I believed this at 17, as a scared and nervous teenager, & I believe it more strongly now as a moderately accomplished adult: if you want to make an interesting living outside of the classic guilds (law, medicine, etc), the most important thing to do is cultivate taste, publicly
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There are employers out there who would love to hire (and pay) a driven, motivated kid who’s curious about things, good at figuring things out, and get things done. The problem is that there’s no way to know who these kids are unless they have a trail of output to show for it
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Anyway this is just my experience. Your mileage may vary.
If you have time to argue about unpaid internships though, you have time to write an interesting essay about something you love, or code up a cute little site, etc, and use THAT to get yourself some paid work.
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Definitely do rant about the injustice of unpaid internships in general, but maybe do that after you’re getting paid. It’s not *that* hard to get paid. It’s certainly easier than playing elaborate virtue-signalling games on Twitter. You don’t have to be broke! ✌🏾
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When I was a teenager I thought of it like this:
If I make stuff I love, other people who like it will reach out to me, and some of them will offer me jobs. There is surely an older, successful, wealthy Visa out there who’ll appreciate my worth &pay me
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I also did think that if this didn’t work out and there was truly nobody out there who cared, then I might as well kill myself. But the simple fact that art exists in the world convinced me that the odds of this were extremely small - ie success was/is just a matter of persisting
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At a meta level I am still playing this game. I would like to be a successful writer by my own constantly-evolving definition of success. I‘d to eventually make a living doing this. I am willing to persist at this for 80 more years if I can. And if I fail, at least I tried, man!
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(Wanna hear why? Because books are soul food, libraries are magic. I’ve gotten so much value from this global, atemporal parliament of hallucinations, & I desperately want to contribute before I die. If one kid reads a book I wrote & is inspired to do the same, it was worth it)
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That’s actually it. That’s my whole life. One kid reads something I wrote and decides she wants to write a book too? I’m done, life complete. It’s all victory laps after that. Any job I do to pay the bills is just scaffolding towards that goal.
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I suppose then I’d like to travel the world and have coffee with you weird fuckers. Maybe make a couple of humans if my wife is into that. Play in a jazz band. Tell some jokes. Nap in a small boat on a clear lake. Road trip on a motorbike. House parties with more weirdos
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Replying to
Most elaborate form of autoerotic asphyxiation I’ve heard of yet
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