Shwmae! I've just returned from my second Welsh boot camp so you can see plenty of videos and photos on my Instagram. I had recently done a piece exploring my relationship with Spanish so here's the equivalent looking at how I feel about Welsh. So for those of you who are not familiar with this bizarre situation, Wales was colonized by the English for centuries and thus over time, the English did everything they could to wipe out the Welsh language and get the Welsh people to speak only English; in a way, that was their way to suppress any kind of rebellion through this form of forced assimilation. It was so successful that the Welsh language practically died out by the 1980s whern the vast majority of Welsh people didn't even know any words at all in Welsh and had effectively become monolingual English speakers just like their counterparts in England. But since the 1990s, there has been a very concerted effort by some Welsh people to reclaim their language and this has been a controversial issue even for the Welsh people. It is harder to get proper numbers as to how many people actually speak Welsh today because the numbers are ridiculously inflated and exaggerated for political purposes: often the number you will see is bullshit as it includes anyone who has ever had a Welsh lesson. There's a running joke: there's a local cake called (rather unimaginatively) a 'Welsh cake' and we say that the government counts anyone who's ever had a Welsh cake as a Welsh speaker. So officially the number of Welsh speakers in Wales stands at 892,000 (out of 3.2 million) but estimates of the true number of fluent speakers of Welsh in Wales is probably more like 400,000, thus that means only about 12.5% of the population of Wales speak Welsh fluently.
Can you imagine if 12.5% of the people in France spoke French? The reason why this doesn't happen in France is because France has always been ruled by the French (well, apart from during the German occupation in WW2); the situation in Wales is far more similar to what happened to a lot of the native American tribes in the USA such as the Navajo, the Sioux and the Cherokee who are predominantly English speaking now and are also struggling to hold on to their own cultures and languages whilst facing a lot of pressure to assimilate. For many generations, there was simply little or no incentive to learn Welsh or to teach your children Welsh - it was the language you may speak at home with your family but when you went to school or work, then you always had to speak English. This was also the case with my own family and mother tongue(s); my father refused to even utter a word of his mother tongue Hakka in front of his children as he felt it was a totally useless language that he refused to teach us. I did pick up Hokkien from my grandmother but my mother just refuses to speak Hokkien with me even though Hokkien is still evidently her first language and mother tongue. The reason my mother would rather struggle on in broken English than use Hokkien is because she considers Hokkien a low class language for uneducated people, whilst English was what the educated gentry spoke. Oh there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my mother's mind on the issue, thus I just leave her be. So this, unfortunately, is very much the case with Welsh in Wales and that's why so few Welsh people speak the Welsh language today, hence they simply have no interest in bothering to learn it as they feel that they really only need English.
I have been on Welsh boot camps before where we try to create a Welsh-speaking environment - let me show you how hard that is in practice. I attended the official opening ceremony of a Welsh language learning center in Lampeter at this boot camp and given that this was in a small town, it was a big deal and it felt like half the town had turned up for the occasion. There was the TV crew from the Welsh language TV station filming the whole thing, there was a famous Welsh celebrity who was this huge star on Welsh TV (she plays a major role in a popular Welsh-language TV series) and the mayor of the town turned up as well. One of the local guys had a Vietnamese wife and she was struggling with English and of course she didn't speak any Welsh at all. It might have felt very hostile to have ignored her and excluded her from the conversations but no, the people were nice so because of the fact that we had one person there who didn't speak Welsh, we all switched to English to make her feel included at the reception. So this is probably why people default to English in Wales all the time because something like that could happen even at a quintessentially Welsh event celebrating the Welsh language. It had mixed emotions about that situation - on one hand, I felt that it was necessary to be polite to that Vietnamese lady rather than exclude her by refusing to speak English. I am also far more comfortable speaking in English than Welsh of course, but on the other hand, there was a sense of, "if we can't even speak Welsh at an occasion like this, then no wonder this language is struggling to survive in Wales now." I would have hoped that seeing an Asian guy like me speaking Welsh enthusiastically will have encouraged that Vietnamese lady to learn Welsh.
One of the most remarkable and memorable experiences I had on this trip was when my Welsh teacher Stephen said that he didn't think Welsh would be around in 100 years; it would eventually be wiped out by English and become something of a curiousity that future generations would see in the museums. So I didn't really have any reaction to that because my initial reaction was, well we're talking about a long time into the future when none of us would be around, your guess is as good as mine what will happen in the year 2122. One of my fellow camp mates actually believed my teacher and she said, "I can't help but feel so sad now, I can't shake this feeling, tell me this isn't true." Now this lady is from Lithuania - she moved to Wales and she wasn't content with simply being able to speak English with the locals, but she wanted to properly assimilate by learning Welsh as well and her Welsh is actually stunningly good. My teacher Stephen then pointed out that the decline is irreversible despite some of the short term gains that we have seen in recent years. One of the key reasons to be gloomy about the prospects of Welsh in the long term is the poor experience of Welsh learners in Wales; back in 1990, Welsh finally became a compulsory subject in all Welsh schools and all students in Wales had to study up to the equivalent of GSCE standard Welsh at the age of 16 at least as a second language and these people would be included as part of the population who speak Welsh today. However, many took their final Welsh exam and said, I never ever want to utter a word of that stupid useless language ever again and have since just forgotten everything they were ever taught in Welsh. Thus you can force the people to learn Welsh at school, but you can't get them to speak it outside the classroom - especially if they feel that they don't need it at all if they already speak English.
We have observed this phenomena in Wales: before you try to speak Welsh with someone, you have to find out if they are amongst the 12.5% who actually speak Welsh fluently, so we would always have to ask (either in Welsh or English), do you speak Welsh/wyt ti'n gallu siarad Cymraeg? The answer which we would often get is 'tipyn bach' (a little bit) and I was told that means, "I've learnt Welsh at school as a child but have not spoken any Welsh in years so no, I don't speak Welsh anymore even though I ought to be able to." Thus when someone says 'tipyn bach' in response to that question, that effectively means that they really prefer to speak English - it is not your cue to continue that conversation in Welsh. Back in 1990, when they finally succeeded in forcing every student in Wales to learn Welsh, they thought that if a student was 6 in 1990, by the time they are 16, they will be fluent in Welsh. So by 2022, this student would be 38 and everyone under the age of 38 in 2022 would be fluent in Welsh. Yet the situation today is nothing short of dismal at just around 12.5% being properly fluent in Welsh despite the fact that it is now a compulsory subject for the students in school - many of those who have done ten or more years of Welsh in school are reduced to this 'tipyn bach' situation? Can you imagine doing something for ten years like learning how to play the guitar, drive a car or play tennis only to have barely mastered the basics after ten long years of lessons? Of course that sounds like a totally ridiculous situation but that is exactly what we are facing in Wales today. So there is a small minority who are extremely enthusiastic about their language, culture and heritage of course but sadly they are remain a tiny minority whilst the rest of the people Wales simply speak English.
