I started out with comedy in college, but had my major in Recreation Administration - which meant I wasn't going to get a real job - so I started doing a little standup.

People admire a screen actor if they have theatre skills, but it's looked down upon by the industry as being not a 'real job,' in the way it isn't in New York or the U.K.

My parents paid me small amounts for cleaning my room or cleaning the dishes and stuff, but I never really had a real job before I started on my professional tennis career.

I'm still awaiting the idea of drawing comics for a living being a reality. I feel like I've been dodging work for 20 years, and at some point, I'll have to get a real job.

College didn't stick, so I worked odd jobs, but I've always written songs and played music. I actually met a guy who was a songwriter, which I didn't realize was a real job.

One of my first memories of being a kid was, 'I want to have a real job when I grow up.' And to me that meant you wear a suit and a hat and carry a briefcase and go to your job.

I used to tell my mother, 'I'm going to have to get a real job one day.' You keep saying this will end one day, but people still call us up and ask us to sing. It's truly amazing.

I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job - I mean, since she's been grown up.

When I first starting writing, and no one was paying me, in order to feel like I had a real job, I would get out of bed, put on a jacket and tie every morning, and sit down at my desk.

We all had jobs that were just fronts. I felt like I was in the mob. I had a job, but that wasn't my real job. My real job was to be an actor. I always knew that and never forgot that.

I grew up a happy kid in Toronto. I've never suffered. I've never even had a real job! But I understand sadness and striving, and those two things tie into all the roles that I've played.

I always loved singing because I grew up in a very musical family. My mom wasn't able to do music professionally because her parents wanted her to get a 'real job,' but she played guitar.

My first real job, I sold Christmas trees when I was twelve for extra money. I did that until I was fifteen. Then I bagged groceries, and I worked at the first Borders ever in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I have to focus and keep things together as much as anyone with a real job... It's just that I know, from experience, that the more fun I have doing something that the more successful it will be.

My last real job was selling air time for CBS affiliates. I quit that when I was 28, and that was the last real job I had. I beat the system. I've been able to do this full-time for almost 15 years.

After I graduated high school and came out to do 'Buffy,' I was enrolled at my mom's university, and I was going to go get a real job. I never thought of acting and never really wanted to be an actor.

I grew up making music in my mum's basement, and I used to tell her I was going down there to work, and she'd say, 'That's not work. Go get a real job!' It took me signing a record deal to change her opinion!

When I got out of college, I gave myself till I was 30 to invent a product. If I couldn't do it by then, I would just get a real job. And that fear - the fear of a real job - motivated me to be an entrepreneur.

Yes, I would loved to have just sustained myself through my art, but less than one in a billion musicians gets that life. So rather than being like, 'I'm an exception!', like a moron, I thought I'd get a real job.

Growing up, my dad was 'get a real job, don't go pursuing your dreams, that's how you become homeless.' So, do I pick my family or do I pick my own happiness, and how much does my own happiness depend on my family?

I always thought I'd go to university and then get a real job, you know. Now I want to do stuff that really makes me happy. Although I'm still trying to work out what that is. But for me there are always constants.

I think I'm probably the only person that, when the parents lent me money to make the movie, they wished I had not paid them back. They could have said 'No,' and it would have ended, and I would have gotten a real job.

Growing up, I was encouraged to get a good education, get a real job doing something I enjoyed, and, should the opportunity present itself, consider public service as just that: a chance to serve, not an end in itself.

I've made a couple of comments about fame, and my kids are going to be put in - in, you know, working at Taco Bell when they're 16 so they know what a real job is like, and - and know what it's like to - to really earn money.

'No Scrubs' is a mean song for a lot of reasons. If you're 18, 19-year-old guy, or even 17, your friend just got a license. You don't have a real job yet. It's like that song asks you to be an adult way faster than you should.

I believe in teaching as a real job. I don't think it's a substitute for anything else. It's been shown to me that teachers can help, and the writing today is just as good as it was when I started out. Technology hasn't changed that.

My first job ever real job in the field was as an airborne traffic reporter and producer in Los Angeles, but I was laid off pretty quickly - which was totally fair, because I'm terrible with directions, and that's kind of the whole job.

My parents were always supportive. They didn't say, 'Get a real job.' They believed in the arts, and they prepared me to be skilled. I'm lucky I can drop into these worlds - into a studio or onto a set or go on stage - and feel comfortable.

