I remembered the day I listened to Tim Ferriss’ interview with Jim Collins for the first time. It fundamentally changed my worldview.

There are many gems. One is when Collins explains how he hired himself.

“I like the independent path and I like betting on myself. So I had this idea, ‘Well gee, if you don’t have to be at IBM to be in business, why do I have to be at a university to be a professor?’ So I said to [my wife], I said, ‘You know I think I have this idea of I’d like to be a self-employed professor to endow my own chair and to grant myself tenure’….And the idea was to try to pursue really big questions that wouldn’t be constrained.”

Until I heard this podcast I hadn’t truly considered entrepreneurial academia. I felt that if I wanted to explore huge ideas systematically I needed to attempt a PhD and then land in an institution. But here was an incredibly deep thinker who instead imitated all that is good in an academic environment, stripped out what wasn’t, and figured he would discover something notable enough to support himself financially. Brilliant.

Most teachers seem to operate under the assumption that they are hired by the hour to work directly with violin students. But I sometimes play with an alternative model.

Students are paying you tuition to go deep, to push the frontiers of music learning, to have brilliant ideas, to understand the violin inside and out, to allow those discoveries to ripple into every corner of your life. And the violin lesson time is merely a laboratory for experimenting in real life with the theoretical ideas you already developed.

To be a professor is to generate new knowledge in your field.
What if your job wasn’t being a violin teacher, but being violin teaching researcher?
What would you get funding to do?
Where would your out of lesson (lab) time go?
What boundaries would you push?
Would you hire yourself?