People are literally making tons of money being musicians, athletes, actors, and so on. People are making “quit your job” money selling MLM stuff. People are making “debt-free in 12 months” incomes as influencers. But that doesn’t make it a realistic career path for all but the most talented out there.
Being a successful influencer takes a massive amount of skill, talent, motivation, entrepreneurial attitude, and luck. Think the capitalist system is tough as a W2 employee with health benefits, 401(k), unemployment, and all the paperwork taken care of for you? Being an influencer is the no-holds-barred, survival of the fittest, red in tooth and claw, Hobbesian “state of nature” version of capitalism. Your resume is competing against 900 others? How many people out there have a phone and are posting to Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, or whatever on the same topics you are? How many of them got there first and already have the audience built and the techniques dialed in?
Like I’ve said… I get the frustration, I get the pain, I get the misery. I’ve been there. I grew up wearing hand-me-down underwear for crying out loud, and that’s not hyperbole. I am super grateful I am not there anymore, and it took a ton of luck, opportunities that I did not deserve more than anyone else (and sometimes deserved less than others), hard work, and more luck, luck, and luck. I didn’t do well in the dot-com bust; I lost a decent job as a software developer, ended up at a call center making $11/hour, and it took me 5 years to get back to the income I was at from the job I lost. I know what it’s like to send out resumes for *months* and the closest thing to a bite I would get was someone asking me if I had a hardhat and steel-toed boots to go spend 3 days at a temp job 90 minutes away in a steel mill, and not having enough money in my pocket to go to Walmart and get the hardhat and boots.
But never in a million years, looking at the numbers out there (YouTube paid $30b total to creators over the last 3 years, which comes out to 200k people making $50k/year assuming an even distribution of money…), would I think that going this route is likely to pay better than walking into Target and filling out a job application for their jobs that start at $13/hour, never mind applying for jobs that require more skill or experience than that.
J.Ja
