001 / Jarret Izzo / "Big juice, little juice"

What's Your Escape Velocity?

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Jarret Izzo tell us about his journey from dueling piano player to PR professional to elementary school teacher.

HIGHLIGHTS

• 0:04 - Definition of "escape velocity"
• 5:25 - The day Jarret quit his PR job
• 9:50 - The realization that made Jarret leave his full-time piano gig
• 13:05 - Why the day-to-day nature of PR work wasn't enjoyable
• 14:30 - The search for meaning in the big-picture mission and the day-to-day routines
• 16:40 - The need for patience when trying to pivot your career
• 20:00 - Finding inspiration while volunteering to teach middle schoolers on the weekends
• 22:04 - Looking for opportunities to try out other things
• 23:42 - Cold-calling antique stores on Charles Street for an apprenticeship
• 26:40 - The importance of intuition and feeling
• 30:30 - The performative appeal of PR
• 32:45 - The urgency appeal of teaching
• 36:08 - Setting up shadow opportunities to observe a variety of teaching environments
• 44:15 - Learning by seeing vs. learning from instruction
• 48:55 - Jarret's joys of teaching
• 52:05 - The challenges of maintaining academic consistencyduring a pandemic
• 61:12 - Using dissatisfaction as the engine for positive change

QUOTES

• "You know what I don't want to be? I don't want to be loading out heavy equipment at 2 in the morning when I'm 50; I know that, that's how I can make that kind of lifestyle decision concrete."
• "I wasn't getting a bigger picture of an overall meaning of this work that I can latch on to days when I'm not feeling it."
• "There's some sort of interplay between, [...] 'What's the purpose of this work?' And 'Do I actually enjoy the minutia, the actual doing?'"
• "Hopefully life is long, and you can fashion a career pivot or a lifestyle pivot. But it's kind of like a [...] rocket ship, you've got to just steer one half of one degree to the starboard. And then all of a sudden, 6 months later, you're going to be in a very different place."
• "One of my ways of exploring 'Is this for me?' was by looking for opportunities to try out other things."
• "At 11:30 the show is going on regardless — so you gotta figure it out. So I like that aspect very much, of it being 'showtime.' And I think that's something that over the course of several careers chunks, I've found that to be an appealing thing. There's an 'on' time and there's an 'off' time.
• "I tried on a lot of different costumes in a very compressed timeline."
• "I feel more ownership of the situation, and I find that satisfying."
• "What's happening day-to-day in a classroom is pretty different than what's happening in a lecture hall, or what the requirements of an education course are.
• "There's a confidence in the material that I'm teaching [to elementary students], that it's going to be valuable. I can guarantee that you're going to need adding; I feel very confident in that. So I never have a big-picture crisis going, 'What's the point of this?'"
• "Who knows what the lasting academic impact of [the pandemic] will be? And so, any encouragement I can give my [class] to still work hard or still achieve, even if it's some strange at-home or hybrid model, has got to be valuable in some way."
• "If I felt sort of out of control [...] I'm going to take that core of dissatisfaction and use it positively as the engine for moving on to the next thing."

SOUNDTRACK

• "Palms" by Text Me Records / Bobby Renz
• "Trip to Ganymed" by KieLoKaz

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