I’ve spent a lot of time high school and college-aged students ever since I graduated college myself. It’s a part of my job. One thing I’ve noticed is how eager students are to get out of college and start making money.

This is normal for students and there’s nothing wrong with it. College kids are burdened with debt and they want to start fixing that problem. For others, they’re just tired of being educated and they are ready to apply what they’ve learned. “Making money” is a reward of sticking through 12 years of school, and then 4+ four years of college. You want some sort of reward for sticking to the system.

One conversation I often have with teenagers is when they are trying to pick one of two options for their future. Their first option could be anything: having a family, joining the Peace Corp, traveling, working for a non-profit, or becoming a youth minister. The second option is always, “…or go out and make a lot of money.”

I’ve never tried to pick apart these options whenever I’m talking to someone. Most of the time, they are trying to sort out two very different worlds so they can figure out where they want to go. They are overwhelmed by the future and they’re talking to me because they hope I can help.

They just don’t choose the words “getting a job” but instead describe that option as “making a lot of money.” Maybe in contrast to the first list of options, getting a job out in the real world does seem like making a lot of money.

Now that I’ve been in the “work force” for six years, I wonder if I’ve failed those young people who asked me for advice. Maybe I should have confronted the presumption of “making a lot of money.” Getting a high-paying job is not as easy as wanting a high paying job.

Reality Check: How to Make Money

So that is one conversation I have with young people–good hearted students trying to sort out their future. The other group of young people have this same conversation about career and future, except their words are laced with an intense desire for money, and an outrageous confidence that money is coming their way. They look forward to college graduation when they can finally escape the drudgeries of their unglamorous student life. They will soon cross into the world of the elite and privileged. Standing on a college campus, these people are almost always believable. You don’t know how to respond other than to believe that one day they will in fact make money.

The older I get, the more I can wrap reality around people like this. Unfortunately for them, it is rare that your desire for money has any correlation to your ability to make money. If desire for money was all it took to make money, then we’d all be rich. Since we all aren’t rich, there has to be something in between desire for success and achieving success. Since I’m a designer, I have to add a diagram here for drama:

Desire for success –?– > Success

Something has to take you from desire to the reality of success. Again, I pass thousands of working adults every day who were in college once too, and every one of us would like to work and make a lot of money. Of those people who do earn a lot of money, I’ve found key attributes amongst them. In the professional world, you get paid according to:

  1. How talented you are
  2. How qualified you are for the job
  3. How hard you work.

Getting qualified for a job requires hard work and dedication. And talent requires hard work to make it worth anything to an employer. Few people will be paid for being talented and lazy. So it’s clear that success is only possible with hard work. If you want to have a good job at Apple, then you are going to have to work hard. If you want a good job as a rock star, you have to work hard. It doesn’t happen any other way.

You would think people would inherently understand what it takes to make money, but they don’t. The arrogant people who assume a big salary is coming their way are always found in the crowd that believes, “It doesn’t matter what degree you get, companies just want you to have a degree.”

It is true that there are companies out there that do not require a specific degree for you to get a job there, but these are almost always pay less than jobs that do require a specific degree. You are foolish if you try to beat the system by getting a degree in Recreation and expect to get paid the same amount as a student studying Chemical Engineering.

To be clear, not all hard working people get rewarded equally. I watch migrant workers storm through the neighborhood twice a week with rakes, hedge clippers, and leaf blowers, and I know they don’t get paid $95,000 a year. But, you will have a hard time finding someone who is paid $95,000 a year who does not work hard.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Foolish and Delusional

You don’t just find these wealth-lust people on college campuses. In the few years of my life after “The Real World,” I met thousands of people who wanted to be my friend because they were big fans of fortune, fame, and the celebrity life. These people believed that I had arrived at the success they were looking for.

They also thought that we had a lot in common because I was once just like them, someone who was anxiously waiting for their big break and the good life. And since we had that in common, I would share the spoils with them. Like somehow I would instruct one of the girls talking to me to go and fool around with that dude in the corner. I’m not kidding you, 1 out of ever 10 “new friends” I made thought like this. I can see clearly that these people were just greedy fools. Why would you believe that a greedy fool just like you would share anything with anyone?

How great is the divide between desire and reality! Consider the hordes of people who are delusional about their futures of glamour:

  1. They want to be doctors, but they don’t like science class.
  2. They want to be rock stars, but they can’t play an instrument or sing.
  3. They want to be movie stars, but they have no interest in acting.
  4. They want to be professional athletes, but they don’t work out.
  5. They want to be celebrities, but all they do is wear big sunglasses and look at celebrity magazines.
  6. They want to be a video game designer, but they’ve never tried to design a video game.

You have to make a path between desire for something and making that something a reality.

Life is the Greatest Teacher

I don’t think that I’ve ever screwed up a young person’s life by failing to confront their assumption that they would be able to make a lot of money. The fact that they are considering a life that is not consumed by money means that they have a good chance of living a balanced, rewarding lifestyle. I wouldn’t be writing about the subject of “desiring money” if this were the only time I encounter this topic in my daily life.

But the reality is that every recent generation is saturated with young people who have outrageous expectations for the future, yet never stop to consider the hard work it takes to get there. I genuinely care about people, and I want to see their life work out well. I’m truly frustrated by the delusions of grandeur that could make it harder for an impressionable young person to make the best decision. Then again, I doubt if this journal will really make a difference or bring clarity to anyone. If you aren’t looking for wisdom, you aren’t going to find it. If not, life will be your greatest teacher.