Don’t give up the day job

Most dreamers should not leap, the article ‘So you want to be an artist’ in Saturday’s FT Weekend magazine said. Even if you are sure that it’s your vocation, you are most likely wrong. Oh no! I’ve always wanted to write comedy. And now this article is telling me to give up!

I was hooked. I had to read the article to the end, even though it was depressing me. If you want to be an artist, writer, film producer, basically anything creative, the article said that you should probably have embarked on it aged 18 instead of making a living first.

I wonder if the Roman sculptor dreamt of being an accountant? Perhaps they wanted to escape wage slavery… or just slavery

Oh, is that like the teenager who wrote a vampire tale: Fangs for the six-figure book deal? That was the Sunday Times headline. I think you were meant to laugh. Only I didn’t. This weekend was not going well. Another depressing story I had to read. Depressing because Abigail Gibbs was, in fact, 18. And I’m not. Good for her, I willed myself to think.

Actually it was only her age that got me down. Because the next paragraph was what I like to read: Gibbs is an “internet sensation” with 17m hits for chapters of her debut novel. She posted regularly on the social reading website Wattpad, a “publishing phenomenon with millions of readers”, the ST said.

Now that got my attention. And she had posted her vampire story, chapter by chapter – but not the ending. She has nearly 100,000 web followers who want to know what happens. And guess what? They have to buy the book to find out.

By the end of the weekend, I had decided age is no barrier to success. You need to work to live. Make sure you enjoy your work but enjoy your life even more by pursuing those dreams – no matter how old you are. The internet is making anything possible.

What about you? Should you give up the day job? Should you stop dreaming because you are too old? Can we embark on different careers at 30, 40, 50, 60 and beyond?