by Herbert Lui
Just a few months before he turned 29, T. S. Eliot started his first day as a clerk in the Colonial & Foreign Department at Lloyds Bank. While he’d gained some recognition for his poetry a couple of years prior, it didn’t earn him enough income to soothe his financial anxieties, which caused him multiple nervous breakdowns. After Eliot started his day job, his wife at the time, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, noticed his improved health. The steady income settled his nerves. She writes in a letter to his mother, “Not one of his friends has failed to see, and to remark upon, the great [change] in Tom’s health, appearance, spirits, and literary productiveness since he went in for Banking. So far, it has obviously suited him.”
Eliot’s story stands out in contrast to the current dominant narrative, that people who are dedicated to their craft must do it full-time if they hope to succeed. When Matthew McConaughey told his father he wanted to drop out of law school to become an actor, his father told him, “Don’t half-ass it.” Sylvester Stallone, even more famously, was down to his last $106 before he came up with the idea for Rocky. How many people, seeing the success of McConaghey, Stallone, and others like them, interpret this advice to mean fully committing to their work—and avoid taking a day job—betting they’ll make a hit before running out of time and money? How many people believe that having a full-time job means half-assing their craft?
Work with the odds, don’t try to beat them
“The glamorous narrative is you had so much courage. You took the risk. You were dependent on this company or this book or whatever. And if it didn’t work, it was going to be a disaster, but you were the one who beat the odds,” author Susan Cain says, who earned money by teaching negotiation skills while she spent seven years researching and writing her book Quiet. “We love that narrative.” Beating the odds, finding success quickly, are alluring narratives.
Yet when we buy into this narrative, we turn a blind eye to the reality the stats suggest. The Author’s Guild reported declining earnings. In 2011, 98.9% of all albums sold less than 1,000 copies. Even the tech savvy aren’t safe from the odds; over 96.5% of YouTube creators aren’t making a full-time minimum income from advertising revenue on YouTube.
These stats draw to mind the likely possibility of failing to find success before running out of money. We don’t account for the sting of disappointment, the endurance it requires to keep making one leap of faith after the next, and the strain of turning a craft we once enjoyed into an enterprise. But rather than sticking our heads in the sand—and hoping that belief, alone, will be the source of motivation we need to succeed—what if we focused on doing what it takes to play the game for as long as possible?
The sustainable choice is the better one
In 1983, poet Dana Gioia wrote a paper for The Hudson Review, entitled, “Business and Poetry,” in which he observes many poets like T.S. Eliot who, finding success to be a tardy companion, turned to white collar jobs. He writes, “Business was the most convenient alternative that society offered them when their earliest ambitions went sour, and they made what their parents and family probably called sensible choices.” Gioia himself worked at General Foods, rising through the ranks to a role as the vice president of marketing.
Perhaps more important than the sensibility of the choice is a job’s ability to enable an artist from a wider variety of financial backgrounds to sustain their craft, so long as they remain consistent. A paper by Karol J. Borowiecki suggests that on average, a person from a wealthy household is many times more likely to pursue the arts than someone from a middle income one. If you can’t count on family income, then a job or business can supplement your income in a similar way.
Lawrence Yeo suggests seeing a day job as a patron of your art, writing, “It helps to fund that precious minority of your day where you can work on your craft without the anxiety of money worries. In addition, you also save the money required to potentially take a leap into doing it full-time.” It’s a path taken by cartoonist and author Gene Luen Yang who worked as a high school teacher, fashion designer Busayo Olupona who worked as a lawyer, and composer Philip Glass who worked as a taxi driver, plumber, and furniture mover. While Glass became a full-time composer in his early 40s, he said, “I expected to have a day job for the rest of my life.”
Give your work the time it needs
Nassim Taleb writes one of my favorite descriptions of creative work, which he describes as, “Intellectual concentration as entertainment.” The illustration that stands out, “Treat everything (including mathematics) the way a great-uncle of mine who was a man of leisure treated his afternoon game of bridge.”
This relaxed, gentle, pace—which, besides the point, still resulted in a very productive year for Taleb—isn’t possible with urgency and pressure. It remains serious, fun, and sustainable. It allows you to pour more of yourself in your work, without needing to hold back for fear of commercial considerations.
Early in my writing career, I focused my ambition on writing a bestseller; anything less meant that I was half-assing it. It took me many years of working as a professional writer, including writing my first book Creative Doing as well as a stint working at Lifehacker during the Gawker Media era, to realize that creative commitment didn’t mean success, so much as it meant writing every day, which I do at my blog. Tyler Cowen, who also writes at his blog every day, says, “It’s a competitive advantage just to be choosing things you’re intrinsically interested in.” My day jobs would allow me to do this without any commercial pressure.
A steady stream of income outside your creative work not only provides financial sustenance. It also helps you create a life, living experiences that will serve as the raw material for your work. In addition to supplementing your creative work with other professional accomplishments, as well as teaching you patience, you can learn an important lesson from your day job. Gioia writes a lesson he learned from poets, which we could apply to all art forms, “Working in nonliterary careers taught them an important lesson that too few American writers learn—that poetry is only one part of life, that there are some things more important than writing poetry.”
***
Herbert Lui is an author and marketing strategist whose work encourages people to embrace the messy, joyful process of creating with purpose and impact. His writing has appeared in Fast Company, The Globe and Mail, and The Fader. As the author of Creative Doing, Herbert draws from his years of practice to help creatives move through blocks, build momentum, and reconnect with the joy of showing up consistently and honestly. He writes every day at his blog.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.