Ironically, I was in West Wales for this recent boot camp - Lampeter is right on the boundary between the counties of Ceredigion and Camarthenshire. Whilst I didn't exactly see poverty there, I did walk around thinking, "oh dear, what do the young people here do for jobs? There's not a lot of employment opportunities here. They would have to move to the big cities like Cardiff and London if they wanted to pursue their dreams, it would be a real struggle in rural West Wales." Yeah so I could see why the poorer, working class people in such areas would be far more concerned about making enough money to put food on the table than preserving their culture and language. The economy of Wales used to be heavily reliant on the mining industry but many of these mines were closed since the 1980s - the coal mines provided a lot of employment but these mining communities were really poor in any case. The closure of these mines created communities with very high rates of employment, particularly amongst the older miners who were struggling to find alternative employment. The situation has improved a lot in recent years only because these former miners have become so old now they were either classified as 'retired' (and thus didn't count as 'unemployed') or have already passed away. So if you were a miner in 1982 who lost your job at the age of 50, you would be 90 years old today. People don't often talk about the role of class when it comes to the preservation of the Welsh language, but I can see how working class people who are struggling to make ends meet simply wouldn't think that preserving the Welsh language was an issue that was of any importance to them at all and if that was the prevailing attitude, then the language will get eroded away.
The Welsh economy has improved a lot in the last four decades and hence I don't share my teacher's pessimism when it comes to the demise of the Welsh language. If Welsh people have enough food on the table, money in the bank and then they will have more time on their hands to think about what else matters to them, what makes them happy and think a lot more about other issues when they are not just struggling with daily survival. A more prosperous Wales wouldn't automatically mean that more people would speak Welsh, but it would give the Welsh language a much better chance of survival into the next century. After all, you need to spend a lot of money to ensure the survival of Welsh and to increase the number of Welsh speakers in Wales - thankfully, there is a budget for that in a Wales that is much richer today compared to 40 years ago. We can't take this for granted of course, when I compare this to the situation in Singapore, it fills me with dread. Singapore has gone from being prosperous to being crazy rich in the last 40 years and my mother tongue Hokkien has gone from a minority language to one that is on the brink of being wiped out in a few years for two key reasons. Firstly, there is a complete lack of will on the part of both the government to support the Hokkien language in Singapore. Secondly, the Singaporean Chinese community prefer to speak Mandarin instead of Hokkien due to the large influx of migrant workers from China in the last two decades - these migrants from China can't understand our local version of Hokkien but can communicate with Chinese Singaporeans in Mandarin. Even older Hokkien speaking Singaporeans are forced to adapt to this situation by speaking Mandarin instead today - so much for prosperity giving us more time to preserve our cultural heritage. Hokkien will survive in places like Penang and Klang, but not in Singapore.
I do love the way the Welsh speaking community has embraced me as a Welsh speaker - I'm often told that I'm more Welsh than most Welsh people because of the very fact that I actually speak the Welsh language. I accept that honour with a sense of pride of course but quite frankly, if I may be honest with you, I don't know why they make such a big fuss. This reminds me of this time when I was at the gym and I saw a beginner struggling with a skill, so I spontaneously went over and helped him out, told him which technique to use and probably spent about ten minutes helping him. This guy was very polite and after the session, he thanked me profusely - not realizing that I was a very experienced coach who had been doing gymnastics all my life, so it's not a big deal for me to make the effort to help him out and in fact, I do always help people out. I feel the same way about Welsh - so from their point of view, I'm an immigrant from Singapore who has embraced the Welsh language in a way that most Welsh people in Wales haven't at all despite being Welsh. Yes I've learnt Welsh but I'm a polyglot who is fluent in seven languages and I get by in 25 - learning languages is exactly what I do. I have managed to get further in Welsh than I have with some of the other languages that I have studied, but I suppose this boils down to the fact that all British people (the Welsh included) suck at learning languages. It's already a struggle for them to be bilingual in English and Welsh, whereas I enjoy flaunting the fact that I can master a brand new language in a relatively short period of time, I'm learning Welsh because I enjoy it, it brings me joy but not because I want to help you preserve your language I tend not to tell them that) so I shall gallantly accept the love and the compliments.
So will the Welsh language still be around in the year 2122? Well yes, I definitely think so - the best case scenario in this case is that loads more people will learn the language which will lead to a massive growth of the number of people speaking Welsh. The worst case scenario is that the language will be wiped out totally and go extinct. There are many shades of grey between the two extremes of best and worst case scenarios: the current status quo could continue for the foreseeable future, with Welsh being spoken by between 10% to 15% of the population fluently and as long as that figure isn't falling, then the language won't be wiped out. It is only if the language is in decline, so if the number of fluent speakers are falling year on year, then you could start getting very worried that the language might eventually go extinct. There is a hardcore group of Welsh speakers in Wales today who are extremely keen on preserving their language and culture - they may be a minority in Wales, but as long as these people continue doing what they are doing to keep the Welsh language alive then it will be around in the future. I suppose that's why they're showing me such love as I am have joined them in this battle to save the Welsh language for future generations. That's a really nice gesture as I simply don't get the same kind of love from say Spanish or French people, despite the fact that my Spanish and French are both much better than my Welsh. So there you go, that's it from me on this topic. I will be writing part 2 very soon, reflecting on the unique experience of being a non-white speaker of Welsh. It will be a rather controversial post, look out for it coming out soon. As always, please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading, diolch yn fawr iawn am wedi ddarllen.
Hey Alex, I think it's great there is a core group of Welsh speakers who arrange bootcamps among themselves. It sounds like a cozy tight-knit community, not too different from people who like Roman history enough to learn Latin amongst themselves. One thing that surprises me about the UK is how homogenous it is with respect to languages. Not far away in continental Europe is Spain where you have at least 6 languages spoken, including standard Spanish (Castellano), Catalan, and Basque. I'm surprised Welsh isn't as alive and well as Catalan in Catalonia, it seems more akin to Basque in the Basque region of Spain. But the UK is a bit funny in that it's technically a union of 4 separate countries/ethnicities rather than being one country and one ethnicity. I suppose it's because Wales doesn't have their own parliament and autonomy like Catalonia does, so Welsh isn't instituted as an official language. The republic of Ireland also has a strange relationship with Irish in that most Irish people speak English, but the words used for official government bodies and even the major parties and prime minister(taoiseach) are in Irish. I guess it's just what happens when you're colonized by the English, they aren't a big fan of tolerating other ethnicities/languages.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me, the Indonesians never stopped speaking Indonesian despite being colonized by the Dutch. And oddly enough speaking Hokkien in Indonesia is mostly an upper class thing because the minority Chinese speak Hokkien amongst themselves and are wealthier on average. But Indonesia has a melting pot of languages anyway, nobody really speaks Indonesian as a first language unless you were born in Jakarta. But even then many Jakartans also speak Javanese, which is not the same as Bahasa. Else everyone else speaks a village language and only learns Bahasa to communicate with people from other villages/cities. Actually, I heard for millennia this was very common in every country before standardized public school education and mass communications were a thing. Even in Saudi Arabia nobody speaks standard Arabic day to day because it's taken from the Quran, which would be like what Shakespeare English sounds like to a modern English speaker.
You have to look at the nature of colonization in the UK where the English really wiped out Scottish, Irish and Welsh culture and forced the locals to assimilate by giving up their language/culture and becoming simply English-speaking British people. If you stop feeling different as a Welsh person, like if you don't speak Welsh and become an English-speaker instead, then you're less likely to revolt against an English ruler and paying your taxes to the government in London. I have to point out that we do have the Welsh assembly which is like the Welsh parliament and that was formed in 1999 - the Welsh assembly has the power to decide on internal affairs, eg. make laws to force all students to study Welsh in Welsh schools, force government departments to only employ people who can pass an interview in Welsh but when it comes to external stuff, they still default to the government in London. There is also the Scottish parliament and the Northern Irish Assembly as well which all perform that same function.
