“Everyone is an artist till the rent is due”

A video with that title by Bailey Schildbach showed up on my YouTube last week so I stopped to watch it. Over the course of 11min she talks about the age-old struggle between pursuing your passions and paying the bills. The dissonance between taking the leap and practicality.

This really resonated. I suspect most young people grapple with this. You ask yourself what you want to make of your life and it feels like you are faced with two paths: 1) make money or 2) find your calling

Some decide (or are forced) to choose the first path and ignore the passion. Others never find a calling. If you’re lucky enough to find one and feel compelled to pursue it then you must find a way to afford it and sustain it. Passion without sustainability is just a dream with an expiration date.

In the pursuit of your passions hard work is a necessary ingredient but its not sufficient. Luck and birth circumstance both play a bigger role than anyone will admit. It’s the reason that the most talent people aren’t always the ones on stage. This discourages many people from even trying.

But in my opinion there aren’t two paths. You’re not forced to choose.

You can take a job that gives you just enough income and flexibility to pursue your passion on the side. Einstein worked at a patent office - a mundane day job that gave him enough stability to fund his genius. The weekend warrior route.

Or you can just accept the price of not paying rent and pursue your passion anyways. You can follow the martyrs like Van Gogh and Dostoevsky and scrape by. The starving artist route.

You can also simply recognize there is art in responsibility. Choosing stability and accepting the beauty of a career. “Garbage collectors stave off the chaos of the world, preschool teachers raise the next Einsteins, caregivers alleviates suffering”

On the matter of luck: I’d argue there’s a huge meaningful difference between potential and realization. Sure there are mailmen who could’ve won Emmys in a different life, and baristas who write better than bestselling authors.

The anecdote is to simply do what you can to stay in the game. You will miss many lucky breaks - you may miss 10, you may miss 100. Dosn’t matter. You only have to get lucky once. The more ‘in the game’ you are, the more you increase your surface area of luck and opportunity.

It’s really hard to get lucky once you’ve give up. The tragedy isn’t failing in pursuit of passion. It’s quitting before you ever gave luck a chance to find you.

Peace,
Ramsey