“The Sex & Cash Theory: The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.”
Hugh MacLeod
Hugh sums the idea a bit more succinctly as “keep your day job”. There’s something simply captivating about dropping your dumb boring day job on a whim and chasing that dream you’ve been thinking about your whole life. So captivating in fact, that it happens to be the plot of dozens of Hollywood films. Besides being incredibly entertaining, it’s just not the way the world works. In real life, it takes more than a montage and some cool sounding music to have a happy ending. Think more along the lines of you’re half way up climbing Everest with your oxygen running low, three of your digits with frost bite, wishing you never left the comfortable confines of suburbia — that’s more like real life. (Although it sounds like a terrible situation, the movie version would probably be a very action packed 110 minutes!) What’s sexy may not be what works best (all the time).
As with most things, it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. You can do the boring stuff while chasing your dream — in fact that’s what probably works best. Someone has to pay the bills. In fact, I’m a big fan of doing all things incrementally from coding to learning guitar to writing this blog post! Incremental long-term progress trumps one-time fast sprints every time. And the Sex-Cash Theory backs this up. You might only have a bit of the sex to start but if you work at it, you’ll be having more sex than you know what to do with! (metaphorically speaking of course =) )
If you didn’t happen to click the link to Hugh’s site, I’ll leave you with some more of his wisdom:
As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to cleave their lives this way – who just want to start Day One by quitting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author… Well, they never make it.