to publishers for my need to feel affirmed. If I became Quincy Spielberg tomorrow, my satisfaction would last long enough for one snarky review, or TMZ paternity claim, and voila! Mr. Needy would return. Fact is, he would have never left. No matter where you go, there you are. All these years, I thought I craved uniqueness. Actually, I craved being seen as unique.

"Faux-Mogul Craves Uniqueness," a want ad in the Reality Check Times.

Confessions of an Oddball Rapper

I'm a 40-year-old classical composer, a rapper, and a "prude."  Opera elitists take me for some street dude who's "trying" to compose. Hip-hop's kids peg me as an uptown snob, who dabbles in music that he doesn't understand. "My old gym teacher ain't supposed to rap," L.L. once said - before he became an old gym teacher. As for the "prude" moniker? Subscribing to Judeo-Christian morality and renouncing crack rap earned me that reverse-Scarlet letter.

Well ...

Dear opera elitists: I rap because I like the art form. It is actually an art form, even though you've never heard an artistic rapper. (They exist.) Your sense of cultural supremacy has marinated for centuries, so not much else I can say will change you. That is all.

Dear 5 boroughs: I rap because I like "rhythm and poetry," as Rakim described it. It's that simple. The drum set is my favorite instrument to play, and language is among my favorite things. No, I wasn't born in New York. Neither does Kool Herc call me at home. But I'm pretty sure that the existence of music, turntables, spoken language, poetry, and the concept of rhyme, pre-dated the 1970s and involved other places. Not to deny those developments and figures who came from your region. It's just that, in the grand scheme of things, I find your in-group/out-group psychology as puzzling as you find me.

Dear prude-mockers: I rap because, when I was introduced to it, there was no mandate for me to be a convict/kingpin/pimp mash-up. Those versions of rappers existed then, but diversity was allowed. There were also inspiring rappers. Dare I say, decent ones. I wanted to be that kind, so posturing as the bad-ass pimp nigga was too high a price to pay for the credible-rapper seal of approval. It still is. As for the inevitable 'judgmental' charge, I'm not morally self-deluded. My name is not Yeshua Ben Yosef. I simply choose not to be a poster child for dysfunction, even though I tussle with it outside the recording booth.

Dear subject-matter goons: I rap for the same reason I speak: because I have something to say. In my dream world, critics judge lyrical skill and beats, while leaving content to the artists. Also, I believe the public can distinguish skill from content. Now, I don't expect you to like what I have to say, just because I say it well. But neither should you misread your distaste for my messages, as me lacking craft.

Dear age-discriminators: I rap because, when it comes to music, "age ain't nothin' but a number," as the late Aaliyah sang. I grew up with rap, so why should I have to abandon it by some arbitrary point in time? (I'd like to cite Shawn Carter's sustained credibility as support, but it doesn't count . He's not a 40-year-old rapper. He's "Jay-Z." From the consumer-psychology standpoint, there is a very big difference.)

Stronger artists take being different as a badge of honor. Maybe I'll get there one day. Better hurry up. I'm already getting junk mail from the AARP.