Jarret Izzo tell us about his journey from dueling piano player to PR professional to elementary school teacher.
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
"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."
"Palms" by Text Me Records / Bobby Renz
"Trip to Ganymed" by KieLoKazPresented by Modern Wordshop
