The advice arrives early and sounds like maturity: decide what you are. You can be a lawyer or a painter, an analyst or a poet, and the sensible person keeps the second option as a hobby that stays quiet at work.
Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato has no patience for the rule. “Art and business are only opposites if we insist on making them opposites,” he says.
He has standing to say it. An American novelist who has lived in Paris since 2019, he has spent his working life in business and organisational leadership, holds an Oxford degree and writes for Forbes as a contributor on leadership and culture. His mainstream debut novel, Three Days Grace, came out from Indigo River Publishing on 12 May 2026, distributed by Simon & Schuster. It sets five people in a Paris hotel for 72 hours, and it won an American Fiction Award and took Silver in Fiction at the 2026 Living Now Book Awards.
Who benefits from the rule
The opposition between art and commerce has a long pedigree. Romantic tradition casts the artist as someone who stands outside the market. Corporate culture returns the favour by treating creative ambition as a distraction from the job. Each side gets something from the arrangement: the artist gets an identity built on refusal, and the organisation gets employees whose attention stays inside the building.
Neither story describes how people live. Plenty of people move between both worlds, and the shelves of any bookshop carry novels by doctors, lawyers and civil servants who saw no betrayal in keeping the day job. The convention survives on repetition. Few people test it.
Bradley-Silverio Donato says he never felt he had to choose between being an executive and being a writer. He has put the point as advice to anyone stuck at the same fork. “You don’t necessarily have to choose between being a businessperson and an artist, or between the practical and creative parts of yourself,” he says.
Seriousness travels
“I’ve never believed seriousness in one part of your life requires abandoning curiosity in another.”
His target here is the sacrifice test, the idea that you prove commitment to one thing by giving up the others. Under that test, a senior professional who writes fiction looks unserious about the career, and a novelist with a career looks unserious about the art. The test measures loyalty by what you renounce. It says nothing about the quality of the work on either side.
He proposes a different measure. In his account, seriousness is a habit you carry from one room to the next, and curiosity in one part of your life can sharpen your attention in the other. He describes his professional life and his writing life as separate, while noting that they exercise some of the same muscles, observation and empathy among them.
If you suspect you must pick, look at who tells you so. An employer gains your undivided attention from the choice. A literary scene gains a tidy story about who counts as a real writer. You can decline both offers and still owe each part of your life your best effort.
The cost of complying
Obeying the rule has a price that rarely shows up in a career plan. People who park one identity in a drawer often stop developing it, and the drawer becomes a reproach. Others keep both lives going while hiding one of them, which turns a source of energy into a secret to manage.
Bradley-Silverio Donato’s novel happens to be about the damage done by things people keep to themselves. He has made no claim that the book draws on his own choices, and it is fiction. The parallel still holds for the reader at the fork: a part of yourself you refuse to acknowledge tends to cost more over time than the awkwardness of owning it.
The convention will outlive any one person who ignores it, and every public example of someone doing serious work on both sides of the line makes it a little harder to enforce.
Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato is an American novelist living in Paris and a Forbes contributor on leadership and culture. Three Days Grace is published by Indigo River Publishing and distributed by Simon & Schuster.
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