Hard work does not guarantee success

Parent Cafe
21

I don’t believe that people don’t understand that hard work is no guarantee of “success,” if we are talking about salary earned for one’s efforts. Anyone who observes people working their tails off doing manual labor in the brutal heat of the summer, who witnesses the harried nurse with too many patients, the school teacher putting in unreal hours and effort just to simply keep order in a classroom, or the firemen running into a huge inferno knows that effort is not necessarily rewarded with monetary “success.”

I don’t believe many people are guaranteeing their kids that hard work equals “success,” either.

What most of us know is that without hard work, you are probably guaranteeing that you won’t succeed. Big difference.

22

I think some positive signs that would lead to a good outcome for a non-traditional field of study would be:

a real love for it and some display of talent and drive and willingness to learn from others on how to be better. By age 18, an aspiring artist should really have an impressive portfolio an aspiring actor have been in tons of high school and community events. Writers should be writing well and maybe have a blog

some sense of reality about life. be willing to struggle, to cut corners financially, to not expect to live the high life at college or afterwards on parent’s dime

be willing to go to say a very good public university art or music program if that is what they can afford. not be wiling to spend 10s of thousands of dollars they don’t have

maybe be willing to take some business or English classes to broaden their skill set and give them a chance to run a successful business or career (if you are a struggling artist / actor you can’t afford to pay others to do things for you)

Otherwise, hey, community college and a part time job might make a more traditional job look a lot better…

i think there is also a lot of room for creativity as say a software person with a flair for art … that may just pay the bills … even if you are just designing really nice websites for local businesses

23

Friends of mine have a daughter who has always loved to draw. They discouraged her interest in the arts as a career at every possible moment – if they drove by a hovel, they’d point to it and say, “that’s where you’ll live if you major in art.” They supported it as a hobby, but were absolutely horrified at the thought she would get an degree in fine arts instead of majoring in math or science (in which she also excelled).

She was stubborn. She got her arts degree. She worked really, really, really hard – spending hours in the studio – and she works that hard now, too. And she is supporting herself (OK, with the exceptions of health insurance and cell phone).

Not every artist is starving. I know many who are supporting themselves with their art. Many of them live modest lives, and they are perfectly happy with that.

24

I have cousins from a wealthy family who were both fine arts majors. They grew up with expensive lifestyles. They married spouses who are also arsty types. My cousins are now in their 40’s and have kids, and my aunt and uncle are still supporting both of them and their spouses + kids.

I don’t care if my kids want to be artists, musicians, Broadway performers, or circus clowns. But I do insist they have something “marketable” to fall back on if the circus act doesn’t work out. I don’t intend to be like my aunt & uncle.

25

Re #23

Expensive lifestyles can be one’s downfall even if one enters a highly paid career path. Consider how many professional athletes go broke after retiring with what should be more than enough money to live well indefinitely.

26

My sister went to college in her 40s. BA in Philosophy and Masters in Women’s Studies. She is an adjunct prof in Composition. She is 60 years old, lives in poverty and would be on the streets if my mother didn’t help her financially. She works so hard grading those compositions. She is paid by the course but if you figured it up by the hour, she would be making less than minimum wage. She is very smart, a very good teacher, works very hard, and lives in poverty.

My son said he wanted to teach college history. I said, “High school” and told him why.

27

My D17 told me last week that deep inside, she’d like to be a stay home mom who does art every day.

kinda sweet; but in reality i dont think that will happen. We will encourage her to take art classes with whatever major she choses. (but not art).

Art is just so subjective. It’s hard to make a living with it. We’ve seen it with my dad, who has his MFA and is a talented potter. He has had to live very very frugally while teaching art at private schools, and painting in the summers. he is happy and satisfied with life in his 70s, but even he is encouraging his granddaughter to not major in fine arts.

28

GMTspouse is an avid collector of historical artifacts—travels to all the shows internationally to buy. Has a collection that is carefully researched, catalogued & archived. Spends countless hours studying the history. Our house is spilling over with books.

But spouse has a daytime job to support this expensive passion.

29

My sis is an MFA. She needed $ support always. She also has serious health issues. She works harder than most anyone I know. She never is paid what she is worth. I wish I knew to put her on my pay roll years ago, so she could qualify for Medicare. I keep working, never thinking I’ll have enouGh $ for me and sis.

Now, the brother of my son’s g/f is an artist. His dad teaches business. They give him books about making his form of art work profitable. He has interned with people in his field that are successful. Given his family support, and their knowledge about making his work profitable, I truly believe he will be self supporting and happy.

30

I think there are multiple threads running through here, some not directly related, some do.

1)Arts careers and the ability to make a decent living in it. as the father of a music student, hits close to home. Yes, it is an incredibly difficult road, and it also can be very, very expensive (my son’s instrument is about the cost of a Toyota Camry or so), both the prep to get into a good music program then the programs themselves. And the outcome, well, is cloudy, you put in all that work, then you continue to, in music it might be grad school, then hustling for gigs, creating an ensemble, marketing yourself, teaching, and maybe getting into a decent orchestra and so forth.And it is hard work, I hear how hard it is to be a doctor, doctor has a big advantage, there is a defined path, you know what needs to be done, you work hard, get good grades, get into med school, work hard, get into an internship/residency, and it is likely you can always find a job, maybe not the money making machine people envision, and can be tough with debt, but it is defined; but with arts, with music since I know that, it is all up in the air, success is hard work, but it also is achieving goals without really defined paths.