I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.

I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.

I think there's always been a little performer in me. But having a family that are Jamaican immigrants, having this idea that, 'Oh, that's what you're going to do for a living?' seems kind of out of reach and not a reality. It's like, 'get a real job.'

Climbing, as my grandmother said, it's a pretty frivolous thing. She always wondered when I was going to get a real job. But climbing is a real job for me now, and I enjoy it. It's a gift that I'm able to do it, share adventure and motivation with people.

I'm a martial artist. That's what I've been doing since I was three years old, and fighting since i was 15 and that's all I know how to do. The money is just a bonus. It's a bonus for me. I think my real job is teaching martial arts, it's what I love to do.

It started back in 2002, when there was hardly any reality television. 'Survivor' had just started. My hope and dream was that 'The Bachelor' would last one or two nights on network TV, so I might meet somebody in the network and then I could get a real job.

Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness - I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full-time.

I started taking acting classes when I was 14. That's when I knew I wanted to try it professionally. Before that, I watched movies, always, but I didn't think it was a real job. I watched Turner Classic Movies with my parents. I've always loved the old classics.

You know how you're in elementary school and the teacher goes around the room and, like, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' I said, 'NBA player.' And she's like, 'Well, OK. Maybe pick a real job.' But I really believed it. I felt like I was meant to be here.

Part of the job of a children's author is to write books that will be remembered, definitely, but if I might go out on a limb, I will say that the other part, the more important part, is to build books that will help children fall in love with reading. That, to me, is the real job.

I think my first actual real job was a door-to-doors salesperson for Foxtel, a cable TV company, and that lasted a couple of weeks because I got held, like I wouldn't say at swordpoint, but I was kept in someone's house against my will and she did have a sword and was sort of brandishing it.

I've been grinding at music for over a decade now. Since I was 18, I decided that this is what I wanted to do. It's not an easy thing. When you start getting 25, 26, people are like, 'Oh you're a musician huh? That's what you're gonna do? When are you going to get a real job?' I never gave up.

Zombie books were going to be my passion projects, but certainly not pay the bills. I thought I was going to have to get a real job on a sitcom or something, and have my zombie books to remind myself I was still a writer at heart. I never thought I could actually pay my bills and write what I wanted.

I remember I had a low point when I was working on a soap opera, 'General Hospital,' five years ago. It was my first real job, and it was so overwhelming. You would work five days a week and have to learn sometimes up to 30 pages of new dialogue a night, then have one take to shoot it all, the next day.

My mother passed away when I was 14, so there were certain things I missed in terms of upbringing. Maybe my mother would have said, 'You have to get a real job.' I don't know because I didn't have that experience. My fortes in school were Spanish, sports, reading and theater. That's what they encouraged.

I never heard of anyone saying they want to deploy their capital wisely and go buy a sports franchise. What you want to do is just not lose money. You see, I don't have to work anymore. I tell people I don't have a real job. On the other hand, I learned long ago that you can't go broke if you turn a profit.

I was writing full time after quitting a job as a high school English teacher, and I hadn't been able to sell anything, and my bank account was down to zero, and all of my friends were like 'What are you doing in the basement, when are you going to get a real job?', and my parents thought I'd completely lost it.

One thing we see a lot is this - the idea kids have now that they don't have to go to college. They don't have to get a real job. They feel they can become 'Internet famous' by taking selfies. They think they can become a star through social media. We see that a lot. You can succeed. But it takes time and persistence.

I got my first real job, one that didn't involve wearing a hairnet or bending over the hood of a wet car with a towel in my hand, in the early '90s working for CBS Records. While there, I started my first of several rock bands and eventually wrote my first book, the semi-autobiographical novel, 'Don't Sleep With Your Drummer.'

I learned really early on that I had to treat it as if it were a real job. This might be my middle class background - the Irish work ethic, which isn't quite the same as the Protestant work ethic - but still, it's, 'Get a job and show up every day. Be there. And don't complain. Who do you think you are: you're nobody special; go to work.'

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

That first company I started made a lot of money for the venture capitalists - nearly $30 million - but next to nothing for the founders. The companies I started after that varied between failures and mediocre successes. But at no point did I ever consider getting a 'real job.' That felt like a black and white world, and I wanted Technicolor.

Share This Page