Question for Creatives who climb

Whats a Creative?

Become a nurse or a fireman in California. Lots of time off and great climbing all around.

Kevin Mokracek wrote:Whats a Creative?

You can identify them from their mating call, "Is there a brief?"

Kevin Mokracek wrote:Whats a Creative?

Web designer, photographer, script writer, graphic artist, set designer, choreographer, musician/composer/music director, producer, director, et al.

Kevin Mokracek wrote:Become a nurse or a fireman in California. Lots of time off and great climbing all around.

And a huge pay cut from a Manhattan salary in the creative sphere. A senior level freelance UX designer I know in NYC has a minimum billable of $175 / hr, charged by the day.

Marc801 wrote: And a huge pay cut from a Manhattan salary in the creative sphere. A senior level freelance UX designer I know in NYC has a minimum billable of $175 / hr, charged by the day.

A lot of the firemen I work with make over $200k a year and still get plenty of time off. Thats with working a lot of overtime but still it's not too bad. It's nowhere in the creative sphere of work but it's been a great career for me and has allowed me to make a great living and have a ton of time off.

Kevin Mokracek wrote:Whats a Creative?

An adjective. NOT a noun!

Kevin Mokracek wrote:Become a nurse or a fireman in California. Lots of time off and great climbing all around.

There's an old song made big by Frank Sinatra, "New York, New York". One line in it still resonates for me:
"If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere."

For high-achiever types, it's still the place to be ... surrounded by Fortune 100 companies in Westchester + CT + NJ with big media budgets. Working on a leading-edge project could be more intense than most of the hours on a mountaineering expedition.

If you succeed in the big City, you can take that experience and resume and contacts to lots of other places -- where it's easy to compete for local work partly because of the intensity you picked up in New York.
And with the kind of money you can sometimes make there, you might find there's other exciting things to do than climbing all year.

California?
The OP on this thread already tried the "California with lots of climbing days" thing. Sounds like he's looking for something different -- just learning about the cost and trade-offs.

Anyway nowadays there's more good rock climbing + bouldering within two hours of NYC than in that range of San Francisco.

For alpine mountaineering, being in red-eye-flight range of the European Alps just blows away California.

Ken

A few things,

I would never take time off in the middle of a project, What I was referring to was to take time in between freelance contracts. FourT6and2 sounds like you have the type of balance that im trying to move toward.

As for leaving the city, I really love it here and have lived the dirtbag lifestyle before, not really super psyched on going back. Future trips are going to be more international as ive been to most of the major areas in the US, good timing on that one. cheap. airfare.

Setting the record straight, when i said expedition i meant in NO WAY mountaineering, that sounds cold and terrible. Just climbing trips to remote areas.

doligo totally know what you mean about the work ethinc in the city, and the fear of taking the vacation you are allotted. The company I work for has a "take however many days you need" policy, testing that this year.

Circling back to moving out of the city. I think when i get my "nyc designer badge" after 5 or 6 years I'll look at moving to cali or internationally. Really just waiting for the day I get sick of the city, we'll see. But being able to drive to el cap certainly has its appeal, the rent in sf on the other hand is no bueno.

kenr wrote: Anyway nowadays there's more good rock climbing + bouldering within two hours of NYC than in that range of San Francisco.

What's the point when the weather sucks a good part of the year? On the other hand, SF has year-round weekend access to either world class big wall climbing or world class bouldering (and I don't use "world class" lightly).

Not saying I'd like to live at either place (I can advance my career further), but your comparisons are pretty ridiculous.