So okay, why did I encourage my son? Why didn’t i say “you are smart, study financial engineering, become a quant, and see what you can make”. The answer is very simply that music was his passion, and he is owed that chance to find his passion. If he didn’t have it, if he hadn’t dedicated to it, I would have discouraged him, but he truly has the passion. And yes, we are committed to helping him as he goes along this path, but we knew that…and he knows the score, there is no delusions there either. People have a right to their passions, and even if he ends up not making it in music as his main avocation, he still went for it, and it will be with him.

2)One of the things people with their focus on success forget is success comes on many paths, and often the path they steer a kid towards seems to be the path to success, but is’t. Sure, get a degree in IT or Tech, you likely can get a job, but guess what, you might end up working hard, and end up with a run of the mill career, never really achieving what you might want. The reason for this is the hard skills you might learn in IT or Engineering only are part of the poicture, and if you have focused on the hard skills, of getting good grades, of getting into a top school, of learning the hard skills, you might find yourself toiling at the same kind of job for a lot of years. The truly successful end up being so because they have a lot of skills they apply, so called soft skills, like people management, or ill defined ones, like creativity and resourcefullness, that allows them to succeed. There are programmers where they give them all the specs, all the information on how to code, what is expected, and they code it, and that is what they often end up doing, and they are competent. But the superstars are people who can program, but also can figure out what they are supposed to be doing, and create something incredible, rather than being told what to do. Guys who can take a business requirement and turn it into a blazing new feature are rare and a hot commodity, programmers who can take a functional spec someone else wrote and write the code are not necessarily.

Likewise, someone can go to an ivy league school, have superstar grades and such to get in there, major in finance or economics, get a grad business degree from the hot school, get a job with some prestigious company, and find they are stuck doing analysis work or support work, rather than the big thing. Why? Because they lack other things, the team skills, the communication skills, the ‘getting along skills’, that were never emphasized by what they studied. Running an analysis on a company as a takeover target, the numbers, is a skill, but being able to take those numbers and put it all together takes a lot more than that. Convincing a potential M and A target that a merger would help both companies takes a lot more than numbers, it takes a lot of persuasion and good old fashioned sales pitch and understanding.

The Wall Street journal had an article about that not too long ago, how a lot of these hyper kids, who did all the rigth things, found out what they were lacking, that when expected to manage, when expected to run projects, they often had a hard time or struggled, because they were taught that in effect the soft skills meant little, they had all the hashmarks of success, but were missing things. Why? because they were so narrowly focused, they forgot about the rest.

Okay, so what does that have to do with an art major or a music major? The answer is that despite their path to things, they have learned a lot of valuable skills, they have learned to self promote (rather than assuming a Harvard MBA and so forth would be the ticket), they have learned how to deal with difficult people, they have learned to deal with ambiguity, real life is not just a bunch of numbers, it is people, often difficult people, and arts majors often have those skills. People get obsessed about usable skills in college, they focus on things like programming or accounting or finance or ‘usable things’, but they forget about the rest (this comes up on the music major forum all the time). College isn’t just about that, and while getting a Harvard degree in finance or economics might open doors easier than an arts degree, the fact that kids went for their passions, channeled their energy into something they wanted to do, means they learned a lot, too (and if employers are worried about academic rigors of music, I suggest they try taking music theory courses). There was a big article not long ago that Goldman Sachs, probably one of the more uptight firms when it comes to hiring, specifically in their business units like banking, were looking for non traditional students, like music majors, because they wanted different thinking then the finance and economics go with the herd types (their words, not mine).

3)Want to know one of the biggest ones, a lesson that so many miss? The kids who jump off the deep end and try the arts, are not afraid to fail, they aren’t afraid to take a leap of faith. Think about the college forums on here, especially trying to get into the competitive programs, and what do we see? “Should my son do violin or piano, which will work better for him?” “Should he take an honors course, where he may get a lower grade, or get a higher grade from the regular section?” It is all about risk aversion, not daring to do anything that might mar the perfect GPA or the track to getting 8 AP classes, it is all about the ‘right’ track to get into the school, rather than about actually learning ot trying new things. And what do you get out of that in the corporate world? Someone who is focused on not making mistakes, on staying within the lines, of being what we like to call a corporate drone. We admire entrepeneurs, yet what we leave out is that they are willing to fail, most entrepeneurs have 5 or 6 businesses go under before hitting it. Likewise, the guys who end up building businesses are willing to take chances, it is kind of funny that these days a lot of the ‘best and brightest’, the academic superstars with the carefully tailored path, want to go work for a Google, yet these were companies founded by those who took chances, not the road fully travelled.

And yes, to succeed in anything, however you define it, you need to do hard work, arts or whatever. The real answer I think lies in what you put the hard work into, and what you don’t work on often is more important than what you did.