Every artist faces the same tension: doing the work that pays the bills vs. doing the work that feeds the soul. In this episode, Jake makes the case that the line between them doesn't have to be a war — and that the smartest artists find a way to get paid to practice.
There's a version of this story most artists know too well: working a job that has nothing to do with their craft, saving up, burning out, and wondering if the dream is even possible. Jake has a different model — and in this episode of Move Faster, he breaks it down.
The concept is simple: get paid to practice. Find work close enough to your craft that every day on the job is also a day of reps. Jake runs a video production agency that funds his real passion — narrative filmmaking. That agency paid for the gear, the skills, and the bandwidth that let him make 14 short films in four months with his wife. It's not a compromise. It's a strategy.
He runs through three real examples: a musician who does audio engineering by day and uses the income to self-fund his own releases and Spotify advertising; a photographer who shoots weddings to bankroll his landscape photography and print sales; and an actor friend spending a small fortune on a short film he could have made scrappier — because he never built the infrastructure that comes from working in the field. Then there's Kurtis Brewer, who kept grinding on his horror projects on the side until one of them grossed over $200 million.
The point isn't to stay in the day job forever. The point is to use it until the art pays for itself — and to not waste the off-hours on another Netflix binge when that time could be closing the gap.
In this episode:
- The "get paid to practice" principle Jake learned from a mentor early in his career
- How Jake made 14 short films in 4 months — and what made it possible
- Three real artist archetypes funding their craft intelligently
- Why the side hustle is temporary — and what you're actually building toward
- The honest question every artist needs to ask about how they spend their off-hours