DeleteIreland was a part of the UK until 1921 when it was partitioned, but the English went out of their way to stop the Irish people from speaking their own language and forced them to speak English instead. Today, only about 4% of the population of Ireland can speak Irish fluently and use it daily, that's a sad story as they've long become an independent country but still they can't get the people to stop being so English speaking. When I used to go to my late mother in law's hometown in Ireland, it was impossible to find anyone who spoke Irish. As for Indonesia, well the Dutch couldn't be bothered to build schools to teach the locals how to speak Dutch, they did far less in terms of education compared to the British in Singapore and Malaysia. The Dutch just wanted to plunder Indonesia for all their natural resources and had little desire to help the local population there.
Yeah it seems only the English really enjoy exporting their culture. Other European countries did have colonies, but they didn't care much for assimilation except maybe for the French who would love it if more people spoke French and ate French food. Ahh so it seems the Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish assemblies aren't as powerful as the state governments in the US who can set their own taxes and make their own laws. It's funny how gay marriage in America used to only be legal in certain liberal states like California or Massachussetts until Obama made it legal everywhere.
DeleteYeah isn't it weird that only 4% of Ireland can speak Irish yet all the official terms for things in government are in Irish and Irish is the official language of Ireland? I get that English is better for business and that most Irish trade with the UK and other European countries is conducted in English. But I guess unless it's taught in schools and required for employment, nobody would really bother. Finding a job is hard enough without adding extra material to study.
The regional assemblies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have the right to make their own laws within their respective areas, so if it is an issue regarding education and how schools operate within their areas, they can make their own rules without consulting central government in London. But if it's an external issue (such as defence), then they have to default to London. So yes they can make their own rules regarding taxes/laws etc - which is frustrating because England and Wales were the first to adopt gay marriage, Scotland followed slowly and it took Northern Ireland forever to follow but they did so in the end. Northern Ireland also decriminalized homosexuality a good 15 years after it was no longer a crime in England as Northern Ireland is a lot more homophobic.
DeleteAll official business in Ireland has got to be bilingual by law that means an MP can speak in Irish or English in parliament and there has got to be translators at hand to help those who want Irish >> English translation. You have the right to request to be served in a government office in Irish though the chances of someone doing that is literally zero. But like in Wales, so many Irish people (like my husband's family) have abandoned Ireland to come work in England for more money as Ireland is so poor whilst England (especially London) is much richer.
Another point I might add, the Basque Country and Catalonia are relatively rich regions in Spain, so I think people there think it's a point of pride to be Basque/Catalonian. Imagine if Wales suddenly became the richest country in the UK, such that everyone wanted to move to Cardiff to study at uni or find a job. I think the Welsh would take immense pride in being Welsh knowing that the best things happen in Wales and everyone wants to move there. Then being Welsh and speaking Welsh would suddenly be cool. It's only hard to be a minority if people don't want to be you, and privileged minorities definitely exist. It's like how Korea is not a very large country but many non-Korean people overseas try to learn Korean because of how cool Kpop is. Korean is in no danger of dying out at all. Maybe if we had "W-pop" then Welsh would suddenly become popular haha.
ReplyDeleteThe current situation is the complete opposite of what you've described. West Wales (where I was) is so freaking poor that it is the poorest area in the EU (see the Data Dive video I embedded - a few years out of date but still useful for comparison). London is the richest area in the entire EU, so the UK has the dubious honour of having both the richest and the poorest area in the EU - that's how MASSIVE the gap between the rich and the poor are in the UK. I did highlight this in the blog post above already, okay it's not like I saw homeless people begging in the streets of Lampeter but it was just a sense of "there's absolutely no work for young people here, they have to leave this rural middle of nowhere place to find half decent jobs in the city." Welsh people have been leaving Wales to find better paid work in England for generations, that's why English has always been seen as the prestige language they need to speak fluently in order to work in England and that has played a huge part in the decline of Welsh. W-pop exists, I did go to a Welsh concert last weekend which was entirely in Welsh in fact and I will write a lot more about my experience there in part 2.
DeleteAllow me to talk a little bit about Cardiff since you have mentioned it: Cardiff is like the only proper big city in Wales with a population of about half a million, that may not seem particularly large but the next biggest city in Wales is Swansea with 250,000 and then Newport with 125,000 - then it gets very small, very quickly. In fourth place is Wrexham with just 60,000 and then we're looking at small towns and villages, definitely not 'cities'. But yes Cardiff has grown in size, it has a strong economy and it is a vibrant cosmopolitan city. However, when people are attracted to move to Cardiff for work, say a Polish or a Romanian person decides to move to Cardiff for job opportunities, they tend to get by in English as nearly 100% of the people in Cardiff speak English whilst something like only 10% of the people in Cardiff speak Welsh. But as more and more non-Welsh people move to Cardiff, it has the effect of making Cardiff more and more English speaking as these recent migrants are quite happy just to get by in English as there's very little opportunity for them to use Welsh in a place like Cardiff if only 10% of the population there can speak Welsh. The same can be said about Barcelona - it is a massive, vibrant cosmopolitan city attracting loads of people to move there for the wonderful opportunities there. The two official languages there are Catalan and Spanish, but most migrants there default to either Spanish or English; hardly any of the migrants even bother with any Catalan at all as Spanish/English would suffice for them. Thus Cardiff and Barcelona face the same challenge - being successful in attracting migrants would actually mean diluting the need to speak the local language there.
DeleteThe UK sounds like the most American part of Europe, with extremely rich and extremely poor people in the same country even within the same city. I dunno if this is uniquely a UK thing, but why is London so dominant? In America New York city is not that important to the national economy. California is the 6th richest country in the world by GDP, but within California you have San Francisco and Los Angeles to pick from. But even then there's still Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois which have sizable economies and opportunities. And of those 4, three of them actually have affordable housing compared to New York. But in the UK it seems everyone wants to move to London, where rents are very expensive. Btw when I was applying for jobs I was surprised that there were many trading firms based in Chicago rather than New York. I dunno if Birmingham also has a sizable finance industry compared to the UK. But over here I'm happy I don't have to move to New York just to do finance, because rents in Chicago are 2/3rds what they are in New York, while the salary is 80% as much and the taxes lower too.
DeleteLol so people do make pop music in Welsh. I feel like art is a great way to keep languages alive. Jamaican is technically a dialect of English, but people do write nobel prize winning books in Jamaican so the language has been kept alive and carries with it some prestige in Jamaica. Oh and Bob Marley's music also helps in making it popular.
I think Catalan in Barcelona will survive, but the local population will speak a mix of Catalan, Spanish, and English in everyday life. It's like how many Dutch/Scandinavians speak English so fluently they frequently mix English words in their everyday language, but otherwise if they had to write an essay in only Dutch or a Scandinavian language they could. Spoken languages are very different from written ones. It's like how the average Australian can use tonnes of slang which makes their English barely understandable to a non-Australian, but can also write out an essay in proper Queen's English. The Catalans in Barcelona are still very proud of their Catalan culture, so I think they'd hate to lose the language. I heard Lionel Messi, an Argentinian soccer player who moved to Barcelona as a teenager, had a hard time adjusting in school because he only spoke Spanish and no Catalan.
