The strive to be successful can be a healthy think that motivates you to change. However, it can also lead to accepting things that are not 100% good for you for a seemingly faster track to fame, a following, success, money, or other desires. I see it with beautiful women joining the pornography industry or men exploiting an immoral or exploitative method to get more money. Some of these people are driven by, in my opinion, fairly neutral desires: things that are not inherently evil. They want to travel and see the world, they want to have a great, exciting life, they want to experience the world, or they want to be someone who’s made it. They want to get out of the “rut” or dead-end job they have found themselves in. These are not bad goals. Unfortunately, they don’t know of any way to fix their situation and think that the only possible way is the only path presented forward to them, which may be a craigslist modeling ad which turns out to be for a porn gig. I want to try and change that with what I do on my Youtube channel. There are so many people out there who have been brought up in a culture or economy or environment where they are conditioned and told to believe that they have no potential and they have no future and there’s nothing they can do. It is very hard to even get them to change their beliefs so that they start to believe or have hope again. I am still learning and figuring things out more and more everyday but I strive to show people of all races and genders that you often have hidden potential in you. There are possibly millions of people who have lived and died and not lived up to that potential because they were not introduced to the right material, the right knowledge, or their skill. There are people who would have been the best chess-player in the world but were never introduced to chess. There are people who have been the best football player or CEO or military general who ever existed but they were brought up in a country or environment where that was not needed or introduced to them at the time. I do have to say that not every female who goes into porn is a beautiful, ambitious but naive girl who ends up in the industry. And one can argue some negative or scandalous exposure, one can argue, is not all that bad. This is debatable but many sex tape scandals and leaked nude photos scandals have generally simply helped propel the celebrity to higher celebrity status, more fame, more exposure, more business deals, and even a reality TV show. Nowadays, leaked photos are so common that they just dissipate into the great Internet and its news does not have the huge impact as it used to. To illustrate, I am sure some of my readers would be surprised to know that certain big-name celebrities were even involved: Chris Brown, Rihanna, Kate Upton. The internet and population is so huge that things just dissipate. I think any female trying to get into adult entertainment should think twice before going through with it. Is the damage to your reputation going to be worth the immediate money you make? Will it really propel you to great success later? Every industry has its competition so will you be able to rise above that competition? Even then, have there really been any great female porn actresses that go on to greater fame in similar industries? (There was an article I read that went something along the lines of “10 actors and actresses who used to do porn” but it illustrates the difficulty when you realize there are thousands upon thousands of porn actresses and those 10 include Jackie Chan)
Finally, to argue both sides, and give a fairer point of view, there are people who, once again, we can argue have, so far, done well embracing similar things. Sara Jean Underwood is one of many Playboy Playmates who jumped at the chance when there were auditions for Playboy at her university. One can argue that everything she achieved since then was due to the branding and connections she got from becoming a Playboy Playmate. She has gone on to host a very successful TV show Attack of the Show, date Ryan Seacrest, and star in numerous films. Appearing in Playboy magazines and online media naked, as the Playboy standard, does not get completely the cultural backlash as pornography does.
My general standing on this is that there are a lot of ways to achieve success and prosperity. Some are not worth the side-effects. Some are un-ethical or will dramatically damage your reputation and in turn potentially your mental health or well-being. What I have learned from Warren Buffett is that I would rather go the ethical way if at all possible. One thing he said was that “there is plenty of money to be made playing center court” which pretty much means there is enough ways to make money doing things well. Charlie Munger, Buffett’s partner, also said something similar in his book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack. He mentioned how not only is it the right thing to do, but you end up making more money by being ethical in the long run. They both implicitly seem to be talking about their own business endeavors so it may be wise to take this with a grain of salt. There are no doubt countries, economies, and systems out there that are corrupt or twisted where it may be very difficult to follow the straight and narrow. I believe that for most of you reading this, however, you should have little excuses.
