The following is a composite of real people
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Jordan was pretty much the stereotype. By 4th grade, he was already hanging around with “the wrong crowd.” You know, cut-ups with long hair and then piercings, tattoos, and a pigtail. And he started smoking weed at 13, which decreased his motivation and memory.
Jordan was the first on his block to get a guitar and although he didn’t have the discipline to practice beyond learning the basic three chords, after school, he’d forgo homework in favor of sitting in his room by himself or with friends “jamming,” sometimes with an audience of gaga girls.
Jordan's parents begged him to study for the SAT and otherwise prepare for the college but he did the minimum, passive-aggressive all the way. So he ended up at community college, where he majored in music but even in that, was far from driven.

Jordan dropped out of community college and stayed living with his parents because the only job that fell into his lap was part-time clerk at his father’s friend’s flower shop. He spent his ample spare time playing video games, watching TV, YouTube, or NetFlix, listening to Spotify, posting Snapchats, getting high, hanging with friends and girlfriend, and playing around with his guitar. When some idea for a song lyric or melody popped into his head, he recorded it on his phone and posted it on his blog.
And Jordan is happy. If we’re to be honest, he’s happier than are millions of people who deferred gratification—busted butt in college, learning stuff that’s hard and of little interest, a bad combination. Those people then took an often soulless job at some company or non-profit that ended up requiring 10 hours a day plus an ever lengthening, ever more maddening commute. At the end of their long days, they sit in their apartment exhausted, wondering if all that deferred gratification is worth it, whether that’s all life offers? So such people typically have kids to add meaning to their life, but in exchange, their modest freedom is thereby replaced by yet more responsibility. Yet we call such people normal, even respect them, while we call Jordan lazy, irresponsible, loser.
Few careers have worse odds of generating even a bare middle income than songwriter, even for the motivated and talented. And prospects will only get worse as ever more music gets pirated—no royalty for the songwriter. Even more foreboding, IBM’s Watson has already created a hit song by reviewing thousands of New York Times headlines and Wikipedia entries to identify the themes people most care about and reviewed thousands of hit songs to unearth the characteristics of the most popular music.

Yet a case can be made for choosing a career as a songwriter. Sure, you may need a day job, must devote time to marketing your creations, and probably need to live a very modest lifestyle, but for many people, those trade-offs are worth considering.
Opting to try to make a living as a songwriter is particularly reasonable for the kind of person likely to want to be a songwriter. Most of them would likely not be very successful in the mainstream world of today and especially tomorrow, whether in no-nonsense/bottom-line Corporate America, glacierly moving government or consensus-driven nonprofits. Nor are they likely money-driven enough to successfully compete as a self-employed entrepreneur.

And without having to sit through degrees full of expensive often boring, largely real-world -irrelevant courses, nor climb a likely Sisyphusianm highly taxed career ladder, that person gets to do what s/he loves all the time—create and perhaps perform instead of living among spreadsheets as an insignificant cog in an incomprehensibly large wheel.