London is so dominant (and rich) as it is the capital city, it is a massive city with loads of great opportunities, many companies making tons of money. Whereas if you're in a small town, good luck to anyone there trying to find a half decently paid job. That's why New York is rich. That's why Tokyo, Istanbul, Sydney and other big cities are rich and viewed as the places where you can get rich. It's a big city thing. I'm not saying that the countryside is poor, but it's all relative: I was in rural Wales where you can get a MASSIVE house for a very small price as land is very cheap and the area is very sparsely populated. So people may earn very little but they have decent lives, so like the local bus driver would have a nice house with a garden as that doesn't cost much at all - a bus driver in London could never dream of owning a nice house like that in London.
DeleteThere is a LOT of music in Welsh and they are split into two categories: traditional/folk music along with modern pop music. Look, only 400,000 speak Welsh and I went to see a concert by Bryn Fon, one of the biggest Welsh pop stars in the Welsh speaking world and you could say he is a big fish in a very small pond. He is content being a Welsh legend with a small but captive audience but as he is not trying to do material in English, he wouldn't become a star outside Welsh-speaking circles. Welsh is an ancient language that is older than English, whilst the number of speakers may be tiny in comparison to English, we have thousands of years of history to access to enjoy Welsh culture. There are so many folk songs and traditions in the rich Welsh tradition - the problem isn't the lack of Welsh music (there's a LOT of it I promise you), it's that young Welsh people these days prefer to listen to music by big stars like Lady Gaga, Ava Max, Beyonce and Taylor Swift.
Mind you, the most famous singers from Wales sing in English: Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey - they have made millions and are popular all over the world. Contrast that to Bryn Fon, who is like the Welsh-speaking version of Tom Jones but I paid £10 to see him sing in a concert in a field in the middle of nowhere in West Wales. I can't imagine Tom Jones doing the same thing. But hey, I met people who drove 5 hours across Wales just to be in the front row by the stage to get as close to Bryn Fon as possible - he is a huge fish in a tiny pond.
DeleteI guess this is a very complex question spanning history and geography as to why London is so dominant. However I do wonder, how do people view Birmingham? Is it considered a good career choice to move there? Don't get me wrong I love London, and would like to visit one day (maybe next year), but if I were a young person in the UK it would be nice to have options for cities to work in, especially if rent is unbearable in London. Honestly I don't really like New York city that much, aside from their subway system. I'm really glad Boston and Chicago are also good options for finance. Maybe I just don't like shoebox apartments. Or maybe I'm bad for the environment since I'd rather buy a landed house than an apartment to live in, even though I love public transport which requires population density.
DeleteOh wow so the Welsh are really proud of their country and culture. Yeah I heard in music unlike other media fields you don't need mass appeal to keep a decent income, as die hard fans will pay enough for concerts. Next week I'm actually going to a concert I paid $400/ticket for, and the band has been retired for at least 10 years. Btw is there a Welsh language only radio station? I think there should be, I can imagine Welsh songs being played on there. I remember watching a YouTube interview with a Canadian rock band once who said that in Canada at least 90% of the songs played on the radio must be Canadian, because the government does provide grants for the arts to grow their music industry. Lol and they speak English/French in Canada, yet the gov feels the need to use money to make their songs more popular so people don't just listen to American songs only.
Btw I've been ghosting finance firms lately on the math quizzes that I'm unprepared for. I thought they mass emailed the math quiz link to anyone who applied, and would just interview whoever scored the highest, but then an actual person emailed me to ask why I didn't submit the quiz, and to give me a 7 day extension. So embarrassing... I had to tell them I was looking to reapply next year because I messed up my estimated graduation date. I just hope they don't remember me next year and blacklist me.
How you view a choice like London vs Birmingham or London vs Bristol or London vs any other smaller town/city in the UK depends a lot on what kind of work you do. For me, as I work in finance, I need to be in London as that's the financial capital of not just UK but Europe. I can attend meetings, conferences and say to a company, cool you're in London, shall I pop by your office next week - would 2 pm on Monday work for you then? But allow me to contrast this to a gymnastics coach friend of mine: he is sick and tired of London being so crazy expensive and he can coach gymnastics in a much smaller town where everything is cheaper - the work is still pretty much still the same as a gymnastics coach and he doesn't need to be in London. So for that gymnastics coach, he is considering moving to a smaller place like Bristol (population 470,000 only) where he has a friend who is also a gymnastics coach there and I think he might go ahead with that move later this year. Certainly for a well educated person like you, your perspective will be a lot more similar to mine compared to that gymnastics coach friend of mine. You will earn enough in your profession to afford a nicer place to live and not have to live in a tiny shoebox.
DeleteAs for Welsh media, there's Channel 4 Wales https://www.s4c.cymru/ which is a Welsh-only TV station with plenty of programmes everyday. It has the dubious honour though of having painfully low viewing figures with one programme once having had an estimated zero viewers. It just goes to show that you can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink, in this case you can create channel 4 Wales but you can't make Welsh people watch channel 4 Wales - they prefer entertainment in English. Likewise there is BBC Radio Cymru (Cymru is the Welsh word for Wales) and they do many hours of Welsh programming everyday but after midnight and until like 6 am, they offer BBC World Service in English. So yeah midnight to 6 am in English, 6 am to midnight in Welsh. But radio stations are so 2001, oh please - there's Spotify, there's Youtube, only grandmothers listen to the radio these days. Welsh people can access Welsh culture and music online whenever they want it and it won't be through a radio station - there are everything from podcasts to vlogs to comedy in Welsh all accessible via the usual social media platforms. Wales is poor but nobody listens to the radio these days. It's all internet entertainment.
DeleteAs for the CanCon (Canadian Content rule) for Canadian radio stations, that's 35% of the music on the radio that has to be of Canadian origin, not 90%.
Oh yeah I forgot about the face time aspect of finance. It's very important to take clients to lunches, dinners, even shooting parties in Wales. Even for a quant they don't allow for remote work unless a pandemic is raging on. That reminds me, the company that offered me an internship in California said the job must be on site, but because housing is expensive they provide a housing subsidy, or else people wouldn't come. I thought that was really nice, but of course California balances the high wages of tech workers by charging higher income taxes. Though I have no idea how other jobs not as well paid as tech or finance get by in expensive cities like London, New York, San Francisco, or LA. My best friend told me that gymnastics lessons in LA is minimum $320/month for 1x a week, which is quadruple what I pay in my city of less than 600k people. But even then many people struggle to afford rent even with higher wages.
DeleteI guess you could argue that when you pay rent you aren't just paying for the house/apartment, but also what else is around it. So your gymnastics coach could buy a bigger house in Bristol on the same wages, but he would have to give up having a bigger variety of restaurants, clothing stores, night clubs, concert events, etc. Actually I know some people who live in big houses that don't even live in my city but live in smaller towns of less than 100k people. But because their town doesn't have a gymnastics club they drive 2 hours to my city just to do gymnastics.
