I’ve been reading in bed on my smart phone recently, which is probably a bad idea because it makes it harder to go asleep. At the same time, though, it tends to get my mind rolling, and when 3am comes around my thoughts tend to go some really interesting places. Sharing those thoughts is probably going to get me into trouble, but hey, you might find them interesting, so why not?
When I was eight years old, I knew I was going to be a writer. There was never any question about that. I spent all my free time making up stories, and my favorite stories were the ones I found in books. However, I knew I never wanted writing to be my job, because 1) everyone hates their jobs, and I didn’t want writing to ever become something I hated, and 2) everyone knows that writers can’t make a decent living. Even at the young age of eight, I had bought into some of society’s most pervasive myths about jobs, careers, and how to make money.
Americans are generally horrible with money–we struggle to keep budgets and put all sorts of things on credit, and pay more than twice what our houses are worth by signing mortgage contracts we barely even read. Because we’re so horrible with money, we tend to see it as a sort of magical force, something that can solve all our problems and make us happy. Rich people are like powerful wizards or sorcerers, so far above the rest of us that we can hardly fathom their ways.
Nowhere is our stupidity about money more apparent in the fact that most of us spend our lives acquiring it by working for some sort of hourly or salaried wage. Wages and salaries are basically the same, in that they convert time into money. That’s why we all measure income in terms of dollars per hour, or salary per year. But for anyone who understands how money works, that is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Money comes and goes, but time? Time is one of the most finite and precious resources known to man.
All of us are going to die someday. Most people are scared shitless by that fact, so we try to ignore it or put off thinking about it until some unspecified time in the future, like when we’re retired. But not all of us get the opportunity to put our affairs in order after retiring comfortably from the workforce. In fact, any of us could die tomorrow, or the next day, or at any other time. And even if we do all live to be centenarians, our time on this Earth is still finite. It’s non-renewable, too–you can’t go back and relive that day or that hour or that minute once it’s passed, no matter how much you regret it.
Converting time into money is basically trading gold for lead, or wine for water. Yet that’s exactly what we do, because money is this strange, magical force that so few of us understand. And the machines that do all the converting for us are businesses and corporations.
Questions like “where do you work?” “what is your job?” and “what do you make?” are much more common than “what do you do for a living?” That’s because most of us have bought into this idea that money comes from working for someone else, exchanging your time directly for a salary or paycheck. Sure, we do stuff with that time, but we don’t actually own it–the company does. While we’re on the clock, the company owns us and anything we produce. That’s the pact we make in exchange for this magical substance we call money.
It wasn’t until college that I started to become disabused of the childhood notion that I shouldn’t pursue writing as a career path. For one thing, I came to realize that plenty of people love their work–that just because you do something as a job doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll come to hate it. But it wasn’t until I graduated unemployed in the middle of a recession that I realized how much of a myth it is that writers can’t make a living.
You see, people say that about every career choice–every career, that is, except accounting. That’s because accountants are the ones who work for the businesses and corporations, counting the magical money. Since we all get our money from businesses and corporations, exchanging our time for money, the only career with complete security is the one that the businesses and corporations will always need. After all, they’re not going to go belly up, are they? Not the big ones, anyway. They can’t–they’re the magical machines where all the money comes from.
Of course, anyone who knows anything about money knows that the only real way to make a lot of it is to produce something of value that can scale. It’s not about time at all–it’s about producing something that people want, and producing it in such a way that the more you sell, the more you make. At no point in that equation does time become a variable. It’s certainly a variable in the production equation, but even there, it’s not necessarily the most important one.
The most important thing, though, is that you have to really own what you produce–and that means owning all the failures as well as the successes. When you work for a corporation, it’s easy to shift the blame. It’s a rare case where one person is solely responsible for bringing down the whole collective enterprise. But when you work for yourself, you can’t blame anyone else when things go wrong. You’ve got to be ready to take the risk, and the bigger the payoff then chances are the bigger the risk.
