Curriculum Will Never Set You Free
Real income power can’t be graded, credentialed, or contained.
Thanks to my previous piece, “fixing” the music school curriculum is being discussed again…
More business electives.
More marketing classes.
More interdisciplinary studies.
More crossover training.
It sounds promising!
Now let me save you a few years:
You cannot learn entrepreneurial sovereignty from a syllabus.
You can’t create a congruent income stream in a classroom of 30 in just a semester.
You can’t workshop self-worth.
You can’t schedule intuition and innovation for MWF at 10:30AM.
And you definitely can’t simulate the psychological unraveling that happens in real life when your pricing, visibility, or safety is on the line.
Frankly, you can’t expect to learn everything you need to learn about how to not need a 9-5 job from people who still need their 9-5 job!
The Classroom Is a Safety Structure—Entrepreneurship is an Exposure Structure.
The classroom is built to reward predictability.
Entrepreneurship punishes it.
And while some programs—especially in business, communication, or organizational leadership—have historically integrated real-world collaboration and entrepreneurial modeling, those were the exception. Many have been dissolved or absorbed into other departments, leaving the dominant model intact: a structure that still trains for compliance, not capacity.
So school—especially in the arts—is still structurally designed to reward you for:
Following directions
Memorizing material
Meeting deadlines
Showing polish under pressure
In a business, those things alone don’t get you paid.
In fact, those exact behaviors are often what prevent artists from earning at all.
Because in business, you have to:
Set the direction
Decide what material matters
Discard perfectionism in favor of clarity
Show up before you're “ready”—and keep going when no one claps
You can learn about all about branding in school, but you cannot learn how to still show your face online after being ignored for weeks.
You can take a pricing workshop, but you cannot rehearse the moment your voice trembles asking for $2,000 when the old version of you would’ve said yes to $200 “just for the experience” or just for “exposure” because it’ll “make your teacher proud…”
You can’t put the kind of courage this work requires on a class schedule.
You Don’t Need More Education. You Need Real World Exposure.
Specifically, exposure to:
Clean power
Structural income congruence
Someone who isn’t projecting their own financial trauma onto you
Someone who knows how to build—not just perform—business
Real world custom mentorship is not a nicety. It’s the missing piece.
Because real entrepreneurial learning is somatic, relational, and reactive.
You need someone who can see your struggles in real time, and redirect you without shaming you.
Someone who knows what it looks like when you’re undercharging because you’re still seeking permission.
Someone who hears the way you contort your offers for approval.
Someone who doesn’t just teach you “what works.”
The right mentors will teach you how to build what works FOR YOU!
The Survival Coding Behind Your Pricing
Most of us were trained—explicitly or implicitly—to perform for approval, undervalue our labor, and justify our pricing with emotional effort instead of structural logic.
That’s not a mindset issue.
It’s not a confidence issue.
It’s a survival pattern.
One shaped by centuries of institutional control, class performance, and professional gaslighting—especially in artistic and academic environments.
We were taught to obey rubrics.
To soften our self-promotion.
To “earn our keep” before ever asking for real compensation.
And even then, getting paid is framed as exceptional, not expected.
And here’s the part most people miss:
Even outside the academy, many coaching programs still replicate its logic—offering new language, but the same permission structures.
A shinier rubric. A softer evaluator.
A business model dressed up like liberation.
But if the behavior is still performance-based, the income won’t be sovereign.
It’s not enough to leave the classroom if you’re still rehearsing to be chosen.
This isn’t about rejecting education.
It’s about recovering the right to build without begging.
Because entrepreneurship done right isn’t capitalist greed.
It’s structural recovery. And at its deepest level, it’s the decolonization of income behavior.
To decolonize your income means to reclaim the right to:
Name your value without shame
Choose your clients without apology
Earn without explaining
Build your own infrastructure instead of waiting for legacy systems to modernize
And no classroom—and no never-ending coaching membership built to mirror one—is going to hand you that power. Because they’re still performing the system, too.
Curriculum Isn’t Neutral. It’s Conflicted.
Let’s be real: most of the people trying to “modernize” arts education are often still trying to prove their own value to the very system that erased it.
So they offer safe updates:
Make a Canva logo
Write an elevator pitch
Instagram marketing tips
Performance résumé templates
But they don’t go much deeper.
They can’t.
Because to go deeper would require admitting that the academic system isn’t just outdated—it’s misaligned.
The real business curriculum artists need doesn’t fit neatly into a semester:
How to regulate your nervous system during a sales call or negotiation
How to stop turning your art into a discount commodity
How to break the loyalty contract to “starving artist” purity culture
How to recognize a financially extractive institution before you say yes
And most schools don’t have anyone on faculty who can teach that.
Because most faculty members were never allowed to build it for themselves.
Mentorship is the Education. Sovereignty is the Outcome.
The best part of being a voice performance major was the private lessons.
Even when I had teachers who weren’t ideal, I still received curated experiences that met my actual needs more directly than a classroom ever could. It wasn’t always perfect, but the personalization made all the difference. It’s why I originally aspired to be a college voice teacher.
One of the deepest flaws in our education system is its factory-model design—standardized, impersonal, and structurally incapable of producing sovereign earners. It was built for conformity, not capacity.
And if high school dropouts can become millionaires, we have to be honest:
The system doesn’t just leave gaps in income behavior—it actively suppresses it.
Statistically, PhDs are more likely to become millionaires than high school dropouts.
BUT here’s what the stats don’t show:
A high school dropout doesn’t have to unlearn structural obedience.
They haven’t spent a decade rehearsing for approval, performing for rubrics, or waiting to be picked. They aren’t contorting themselves to sound credentialed before making a move.
Meanwhile, many highly educated professionals—especially in the arts—are stuck in a psychological infrastructure that actively resists entrepreneurial sovereignty.
The dropout may start with less information, but more instinct.
The academic may start with more tools, but fewer permissions.
And in a marketplace that rewards visibility, decisiveness, and clean self-trust—that difference matters more than anyone wants to admit.
You can always learn more.
But you can’t always unbecome who the system trained you to be.
So if you’ve been told you just need another class, another certification, another degree—it might not be true.
You don’t always need more credentials.
You need living role models of structural integrity—people who are earning cleanly, congruently, and without apology in real time.
You need proximity to someone who isn’t just teaching it.
They’re doing it.
Right now. Without flinching.
Entrepreneurship is not a field of study.
It’s a field of capacity.
You don’t master it.
You metabolize it.
And that kind of transformation doesn’t happen behind a desk on MWF at 10:30AM.
It happens in motion, in real decisions, in real revenue—
with mentors who mirror what’s possible because they’re living it.
Final Thought
We need to stop pretending that tweaking syllabi will prepare artists to build sovereign careers.
The education system can’t give what it doesn’t have.
It can’t hand out self-trust.
It can’t grade financial congruence.
It can’t measure the moment you finally stop contorting yourself to be picked.
College still offers real value—new perspectives, community, creative exploration, and a structured space to practice becoming.
And when you divest from the outdated idea that a degree should guarantee a job, you free the liberal arts to do what they do best: unlock the kinds of originality and possibility that traditional careers suppress but that real wealth is built upon.
You don’t need another class.
And school doesn’t need to change.
You need the right mentor.
And school just needs to tell you to get one.
P.S. Check out my subsequent article. It’s a short list of mentors and coaches whose work I know and trust enough to recommend—each based on a clear, rigorous standard of structural and behavioral integrity. The list isn’t about loud visibility—it’s about quiet alignment, earned trust, and the kind of leadership that doesn’t need applause to be real.