But now with the advent of remote working, I can for example, buy a big house in Wales for very little money and then move there whilst working for a Peruvian company. For the price of my current London home, I could have a massive 4 bedroom house with a pool + a huge garden along with some forested land surrounding it. No neighbours, wow. What a luxury, I would be so isolated. Now that kind of splendid isolation may appeal to me when I am older. Looking back, I would say, don't worry about paying more or spending more money at your age as you will eventually make enough to be at a stage not to have to worry about running out of cash - so just go ahead and move to the big city to pursue the opportunities which are there. Just spend what you have to spend. To give you an idea of gymnastics prices in London, we have a pay as you go system: in my gym it is more expensive at the equivalent of US$20.48 per session but there's also a cheaper gym at US$7.83 per session - the more expensive one is with coaching and instruction, the cheaper one is an open session, ie. no lesson, you do your own thing. As for the gymnastics coach I talked about - BUY his own house? You're joking right? You're rich but you forget how poor people live. No, poor people rent as they will never be able to buy property - property is a very expensive purchase that's just way out of rich for most gymnastics coaches who live from pay check to pay check. Most gymnastics coaches are paid very little, they are poor working class folks. And as for a "bigger variety of restaurants, clothing stores, night clubs, concert events etc" - what good is that to a working class person in London who doesn't have the money to go to a restaurant, buy fancy stuff shopping and blow hundreds of pounds on a night out in town? Geez, this gymnastics coach is painfully poor. He barely makes it to the end of the month on his pay check as a gymnastics coach. That's why moving to a smaller town like Bristol makes sense for him - his earning power is limited by his profession, it's just that if he spends less on rent in a place like Bristol, there would be a bit more money left over before the end of the month arrives. You forget what it is like to be a very poor working class person.
DeleteWell I am living paycheck to paycheck right now because I just bought a car with a loan and PhD students aren't paid a lot, but I thought gymnastics coaches might make a bit more than I do. I really don't know how much they get paid. Wait, are the coaches in your gym full time workers? I get the idea that my gymnastics coaches are all part-time and do it as a side hustle, because one day I overheard my coach saying "yeah I just changed jobs, a better healthcare company this time."
DeleteYeah I suppose I'm fortunate to have the job opportunities I have if I can just finish this PhD. But unlike you, I really don't like New York or super crowded cities, even though New York has the most and highest paying finance jobs in the US. I barely tolerated how cramped Sg was, I really missed having lots of space. So if I could, I'd try for Boston instead if I was going the finance route, though I'd settle for Chicago even though I will miss having fresh seafood and being near the coast. If I went the tech route then I'd have the choice of either San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Austin. San Francisco and LA are not super crowded, but I won't go there unless they pay me a lot because housing and taxes are super expensive. I had a friend who went to UCLA that told me one of their professors quit their job to move to UC Davis, a lower ranked school but in a much cheaper housing market, because even when being paid $160k usd/year he still couldn't save any money to buy a house because rent for a family of 4 and taxes ate up at least $130k of that paycheck alone, and this prof was married to a stay at home mom. Yeah Alex you lucked out by not having any kids and having a husband who works haha.
Hang on a moment, you don't know how poorly paid gymnastics coaches are? Okay let me explain why they are paid peanuts. Do bear in mind my references are to the UK system but the US system is very similar. In the UK, they are barely paid more than the minimum wage, so say if someone working at McDonald's is paid the minimum wage, they get like minimum wage + 12.5% and that's it. The money is excruciatingly bad. The key reason why the pay is so pathetically low is because of the very, very low barriers to entry, to work as a gymnastics coach you only have to pass a level 1 coaching exam. Now you can work your way up the hierarchy and become a level 2, 3, 4 etc coach but really, once you reach level 1 you're good to go. The level one course is like 5 days long, I kid you not. People are Starbucks probably spend more time training their staff than British gymnastics but then again, that's only for a level 1 coach because you're gonna spend most of your time babysitting kids who don't wanna be there and you're going to be teaching basic skills like forward rolls and cartwheels only. If you wanna work with more advanced gymnasts doing difficult stuff, then you need to work towards your level 2, 3, 4 etc qualifications but here's the really shit thing about the pay structure - coaches get paid a flat rate in the gymnastics club whether they are baby sitting 5 year old kids doing practically nothing or whether they are preparing their gymnasts for the Olympics. Is there money in gymnastics? Yes, the gymnasts pay an arm & a leg for the classes, the classes are expensive but does the gymnastics club pay the coaches well? Hell no. Think about it this way: I can go to a fancy sushi restaurant where I have to pay $250 for a main course there, it is a very expensive restaurant but just because I am paying $250 for a plate of sushi, does that mean that the waiter is paid a lot? Or that the old lady washing the dishes in the kitchen and cleaning the toilet is paid top dollar? Hell no, they are probably paid peanuts whilst the restaurant owner and maybe the highly skilled sushi chef earn a lot of money. Same thing happens with the gymnastics club - the coaches get paid very, very little whilst the gymnasts pay a lot for the lessons there. I'm not sure how close to the coaches you are but money is a tricky issue: if I earn a lot of money, I don't boast about it as it is in very bad taste to brag but if I earn very little, I am too embarrassed to talk about how poor it is so I never bring up the topic at all. The bottom line is you don't need a degree to work as a gymnastics coach, it is not considered a highly skilled job.
DeleteThere is an exception to coaches earning a lot of money - if you have managed to coach a gymnast to win an Olympic medal, then that gymnasts says, "it's all thanks to coach Amanda who has been brilliant, this gold medal wouldn't have been possible without Amanda!" Then yeah the next day, your phone will be ringing non-stop, "please coach my daughter, just name your price I will pay." In America, there have been a few coaches who have done just that - they produced a world and/or Olympic champion and now they can state their price. The bottom line is that gymnastics clubs are run like restaurants, the business is very profitable because the staff are paid peanuts. Think about the level of entry: if you wanna work as a gymnastics coach, the level of entry is extremely low, it is very easy to get a coaching qualification in days and then you're qualified to teach - that's why gymnastics coaches are paid peanuts whilst doctors who take so many years to complete medical school command such high pay. But if you wanna open a gymnastics club, aha, then the level of entry is very high as you need to come up with a lot of capital to secure the premises and run the business but with that comes the right to charge your customers whatever you wanna charge and pay your staff as little as possible. It is harsh of course but that's the world of business. Also in London, there's no shortage of young people looking for work as coaches so if you won't work for something stupid like £10.50 an hour, then someone else will. Having said that, the money is in private lessons (for rich kids, private schools with budgets etc) and NOT gymnastics clubs, where like I said, the coaches are treated like the waiters in a fancy restaurant. If you wanna make money as a side hustle, you're really barking up the wrong tree with gymnastics - people do it for the love of the sport, because it is extremely fun and they wanna keep gymnastics a part of their life in spite of the fact that most gymnastics coaches get paid so little.
DeleteIn fact this gymnastics coach that I talked about was so freaking poor that when his mother died, a group of us decided to collect some money to help him pay for the funeral because he was literally living from pay check to pay check as a coach and when something like a funeral comes out of the blue, he simply didn't have any money to pay for the funeral but he couldn't just leave the dead body in the morgue when his mother died so a group of us friends helped him out. That's how painfully poor gymnastics coaches in the UK are. This poor coach couldn't even give his late mother a funeral without the help of his friends.
DeleteWhen you said poor, I wasn't imagining literally minimum wage because gymnastics does take some skills/talent compared to working at McDonalds. But that is a difficult situation indeed, especially in London. Where I live is basically small enough you could call it the Bristol of America or "the countryside", where some people did manage to buy a house on minimum wage, but their house is a 2 hour commute away. That was nice the community helped your coach out when he had a financial emergency. I'm still new to gymnastics so I'm not close to my coaches, but it seems the others see them outside of class, whether to watch movies or play poker nights.
