Don’t follow your passion or be yourself
Nothing confirms the folly of today’s youth like their willingness to come to me for advice. I think I understand what is going on here. Because most columnists are, for want of a better euphemism, “distinguished” ,I am mistaken for a youngster who can relate to Generation Z.
I forever dread being roped into some kind of Financial Times mentor scheme, where an intern and I clock-watch our way through meetings like a divorced father and his son on a custody trip to Pizza Hut.
On the other hand, if I don’t give them advice, they will just get it from a less scrupulous dealer, and the dodgy stuff can do irreversible harm. Self-help used to be a discrete field, comprising such fixtures of the Western canon as Awaken the
Giant Within and Wherever You
Go, There You Are. It is now so ubiquitous as to constitute a kind of ambient noise. Here, then, is my rebuttal to the worst advice: my counter-advice.
Be true to yourself
Actually, don’t. A huge part of life comes down to acting. You change your accent as you move up socially. You feign confidence when you feel none. Once you make it, you do the inverse: feign bashfulness and self-doubt to avoid ruffling people. None of this makes you “inauthentic”. Or if it does, then authenticity does not warrant the hype that has grown up around it. Lying is corrosive. But a certain amount of dissembling is hard to avoid.
Don’t compare yourself to others
This is a good way of preventing insecurity. It is also a good way of underachieving. Competition is a spur to performance. Even people who are not workfocused engage in competitive parenting or competitive socialising. And if you try to avoid invidious comparisons, your brain will resist. The research on “inequality aversion” suggests people think in relative rather than absolute terms. We would rather have less overall if it means our neighbours do not have comparatively more.
“It is not enough to succeed,” said Gore Vidal, my life coach. “Others must fail.”
Follow your passion
This is wrong on two counts. First, many passions are hard to monetise. This was true of music and novel-writing even before the straitened economics of those industries set in. Creative pursuits favour downwardly mobile rich kids, hence the oversupply of contemporary fiction by authors who “live in New Haven and Jakarta”, starring characters who fly a lot and feel a bit sad.
Second, if you do make a career out of your passion, some of the passion goes. Bar songwriting or filling that regista slot for Arsenal, there is nothing I would rather do than write columns for the Financial Times. But because I do, it is a job. I don’t get to saunter over to the laptop when the ghost of inspiration possesses me. Any activity, even Alba truffle-eating, becomes less fun once your ego and livelihood depend on it.
SELF-HELP IS NOW SO UBIQUITOUS AS TO CONSTITUTE A KIND OF AMBIENT NOISE. IT IS THE UNOFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF INSTAGRAM
Work for your dream
Up to a point. But there is no linear relationship between effort and success. And while hard work never killed anyone, it has drained them of their happiness. I keep wanting to press this case through a trilogy of self-help books (Lean Out, The Seven Habits of Highly Rested People, The Fierce Urgency of Tomorrow) but it seems like a lot of work.
A penny saved is a penny earned
An old one, this, and it shows. Many asset classes have risen faster than incomes throughout your lives. It will take some heroic saving to buy the house you want. The modern world often disincentivises you — all but mocks you — for thrift.
The memories you acquire in your twenties will sustain you later. Make sure those memories are of something better than diligent tithes to your 401(k). Retrench in your thirties, if you must, or just marry into money. Economists will sputter. But they undervalue what they cannot quantify, and they cannot quantify raw human pleasure in the moment. The best things in life are not always free, even if this advice is. /©