That’s why everyone says that you can’t make a living as a writer. They say the same thing about making a living as a sports caller, or a musician, or a political activist. I’ve even had people tell me that there’s no money in math or in Arabic. They say that because they think that money is supposed to come from corporations, and corporations only really need people who can count their money. Every other part of the business they can either figure out how to do it with robots or outsource the work to India. They might not outsource all of the jobs, but there’s always a risk that they’ll outsource yours (unless you’re an accountant, of course, because corporations always have money).
In the end, though, it’s all just silly. Money isn’t some sort of vague magical force, and it doesn’t come out of the void from businesses or corporations–it comes from making something that people are willing to pay you for. It comes from producing something of value, or at least convincing people that you have something of value. And you don’t need to sell your time at $7.25 an hour or $24,000 per year to do that. You just need hard work, a great idea, and the opportunity to succeed as well as fail.
So can you make a living as a writer/artist/blogger/activist/global nomad/whatever your dream happens to be? Of course! It won’t be easy–you’ll probably fail a lot, perhaps even spectacularly–but it is possible. So why not give it a try? At the very least, you shouldn’t buy into the myth that accounting is the only career path guaranteed to make you any money.
I really like this post. Good articulation of why people should go for their dreams and for things that will make them ultimately happy (which is typically not money). Also a very valid defense of the more individualistic/entrepreneurial approach to making a living.
However, I don’t think all salaried jobs are inherently unworthy. Many folks are pursuing their passion, and the best way to do that (given current market assumptions) is through taking a position at an institution. Many of us work for non-profits or governmental agencies with the dream of making a difference in the lives of others (i.e., “public service”), and not all of those jobs are as corrupt as yours was on Capitol Hill.
For example, while there are other ways to make a difference in the life of low-income, underserved students (such as acting as a volunteer tutor or developing something like Khan Academy), I argue that the world also needs salaried teachers and administrators (including accountants!) who exchange the creative output of their brains in exchange for money so that output can serve kids in public, private, and charter schools and give them a hope at pursuing their own passions.
The same is true for other fields of work. Not all other fields, but many.
In other words, I don’t think that becoming a one-man enterprise to pursue your writing, blogging, activist, or nomadic dreams is the one and only true way to Make Money and Be Happy with your Time and Work (publishing deal on that book title forthcoming…;). But, I definitely do agree with you that it’s a very valid way, and it’s often criticized or viewed with fear, particularly by our parents’ generation (and their offspring who have bought into it).
I agree, there are totally valid reasons for working a salaried / hourly job or pursuing a non-freelance career that have nothing to do with money. Making a difference in other people’s lives, being a part of something bigger than yourself, joining with other like-minded people in a meaningful way–those are just some of the many reasons. But even then, you’ve got to ask yourself if you’d still be doing what you’re doing if you weren’t getting paid for it (provided, of course, that you still had enough to take care of your basic needs). My hunch is that since the recession, that doesn’t apply to nearly as many salaried / hourly workers as before.
Excellent post Joe.
Thanks!
Technically accountants are creating a product that people are willing to pay for on a perpetual basis: tidy accounting books, nice tax returns, etc. While they tend to get paid for the time spent creating these products, they are still, technically, products. Just to be useful they have to be remade every so often. And I happen to know a number of people who really like their jobs as CPAs (which isn’t exactly the same thing as accountant, but I’ll run with it for now). It’s got a good mix of technical thinking/problem solving and interacting with/helping people. I understand your point in this post, but you kind of paint with a broad brush regarding anyone who doesn’t necessarily want to be an entrepreneurial product-creator (especially since many accountants and such ARE entrepreneurs and build their own firms and clienteles from the ground up). Just had to throw that in there. 😉
Don’t get me wrong; the world needs accountants, just like it needs workers in pretty much every other job (well … most of them, anyway). I’m not trying to bash accountants–they’re probably not the ones telling everyone to go into accounting, since they have a clearer idea of who would excel in it and who would find it miserable, and are thus less likely to throw it out as the default for anyone who wants any sort of job security.