DeleteAlex, from the perspective of someone in finance, what do you think of the economy right now? People say it's approaching recession with layoffs left and right, and inflation is squeezing people. But I'm still getting job interviews. It makes me worried I might just graduate into a recession and be laid off soon after.
Actually with all due respect, you're wrong in the sense that gymnastics takes some skill/talent compared to McDonald's - in a fast food restaurant, you need to be familiar with their standards and procedures in order to produce food of a consistent quality, that's why I can go to any McDonald's around the world and get the same Big Mac. How McDonald's does this is by investing training their staff and what you have to understand about gymnastics is that if I want to train the next Olympic champion, then yeah I would need a whole load of knowledge, skills, experience etc to successfully deliver results. But if I am mostly just teaching a bunch of kids how to do cartwheels, in the UK, you can get certified in 5 days - that's probably less than what your typical fast food restaurant invests in their staff. There was a shortage of coaches when gymnastics grew in popularity a while ago and British gymnastics responded by making it very easy to become a coach by lowering the barriers to entry: think about it. 5 days of training and you can call yourself a gymnastics coach. Compare that to people who spend 5 years at university to get a qualification. But that's entry level, yes if you become a very good coach and you start gaining a reputation of producing champions, then you can start charging students a lot more for private lessons. Very few coaches become famous like that and in the case of my friend who couldn't afford to pay for his mother's funeral, that's a lot more typical of how most coaches live from pay check to pay check, in poverty.
DeleteThink about it this way, anyone can become a cook and call themselves a chef; some will be flipping burgers in McDonald's on minimum wage whilst some will be the executive chef at some Michelin star restaurant earning crazy money. The vast majority of chefs or cooks will be earning very little whilst those that make it rich are a tiny minority - the same principle applies to coaches. If that coach couldn't afford to pay for his own mother's funeral, buying property no matter how cheap is simply not possible.
The economy is in big trouble and we're facing the highest inflation in living memory with a war raging on in Ukraine. Yeah there's huge trouble ahead, things are gonna get a lot worse but so what? It's not like you're a gymnastics coach earning peanuts, what the heck are you worried about? And if you get laid off, so what? You'll find something else as you're highly skilled - it's not like you're like my gymnastics coach friend who has far fewer career options. I have no idea what you're worried about. I changed jobs this summer in the middle of a recession and I even negotiated my old package + 10% uplift + bonus. Why? Cos I'm me, I'm not everyone else. I'm in demand because of my skills.
I forget that for the kids level classes the skills are not too difficult. But for the adults it is. Strangely enough most of the money in gymnastics in America is for the junior level training the next Olympic athlete. Mostly because in America sports outside of a public school is a big business.
DeleteI also heard the UK is struggling with utility bills because most of Europe relies on Russia for energy. Well I am getting paid only slightly above minimum wage right now, but I guess my skills are in demand. Wow that's amazing you negotiated an even better pay packet than your previous job in the middle of a recession. And you get to work from home in London.
Actually, you're gonna slap me for thinking this, but I was worried because I noticed I couldn't get any job interview for decently paying, widely available, but not too stressful engineering jobs. Things like website coding, mechanical design, etc. These type of jobs are way more common than the job interviews I did get. The only callbacks I got were high paying in finance or research and development, but required minimum 50 hours a week and advanced math/programming/physics. They also weren't very common. Actually next week I have an interview with a nuclear fusion company about a position simulating nuclear reactor parts. How many nuclear fusion companies even exist compared to web design firms? This baffled me because I'm in mechanical engineering but somehow I could only get finance + physics jobs, probably because my undergrad was in physics and most of my research is just math/code.
But I chose this life, and part of me chose it because I didn't wanna do something easy for the rest of my existence. At least industry does reward it with higher pay, but it does require more work than people who specialized in training for easier more common work but with a lower ceiling. I suppose there is more room for advancement with quantitative finance and research and development compared to being a web coder or regular engineer, but the barrier to entry is a lot higher and the consequences of not meeting that barrier are more dire, cuz there aren't lower tier job options out there for physicists aside from physics tuition teacher. I guess I was worried because I like having backup options, but in this case it's just the nature of what I do, either aim for the top or don't aim at all.
Yeah so I know I sound like I'm overreacting, but in Sg there weren't any opportunities for what I do. People didn't appreciate highly theoretical math/physics, they were more focused on skills like website coding or machining metal parts. So I was really unemployable in Sg and always felt I had to work harder on my CV just to get any job. But I guess places like the UK and US are much different, where there are jobs that appreciate and even require what I have and reject anyone who doesn't have my skill set. I'm so shocked I'm getting more than a single interview in America because in Sg I had to take the first and only job offer just cuz I only got one interview following graduation, and it paid terribly. But then again the UK and US are more innovative than Sg, the world wide web and even the mobile phone processor(ARM) were invented in the UK. So they don't mind more RnD types like me who don't really fit the mold and prefer to invent new things instead of operating in existing industries.
DeleteActually the level of skills for gymnasts don't vary with age but individual - I've seen videos posted of "this 5 year old gymnast is doing this ridiculously difficult routine" and I'm blown away by what I see. Then I meet adults - not like ridiculously old people like me - but like 18 or 21 year olds struggling with the basic because they're approaching it for the first time and learning something brand new. Though I believe that good coaches aren't the ones teaching you the most difficult skills, they're the ones who are the best communicators. Now I have actually seen coaches dealing with children with special needs and that takes communication to a whole new level, I've also seen how it can be a lot harder to persuade adults to do scary stuff in the gym because of this fear of getting hurt whereas with kids, they often have no fear at all. With adults, I am so tempted to say, "look there's a yoga class next door, they have classes 5 times a week, the schedule is on the notice board in the corridor, you sit on a yoga mat, you never leave the floor and you never get scared or hurt. I think yoga is going to be far more suitable for you if you're scared of everything; you'll be a lot happier doing breathing exercises whilst sitting on the floor with the yoga teacher than trying to learn gymnastics." Yeah I have no patience for people like that but with some other adult coaches, they know how to communicate and empathize with adult learners who are harder to teach. I recognize that this is a kind of skill that I don't have however, these coaches who are good communicators are never rewarded for that aspect of coaching, ie. they don't get paid more for being good communicators with bad students (for want of a better word, sorry), they simply get respect from their fellow coaches. You are really only rewarded monetarily if you can produce gold medals and unfortunately, the coaches who produce gold medals tend to be the ones who are harsh, strict, abusive and treat their gymnasts really badly in order to produce that kind of results that will produce a medal at the very top level. Nice coaches end up very poor whilst the nasty ones end up rich after they produce an Olympic medalist, such is the world of gymnastics.
