Recently, a student from a well-to-do family – her parents spend a million a year sending two kids to boarding school in the UK – confessed to me what she really wanted to do was to study music at university.

Mindful of the mentality of Chinese parents as implied in this joke – “I’ll push my kid to practice the violin, but if she wants to be a violinist I’ll do everything in my power to stop her” – I shared with her the realities of working in the arts. On this issue I need to look no further than myself.

When Apple Daily was still in existence, I was paid $1,000 per column; I wrote two columns per week, which brought my monthly earnings from the paper to $8,000. At the time I was also writing for Ming Pao twice a week; their rate was $400 per column, so each month I received from them the princely sum of $800. As one can imagine, if I had solely relied on my writings for income, there would have been no way I could have survived in an expensive city like Hong Kong – even if I had lived in a subdivided flat, the $5,000 or so in rent would have eaten up more than half of my pay.

Still, I assured my student, it can be financially viable to work in the arts, if one is imaginative enough. In my case, I took inspiration from Joseph Pilates, the inventor of the Pilates fitness system. He started out as a circus acrobat; when he retired and had to find another way to make a living, he figured he could use his deep knowledge of the human body to help clients to build that coveted long and lean physique. I, too, know a lot about how to make a piece of writing come alive. Why not apply that knowledge to exam-taking and teach students the secret of producing essays that stand out from the crowd?

I then gave my student other examples of artists who have studiously avoided the fate of the  starving artist. There is this actor who turns CEOs into better communicators by giving them speech-delivery tips (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willgreenblatt?originalSubdomain=ca ), an art historian who turns police detectives, medical students and military officers into keener observers by developing their visual intelligence (https://artfulperception.com/about-amy-herman/ ), a literary critic who pairs up with Boston Consulting Group and turns management consultants into better strategic thinkers. (https://press.umich.edu/Books/W/What-Poetry-Brings-to-Business2 )

We are, after all, in the creative business. It is up to us to find creative ways to not only survive but thrive financially. The payoff – we get paid to do what we love – is itself such a priceless privilege that every ounce of effort devoted to making an arts career work is so worthwhile.