Sunday 13 September 2009
Money isn’t the only measure of success, but feel good about how much you make
It is often said that good writers never make any money. I have never met a successful writer, so I don’t know if this is a universally held view. But all the writers I do know, who are all poor, assure me that this is the case.
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Money isn’t the only measure of success, but feel good about how much you make
Alan Alanson
13 September 2009
It is often said that good writers never make any money. I have never met a successful writer, so I don’t know if this is a universally held view. But all the writers I do know, who are all poor, assure me that this is the case.
The theory is that bad writing sells better than good writing because badly written books are all about what happens next, whereas well-written books are all about the writing itself, something your average book buyer doesn’t appreciate and therefore finds dull and tells his or her friends to avoid.
I understand that unsuccessful musicians also hold this to be true in the case of the music industry. And although I don’t know any, I imagine struggling actors look at Megan Fox and Hayden Christensen and curse the injustice of the movie business.
I am, of course, talking about success in the purely financial sense. Many writers, musicians and artists do what they do because they like it, not because they are looking for an end-of-year bonus. And, although this may sound strange in the Your Money pages, success can be defined by other ways than how large your bank balance is.
My friend Stuart, for example, is a full-time artist. He is in his early forties, has a teenage son, and has practically no assets and no money. His work consists of something called “installations”. In his case, this means that he creates work for a particular exhibition and then dismantles it afterwards. In other words, his work cannot be purchased. He has chosen a profession from which it is impossible to make money.
To ensure that neither he nor his son starves, Stuart also works part-time at an art gallery. To devote as much time as possible to his art, Stuart spends the absolute minimum number of hours at the gallery as is necessary to survive.
As a result, he consistently finishes spending every pay cheque just before the next one arrives.
This approach to personal finance would leave me a nervous wreck, but I can see the advantages. Stuart, for example, was not aware that the financial markets recently collapsed. And as his bank balance hovers mostly around zero, he was not nervous about the loss of his savings should the banks fail.
The other advantage he has is that he does not rate his career, or indeed his life, by reference to how much he earns. The ambiguous criteria by which artistic talent is measured mean that any objective assessment of his work is impossible. For the rest of us, who create nothing of any aesthetic or social value, pretty much all we have to rely on to determine how we are doing is cash.
The biggest problem with judging your success by your relative wealth is that it is difficult to ever feel a real sense of achievement. And this is because the goalposts keep moving. For example, if you are like most professionals, your personal wealth on leaving university was zero or some much larger, but negative, number. In other words, you were poor. You got your first job, earning somewhere around US$30,000 a year, and you immediately felt incredibly rich.
Sometime later, you would enter the class of people who had more than US$10,000 in the bank.
To a university student, a bank balance of US$10,000 is super-rich. Once you enter this category, however, you soon realise that lots of your colleagues have ten times your wealth in the bank. After a few years of bonuses and increasing salaries, probably delayed by marriage and the purchase of an unnecessarily expensive car, you’ll get there.
And you will then become aware of the people who have half a million in the bank. And so on. This is a never-ending climb. Wherever you find yourself on the ladder, there will always be people above you. A sense of achievement, linked solely to how much money you have, is therefore difficult to come by.
Now, there is of course someone at the top of this ladder. According to Forbes, it is Bill Gates, who has a net worth of something like US$40 billion. If money is the ultimate measure of success, then to be No 1, you need to top that. I am prepared to go out on a limb and predict that that no one reading this article has a chance of doing that.
It’s tempting to think this means all of us unimaginative corporate types ought to throw in our shallow material goals and, like my friend Stuart, strive instead for emotional and spiritual fulfilment.
However, most of us don’t have the option of being artists. Part of the reason bankers are bankers and accountants are accountants and parking inspectors are parking inspectors is that we’re not much good at anything else, particularly skills that involve imagination.
There is more to life than work. Make up for the shallowness of your work life by focusing on your family, your golf swing, your stamp collection. But that is of course nonsense. You spend five days a week at work and a good part of the weekend thinking about it. You can’t pretend it’s not the most significant or at least the most time-consuming part of your life, shallow and materialistic it may be.
So feel good about it, focus on how much more you are making than all those artists.
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