DeleteGymnastics is frightfully expensive because of the nature of the equipment involved, think about all the gymnastics apparatus in the gym hall - that's several millions of dollars of equipment just there. A gymnastics coach can't run a class without all that very expensive equipment, I can't just take you out to the field in the park and try to teach you gymnastics there. That's why gymnastics club owners are the ones who get to charge you an arm & a leg for your gymnastics class and they then pay the coaches peanuts. The coaches are caught between a rock and a hard place: they have a very specific skill set for their profession, they know how to teach gymnastics but they cannot do that work unless they have access to the equipment in the gym and that's why they are at the mercy of the gymnastics club owners who know that and exploit them. "I'm paying you barely the minimum wage to coach here, because you have no choice! We're the only gymnastics club within a 40 mile radius of this town, what are you gonna do? Run your own gymnastics class in the park without any equipment? You can't do that." There is a great gymnastics culture in America which I can talk about till the cows come home in that it is well structured, it is popular, the kids have a lot of competitions amongst the clubs up to very high level, only a tiny handful will ever represent America at an international level but many are happy just to finish their careers representing their universities and there's a great NCAA inter-collegiate programme for gymnastics. All that is true of course but it doesn't change the fact that most gymnastics coaches are very poor.
As for your other point, look Europe is struggling at the moment and we're in the middle of a deep recession because of the double whammy of pandemic + war in Ukraine affecting the economy. First the pandemic has screwed everything up then the war has driven up prices so you have a weak economy + prices rising quickly = pain for most people but the pain is not felt equally. One of the constant themes that I have talked about A LOT on my blog is how painfully unequal this world is and at the risk of repeating myself for the millionth time, Amanda, in a nutshell, the bulk of the wealth of the world is concentrated in the hands of a small number at the top, say the top 10% whilst the bottom 90% are scrambling to make ends meet. If you're in the top 10%, you can see the rest of the world go to hell in a dumpster fire and shake your head at the catastrophe happening before you whilst sipping champagne on a luxury yacht. If I may be blunt, I'm in this top 10% so whilst I'm not crazy rich (ie. top 1%), I know I'm going to be absolutely fine no matter how bad things get whilst we have people like that gymnastics coach who can't pay for his mother's funeral suffering.
DeleteI'll give you a simple example to illustrate the contrast: if my partner and I have a health emergency, we'll just go private an get it seen to ASAP. I recently had a chipped tooth and I can either just pay to go private and be seen at once or hunt around for a NHS dentist willing to take me on. I chose the private route because I have the money to do that. A poor person will live in agony whilst being unable to get that toothache treated. Likewise, if I have to spend 20% or even 50% more on my grocery bills, then I would grumble but just keep spending the money whilst poor people are - well, for want of a better word, fucked. If their grocery bills go up 20%, they don't have the extra money to pay for that and they would have to cut back on all other expenses and they would also have to reduce the quality of the food they eat so yeah, they're well and truly fucked because they don't earn enough to weather this storm. Prices are rising quickly and it is hurting poor people a lot. Yes, it really sucks to be poor but am I telling you anything that isn't already painfully obvious?
But Amanda, you're going to be in the top 10% given the kind of education you have and the kind of jobs you're considering. Think about working class people like the folks who work at your local supermarket, the bus drivers, the gymnastics coach at the gym, the people working at McDonald's and Starbucks, the Uber drivers, the person who delivers your take away when you order food online, the gardener mowing the lawn in your university - those are the people who are really going to be fucked so badly in this recession. You won't be one of them as you're going to be top 10%, eventually, once you finish this PhD and get a decently well paid job. What the heck are you worrying about? You're anything but working class, you'll be absolutely fine, duh.
But as for finding the right job, one last point: you need to avoid a mistake which a lot of people make. These are bright, intelligent, highly educated, highly skilled people who think, "I'm really good at ABC so I wanna find a job where I can do ABC all day long." What they fail to consider is whether or not this particular skill set is in huge demand or if it is a fairly niche area that doesn't employ a lot of people. I once met this guy who had a PhD in some quite niche area of English literature (yup prepare to roll your eyes) and he ended up doing a job outside academia because it was a totally niche area that very few universities even taught, he was so self-indulgent in pursuing what he liked that he failed to consider if that area was too niche and if he could actually get paid work in this area if he pursued it to a PhD level. What we need to do is to be very realistic and pragmatic: look at the areas where there is a huge demand for skilled professionals and consider if you have enough overlap with your kind of skills to provide exactly what they need; you may need to do a bit more training / development on your end to become the ideal candidate to fit into that kind of role. So you must stop saying, "I like this" or "I enjoy that" but start thinking about it from another person's point of view - that's social skills 101 for an autistic person, I know as I force myself to do that all the time, on a daily basis. You need to find a role that is best aligned with what you want out of life and then transform yourself into the perfect candidate for that role.
DeleteI suppose I think gymnastics is very difficult, but I guess at the end of the day it is a service job which scales about the same as being an uber driver or a personal trainer, so the pay doesn't go up very high. That is pretty sad that gymnastics coaches aren't paid better, and that the ones that are can be very cruel to produce gold medals, but like you said life isn't fair.
DeleteI suppose I probably will be fine relative to most people, even if I don't see it that way right now because being a PhD student sucks in terms of pay. But I probably come across like a medical student studying to be a plastic surgeon complaining that they're poor and the future is uncertain and bleak. Nothing is certain, but a medical student studying plastic surgery is definitely more well off than a gymnastics coach.
Oh gosh, I do roll my eyes at that person doing a PhD in English literature and not finding a way to adapt it to make ends meet. As if I even wanted to be a quant in the first place, it's not my first choice but because it pays the best I will knuckle down and study for the quant exams which give me nightmares. Here is an example of one of the questions I was asked by a trading firm: Suppose we have bag with 3 coins, one coin has a 10% probability of getting heads, another has a 30% probability of getting heads, and the last has a 60% probability of getting heads. We take one coin out and it flips heads. What is the probability that if we flip that coin again it will also get heads? That question can probably be solved using some standard procedures in probability, but I panicked when I first saw it because I only had 1 minute to get it right, and what kind of weird coins are these which only have a 10% chance of getting heads?
Right. whilst you think gymnastics is very difficult, you need to think of it in terms of how the difficulty correlates to the amount the coach gets paid to teach you. Think about it this way: I can go into Tiffany's the jewelry shop and buy some very expensive diamonds there, whilst I can spend an absolute fortune in the shop, how much should the shop assistant who served me be paid? You see, there's very little correlation between the value of the diamonds and the pay of the shop assistant because the shop assistant isn't that important in the entire process once you pull back the focus and look at the supply chain of how that diamond bracelet ended up in that shop in the first place. And likewise, whilst the gymnastics skills can be difficult (that's arguable, a lot of it depends on how talented you are), but how much value does the coach add to the process for the class to happen? Think about the business owners of the gym who bought all that equipment, who set up the club, who organized the lesson etc - there are so many pieces of the puzzle that come together before the coach walks in through that front door of the gym to teach you that lesson; arguably the coach adds very little value to the process the same way the shop assistant in Tiffany's who brought you that diamond bracelet off the shelf adds very little value to the whole process. The bottom line is if you wanna make money and get rich, you need to understand how the business process comes together and where the most value is added, then insert yourself into that part of the process. Sadly a lot of coaches get stuck in coaching because they don't know anything else and they at least know what they're doing in the gym - before you know it, 10 or even 20 years have passed and they feel too scared to switch careers to something that might be a lot more lucrative but requires a massive transition to a new environment.
DeleteAhh so you're saying that pay is not necessarily dependent on how expensive the product a salesperson is selling, but also on how crucial they are to selling it. A jewelled necklace sells itself, but risky financial products or cars or houses don't, or at least not at the price point the sellers want.
