Bill Conlin on the business

Success can't be measured by covering the pros or having a lot of loot. Success is a feeling of accomplishment and if you find that covering a tiddly winks tournament, so be it.

 

And, the fact that someone, perhaps, would like more/greater success, does not necessarily mean that they haven't been successful.

Just as a lack of success can make people hungry for it, so success creates a taste, an expectation, even, for more of it.

 

Success is some elusive satisfaction/fulfillment of needs ratio. I have a feeling the closer the ratio is to 1, the better off you are.

 

I know we like to cling to this as some reason we "deserve" to be paid more and treated more professionally than others . . . but it's really pretty meaningless.

Whether you are a janitor or a journalist, you are paid more (or less) because you are worth more (or less) to the company that hires you.

The fact that I took some journalism courses in the early 1980s doesn't make me intrinsically worth more than the janitor who cleans up around my desk each night. It doesn't mean I do my job better than I would had I been hired straight of high school.

Some professions (medicine, law, engineering) have a high demand on what you learned in college. Journalism is not one of them.

 

Great post. "I've got a college degree" means far, far less than "I've got a skill that's in strong demand."