Why I Earn More Than My Way More Talented Friends

Talent won’t get you that far.

Talent isn’t a quantifiable metric, but it can be. It’s largely subjective, but there are some people we can all agree are more talented than others.

I know, for much of my life, I’ve not been the most talented person in the room. I’m not the most talented person writing on this website. I’m not the smartest or most talented designer on my team at work. This is a role I’ve accepted. As most of us need to.

I spend a lot of time pressuring my friends to create better lives for themselves. I recently got my first junior design position, making more than a friend of mine who had 4 more years of experience than I did. She’d stuck with a company for almost a year that was paying her as an intern, despite her title no longer being ‘intern’.

She stuck around simply because she didn’t have confidence in her own abilities. It took a lot of convincing, but eventually, she left and landed a job paying what she’s worth. I was able to land the job simply because I was more confident in my ability to do it; not because I had any more skills than she did.

There are many people around me, and who aren’t monetizing their skills. It breaks my heart. I know and believe so deeply in their potential, and there’s nothing I can do to make them strive for more. I don't want to be earning more than people who are objectively better than me.

Laziness

Talent is nothing if left alone. Throughout university, I met a lot of talented people. I studied Communications, so I specifically met a lot of talented writers. Way better writers than I.

Only three, out of around the ten I’d met, actually graduated and ended up working in writing. Everyone else complained endlessly about the amount of work and dropped out. They hated having to write so much, so often, and sometimes about things they didn’t always care about. All things, that in my opinion, were hurdles to an end goal.

One guy had told me he’d had the opportunity to write for our town’s paper, which would be a paid writing gig, and didn’t. It crushed my heart more than his.

Could there be other factors at play? Sure. Are some people just lazy? Yes. Laziness is often a side-effect of talent. When you’ve always been so good that you don’t have to try, you don’t.

Talent’s a blessing and a curse. With enough drive, it’ll catapult you into amazing places. Without any drive, it can be incredibly stagnating.

Since I’ve never been the most talented in the room, I’ve always been willing to work a little harder. I had to. When you’re used to being the most talented in the room, you don’t really feel the need to work at all.

Perfectionism

We’ve told many creatives that perfectionism is a good thing. It’s glorified in our education and workplaces a lot. At face value, it looks like a good trait. For a while, I’d considered myself a perfectionist as well.

It’s exalted because perfectionism appears to be synonymous with being thorough. Thoroughness is a good trait. We should all try to be as thorough as possible. Perfectionism isn’t that. Perfectionism is a crippling practice that causes people to ruminate on insignificant parts of their projects. The hangups become so overwhelming they stop in their tracks.

Perfectionists struggle to get anything done to completion. When you’re working with a perfectionist mindset, you’re chewing over potentially irrelevant changes. What I, and many artists, have to learn is that a mediocre, but complete, project is infinitely more valuable than something incomplete. A piece sitting eternally in my drafts is worth nothing. There’s no potential. Something posted has, at least, some potential.

Releasing perfectionism isn’t about accepting mediocrity, it’s about acknowledging that perfection isn’t real. Something half-baked is of more service to you, and all of us, than something you’re endlessly rewriting the recipe for.

Confidence

You’ll never be able to pursue your worth if you don’t know that worth.

A friend of mine who’d enjoyed photography was doing headshots for free. She’d thought since she was a “beginner”, and enjoyed doing it she never needed to charge. It was mostly fear of asking for money. The money she’d deserved.

Without self-confidence, it’s incredibly easy to get run over in the creative space. People are chomping at the bit to underpay you as an artist. And most of these people can smell a lack of confidence from a mile away.

The most talented people around me never knew how good they were, and never knew how much they were worth.

Fake it until you make it. When you’re used to having to work harder and sell yourself more, you give off an air of confidence whether it’s real. I’m able to feign confidence less in my talent, and more in my ability to commit and improve. Confidence is performance art.

Acknowledging I earn more than many of my more talented friends is not about showing off earnings. Even when I didn’t earn much, it was still more. Simply because I’ve been working enough to pursue more.

The purpose of this article is to convince the talented, lazy, perfectionist, self-loathers reading this to pursue their art, and know their worth. Create. Freelance. Sell, or charge more for your work. Your talent has gotten you far, but there are some extra steps you need to take. Stop letting me, and the rest of the untalented, dominate this market.