Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Don't make your art pay rent
Following a passion doesn't mean ignoring rent. Paying the bills is a reality to deal with, and living in a parents' house until it works is fine. The trouble starts when the art has to carry that pressure, because then the maker won't make the best decisions. Real-world issues push toward short-term choices that don't support the long-term benefit of the real work.
The dream doesn't have to be the hobby, the love, the profession, and the paycheck all at once. Someone who moves to Peru to be a violinist may want an actual job to pay the bills while doing it. That's okay.
Rick Rubin lived this plan himself. He started making music as a hobby while at school, thought he would have a real job to support himself, and expected he would probably go to law school. Music was going to be the love of his life. It turned into a profession by nothing he did, and he never expected it could.
Which great artists held day jobs?
Composer Philip Glass drove a taxi and worked as a plumber into his forties, supporting the music he was writing. The poet T. S. Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank in London from 1917 to 1925 while writing The Waste Land. Wallace Stevens spent his career at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he became a vice president, and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1955. Franz Kafka worked at an insurance institute in Prague.
How does money pressure affect decisions?
A 2013 study in Science by Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao found that financial worries reduce performance on thinking tasks. In their experiments, the effect was comparable to losing about 13 IQ points. They proposed that worry takes up mental bandwidth that would otherwise go to the task at hand. Their subjects included shoppers at a New Jersey mall and sugarcane farmers in India.
More from The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
