<p>Way upthread I listed some elite college grads who had a great deal of success with only their unmarketable BAs, but I forgot one of the best: Charlie Hamlen. </p>
<p>Charlie graduated from Harvard with one of those super-marketable French Lit concentrations, and after a year at the Sorbonne started teaching high school French in Western New York. He had been a strong amateur pianist all his life, and he became active in the classical music scene of his city. He was especially good at accompanying soloists (voice and other instruments), and was often called on to support touring musicians who couldn’t afford to bring their own accompanyists when they performed in his area. A few of them, who were getting to the point where they COULD have their own accompanyist, prevailed on him to move to New York as a full-time musician. Not long afterwards, one of them asked him to be her manager as well, and then a few more, and in short order he was an artist manager, not a musician.</p>
<p>He founded a management company with a like-minded woman, and they became a hot management company in the classical world. A major sports management company was moving into other fields, and bought them out, but hired Charlie to stay and run the company. He built it over a decade into the dominant artist manager in classical music, and expanded into other business lines. He left to work full time on fundraising for AIDS research, and was knighted by the French government for his work. Sixteen years after leaving the company he founded, he was re-hired as chairman and CEO after a scandal forced the resignation of his successor. </p>
<p>He is wealthy and universally admired; he gets his picture in the NY Times society pages. He has been doing work he loves – including teaching French – his entire career.</p>
<p>There’s a Harvard career path for you. Talent, intelligence, commitment, leadership, ethics, and drive made him an enormous success (including monetarily) despite never doing anything conventionally marketable.</p>