DeleteYeah I do wonder what is going through the mind of someone who becomes a gymnastics coach knowing that there isn't much progression in that path, even if it is an uncommon skill. Switching careers is scary though, especially if you don't have a lot of education or aren't actively doing something that lets you gain lucrative skills or network with people who can get you good paying jobs. I'm pleasantly surprised I do see more people getting software engineering jobs without a 4 year bachelors degree. I think I mentioned I met 3 guys at a networking event who all went to the same coding bootcamp for 6 months at a non profit before landing jobs in the software industry that paid 90k/year starting. But most people don't know what they want to do for a living, and in every job people will hate part of the work, so it's even harder to get people to do something they aren't even sure they like in the first place. I don't like options trading all that much, but I'll do it if it lets me buy a house.
Exactly, with no disrespect to the sales assistant at Tiffany's who presents you that diamond necklace, that sales assistant adds very little value to the process. You have to consider the miner who found the diamond, the person who cut and polished the diamond, the designer who came up with the design for the necklace and the person who actually put together that diamond necklace. Then you have all the PR and marketing team creating the brand name of Tiffany's that makes you wanna shop there when you are ready to spend a lot of money on expensive jewelry - now you have that supply chain in mind, compare that to the gymnastics class and consider all the factors that has created that gymnastics club in the first place and how much investment has gone into that who set up (with all that expensive equipment). So that's why some people make a lot of money and others don't, but I've made that point already.
DeleteAllow me to explain why gymnastics coaches end up on that path - there are two main reasons: firstly, it's the low barriers of entry that lures them in. You don't need a degree, the courses are super short and easy to pass. So if you don't have pushy parents insisting that you go to university, then it's easy to settle for a job like that. Also, some genuinely do it for the love of gymnastics. I know of some gymnastics coaches who do it as a side hustle whilst completing their degrees and the moment they can access better paid professional work, boom they're outta there. I knew of this coach called Amber who was a great coach but she was completing her degree and the moment she landed a full time job working in recruitment (in a field related to her degree), that's it, she left. But if you're putting in 35, 40 hours a week as a coach, where do you find the time to complete a degree the way Amber did?
I suppose that's why a lot of coaches try to make their own gym in the end, though finding the capital for that has a high barrier to entry, as well as finding a customer base.
DeleteWell good for Amber that she used gymnastics coaching as a side hustle to make ends meet until she finished her degree and found a job. It is a big issue of how to get older working adults to finish a degree in any developed country. It's even harder when people have children and have to balance school with raising them whilst on a reduced income. I suppose I see why you got so angry at your nephew for trying to get a working class job, because the decisions one makes in their late teens to early 20s can have huge consequences on the rest of their life.
Yes ideally a lot of coaches wanna take control of the profits by setting up their own gyms, I have met coaches who wanted to do that before but unless you have access to quite a lot of capital, that's just not possible. I spoke to a coach (in fact I blogged about it) and she wanted to set up her own gym but got turned down by the bank as they wouldn't give her such a big loan - she was just too poor to raise the credit on her own and I wasn't prepared to back her without saying, "what's in it for me then? If I back you financially, I want a huge cut of the profits because without my help, you can't do this." Finding a customer base isn't that hard as gymnastics is very popular, at least in the UK & US.
DeleteWell my nephew has secured a place in university which he will embark on after he finishes his NS in 2024 September. However, I have a young gymnastics coach friend who started coaching years ago and I thought, cool are you doing this temporarily? Then like ten years later, he's still coaching and I realized, ah okay so you're doing this permanently now - he's still young and single, living paycheck to paycheck. His life revolves around coaching, goes home to watch TV or play computer games, sleep then wake up, go coaching. That's fine for now but what if he wants to get married and have a family?
Yeah it is difficult being a coach trying to get capital because banks don't usually make loans to people without much business experience or education, or people who aren't connected to a bank in the first place. My father regularly dealt with banks for loans because he needed supply chain financing as he was a contractor in the oil industry. But he only had these banking contacts because he used to work for a different contractor before starting his own company. A gymnastics coach is highly unlikely to know people in finance who can provide the required capital, even if they have a very good business idea.
DeleteWhy didn't you want to invest in a new gymnastics club? Was it too risky? Or you didn't want to risk the friendship over a business venture? Can you please post the link to the blog post?
Yeah like you said its hard to pursue higher education when you have to work 35-40 hours a week full time. At least that friend who is a coach doesn't have kids. But he would have to think of switching careers soon if he wants to get on a good career path with room for advancement. By the way, how accessible is higher education in the UK to a poor person? I think it's more accessible than the US because loan repayment is based on income, the tuition fee isn't as high, and loans are forgiven after 20 years. In the US student loans can totally bankrupt someone, but they can't be discharged in bankruptcy and are never forgiven unless you work in certain government jobs.
http://limpehft.blogspot.com/2022/05/kates-business-challenge-five-possible.html Here's the thing: 'Kate' needed 3 million pounds and that's 3.55 m USD - I didn't have enough faith in Kate's ability to run it successfully so it would have fallen under the most risky type of venture capital. Besides, Kate would have never accepted my terms & conditions, "okay I will find you that 3 million but in exchange, I want 50% of your business and I won't do anything more than find you that capital because you can't do it without my help." I think she would have walked away at that point. But for me, if I am taking this kind of super high risk then I want a super high reward to come along with that.
DeleteAs for higher education - sigh, that's a complex issue. Yes our tuition fees are capped at like £9,250 a year and you can get student loans etc; but don't forget whilst we're the land of Oxford & Cambridge, most universities beyond the top 30 are not worth bothering with. The worst case scenario is when a poor person gets into debt to get a degree from a university at the bottom of the league tables then realizes that oh no, I've spent all that time and money on a degree that's really not worth the paper it was printed on.
Wow 3 million! That's a crazy amount, I wouldn't even ask for that amount even if I were to commercialize any of the patents from my PhD. But then again gymnastics is very capital intensive because it needs rental space, especially in London. There are far more other businesses with larger profit margins to invest in, unfortunately.
DeleteIt seems to me that to get a job, one mainly just needs to consult someone already in the target job and ask them what recruiters want, plain and simple. That may involve a degree, it may involve work experience, side projects, etc., but a degree from any university is no golden ticket by itself. In fact I was just reading this article in the New York Times about how 52% of universities produce graduates where over 50% of these graduates don't earn more than someone with only a high school diploma:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/your-money/college-graduate-earnings.html
£3m was already a very modest amount - you need a huge amount of space and a lot of expensive equipment for a gymnastics club. But if Kate could potentially find that £3m on her terms, then yeah she could potentially make huge profits. But I was never going to put that much faith in her business ability - running a business is very different from teaching a gymnastics class. Kate may be an experienced coach but she has zero experience running a business, none at all and that was why I viewed it as such a high risk venture that I wouldn't touch it. It was nothing to do with the nature of gymnastics club, it was me going, "Kate? Fucking hell, Kate? Of all people? Has she ever worked in a shop before? What the fuck does Kate know about running a business? Nothing! Kate knows absolutely NOTHING about running a business, NOTHING! Which part of SHE KNOWS NOTHING do you not understand? No no no, Kate is a gymnastics coach and she should stick to what she knows best. There's just no way in hell anyone would trust her to run a business, no way, she knows nothing about running a business. No offence, but I have to be blunt."
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