For actors in Los Angeles, most struggle many years without ever being admitted into the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Too bad to, because SAG membership is a necessary step to top studio auditions and higher pay.
Depressingly for actors, even for the 120,000 who do get in, their average income still hovers around $10,000/year. Yet countless no-namers flock to join the struggle every year, chasing that dream of becoming Hollywood's next big thing.
You see the same pattern reflected in the music business where thousands struggle to even earn a dime while a select few get rich.
Visit a university and you'll notice poverty stricken grad students far outnumber tenured professors. The grad students, many with doctorates in hand, labor for less than livable wages in hopes of one day gaining a tenured position with that fat salary and almost unlimited intellectual freedom.
From a marketing perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Tom Cruise's success appears very inspiring. Watching him on the big screen and seeing his pay check discussed in Forbes gets us dreaming big.
What would happen if, instead, every working actor in LA earned $60,000 a year, regardless of their popularity. If that wealth were spread out, it'd be much easier for practical parents to send their kids to acting school. But it'd also become difficult to get the child to care.
Is this why the average CEO's salary is so astronomically high? Could it be that paying the top person $20 million a year makes it easier to inspire those below? Could an insanely high CEO salary actually attract more talented workers than giving those same workers a modestly better salary themselves?
A living wage does sound a bit boring. It's not much of a story. Marketing-wise, it's hard to sell. But you have deeper questions to consider. Do you go for a SAG type organization where the chance of success is very small and the rewards of that success are huge? Or do you go for a more practically minded company, walking a path more likely to help you enjoy things like eating out and having kids?
And once you've built your own company, you have to ask, do you want to attract the dreamers, who may cling to unrealistic expectations, or would you rather build a more rational, down to earth team?
There are no easy answers. Perhaps it depends on your products and the kind of team you want.
Luckily, you were granted with inordinate power to grapple with deep thinking. There's something special about fleshing out those amazing decisions within your mind. You can see and choose it everyday. Your mountain is out there. We watch with curiosity. Your path is waiting.