Forget the maverick who breaks every rule in the book or the villain who patiently explains the entire dastardly plan to an audience of henchmen. My least favourite television trope is the office lifer who hates every aspect of their job. It’s not the authenticity I object to — offscreen these people exist in their billions.
Rather, it’s that the role of ‘person who despises their work’ is being played by someone doing a job they presumably love. Even struggling actors — that is, the vast majority — who wait tables or greet wealthy customers at Chanel have at least chosen a particular kind of struggle.
Few enter the entertainment industry for purely economic reasons. A tiny fraction may end up accumulating generational wealth but for the rest, the motivation is intrinsic: the thrill of performance, the spark of creativity, the glamour of proximity to celebrity.
Without these (the former Treasury official in me wants to call them ‘benefits-in-kind’ but they’re really just perks), what would be the point? Consequently, anyone embarking on a career as an actor is competing against people who would do it — and often are doing it — for free.
The vineyard test
We see this replicated across numerous industries, from restaurants and bookstores to surf shops and sports franchises. These are businesses where the owner’s personal enjoyment almost necessarily conflicts with a fiduciary requirement to maximise shareholder value.
We’ve all heard the one about the bloke in his mid-fifties who’s made his millions from a commercial cleaning company or car repair shop and decides it’s time to have a little fun, so buys a vineyard in Provence. But people tend not to go in the opposite direction.
Not least when, like show business, running a vineyard can be not only deeply unprofitable but seriously hard work. I mean, it’s farming!
And so here’s the all-seeing, all-knowing 1980s American sitcom-dad lesson: in the words of restaurateur and entrepreneur Richard Mott, speaking on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, “You never want to be in a business for economic reasons when you’re competing with people who are in there for non-economic reasons.”
Or, as my real-life American mom would say when evaluating the merits of a significant purchase: “You have to love it.”
Resolve
At the risk of going ‘ah, now we’ve eaten our microeconomic vegetables, let’s binge on some geopolitical cookies’, the same asymmetry plays out in rather more consequential settings. If in business, the amateur is happy to lose money to play, in war the party fighting for national survival is usually willing to absorb far greater losses than the one waging a war of choice.