He was telling me how and why he’d got a little off track. I kept thinking about the money, and that’s rubbish. I don’t care about the money. I’ve never cared about the money. It’s not the point, never has been. That explained a few things. For one, it explained the mixed messages I’d been getting about the degree to which he wanted me involved on the project. The problem wasn’t that he kept thinking about the money, the problem was that he hadn’t thought enough about the money. What he wanted for the work, why he wanted it, and how much he was prepared to spend on having others help him do it.
Whenever anyone tells me “it’s not about…” I know that either they are lying, or they haven’t thought it through. Usually, to be fair, it’s the latter. We like to think we know ourselves better than anyone else knows us, but unless we spend time getting to know our self, that isn’t necessarily so.
That’s as true about our attitude to money as it is about our attitude to love, Marmite, science, politicians, dreamwork, religion, gun-control, the ethics of farming or anything else. We think we know what we think…but unless we’ve checked in with our self recently, we could well be wrong. In degree, if not in principle…how we think and feel about things changes over time…which brings me back to money, because I know that my attitude towards it has shifted. Not much, but some.
If you hear yourself saying you don’t care about money, I’d recommend you have a check in with yourself, because trust me, you do. You just haven’t worked how much and why.
Let me be clear from the outset. I do care about the money. It’s not all about the money; I do my share of charitable contribution. Money is not my primary motivator and never has been. Even when I was earning a pittance, time mattered to me more than money. If my employers had given me the choice between a pay rise or extra holiday, I’d have taken the latter without a thought.
Generally, I am motivated by achievement and growth…wanting to do a good job and to learn and to get better at what I do. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the money. While there are many things I will do for free, for the love of doing them, there are many others for which you would have to pay me a vast fortune before I’d even contemplate the idea. In the middle there are things for which, while I enjoy doing them, I still think I deserve to be paid a decent return and generally-speaking won’t do ‘just for the fun of it’.
I think this is true of most people.
I have a standard response for people who tell me they don’t care about money, which is “Hey, cool! Can I have your share?” Oddly, they then start to care. There’ll be some hedging around bills to be paid, families to feed, children to educate – all of which is likely true – but it misses the point. The point being, they do care. We all care about the money. We live in a capitalist society. We cannot not care. Even if you’ve gone completely off-grid and live in a bartering community, at some point that community interfaces with the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is still money-bound, money-driven.
The subtlety is in getting to understand how much we care and why.
Clive & I used to talk about winning the lottery – which wouldn’t happen, because we didn’t buy tickets – it was a purely hypothetical conversation. I often said that I would like to win a significant amount, but not a stupid amount. I didn’t need or want to be a multi-millionaire. He always smiled and said Why not? Think of the good you could do with that amount of money.
That thought links up with another of my many life lessons from my Dad. When he talked about money he often made the point that it’s not worth anything until you spend it.
What came out of those conversations is that while money is never sufficient motivation for me, there are things I like to do, would like to be able to do, would like to enable others to do, and they all cost. So do I care? Oh yes!
In practical terms I agree with my Dad: money is just potential. A quick trot through global history (in some countries very recent history) will throw up periods of hyper-inflation, where the value of money as a means of exchange disappeared virtually overnight. We should read these cautionary tales regularly. In terms of intrinsic value, money – all money – is no more than a promissory note, an I.O.U. We can never be 100% sure that the person making the promise will be able to deliver. At the same time, we have to trust that they will or the whole economic system will collapse.
That might not be a bad thing in the longer term, but selfish as I am, I am not sure that I want to be one of those who has to live through it.
Beyond the practical however, money plays a role not just in ‘value’ but in ‘validation’. You can call it ego, or you can call it self-esteem, but we cannot avoid the fact that we think better of ourselves when others think well of us. When I am paid to do a job, that involves someone telling me that I can do something that they cannot, or that I can do it better or quicker than they can. That tells me that my time, my knowledge, my skill is ‘appreciated’, ‘wanted’, or on some small level ‘necessary’.
It tells me that the years spent acquiring and developing the knowledge and skill were worthwhile.
It tells me that being brave enough to stand up and do it, to put myself and my work ‘out there’ was worth the risk.
It tells me that I am ‘good’ at something.
All of these things play into my perception of myself. In a good way.
Like most people, I feel closer to the person I want to be when I am mixing the things I do purely for the love of them, the things I do purely for the love of the world and the people in it, and the things I do which serve me and my selfish desires.
If we say we don’t care about the money – by which we are saying we don’t care about the things money can be exchanged for – we are saying that we will devote all of our time and energy and love and ability to the world at large, without return beyond what we need to survive at the lowest level necessary to keep doing that. We revere people who seem to take that approach for the very reason that they are few and far between. We revere them, but most of us have no intention of even trying to emulate them.
Worse: if we say we don’t care about the money, we are saying we don’t care about ourselves. We don’t care about living the life we really want to live; we don’t care about how much other people value our time or our ability. We are saying that we are not worthy.
We are worthy. All of us. We all have something to give and we deserve to be properly rewarded for it.
There is nothing wrong with choosing to be rewarded. Expecting to earn a reasonable amount for the work we do, involves us saying to the world: I am worth this. I have worked hard to get to a point where I can do this, and I want to be rewarded for those years as well as these hours. I want to be rewarded for what you will gain when you take my work and feed it into yours. A wise person once told me that “self esteem isn’t something you have, it is something you do”.
It can be difficult to extricate how much we care from why we care. It is possible to care intensely about the money because you have passion projects to save the world, which needs every single groat you can lay your hands on. Equally, it is possible to not care very much because you’re getting by, and you’re content and all the things you would want to spend money on are covered…and occasionally you can indulge in a luxury or give a chunk away or whatever.
I think it is important that we understand how much we care and why, because it enables us to make better decisions about the work we do, how hard we choose to work, how much we expect to be paid for that work, and what we do with what we earn. Those are fundamental decisions about the life we are choosing to live.
Understanding how much and why we care about money has three starting points.
The first is how much money do you need – this is the amount you need to bring in on a regular basis or to have in the bank to draw on as you need it – to sustain your current lifestyle. Or if you are in debt, to sustain that lifestyle and reduce and ultimately clear the debt. Or if you are living in abject poverty, to lift yourself out of that.
The second is how much do you want – again to bring in on a regular basis or to have in the bank to draw on as you need it – to transform that lifestyle in to the one you genuinely really want (a whole lot more self-reflection goes into that bit!). This was the point at which I used to talk about ‘a significant amount, not a stupid amount’.
Third - what would you do if you had a lot more than that. How would it make you feel? What would you do with it? I have slowly come round to the view that I would dearly love to earn or to win a stupid amount of money, because I’m gradually getting clearer on what I would do with the vast chunk of it that I wouldn’t ever need for the life I want to live.
And finally, what is money about for you, beyond what you can buy with it? Does it give you a sense of security, or a sense of freedom? Or would it be a hindrance…would it create a trap that would draw you away from your core values? That was what I feared when I used to say I didn’t want to suddenly find I was mega-rich.
I also think that we have to get clear on our own attitude to money – what it is, why we want it, how much we want it, the extent to which (and reasons why) we deserve it, what we would like to do with it – before we can start talking sensibly about money in society, what it is really for, what the collective ‘we’ should be doing to share it around a little better than we currently do.
I would like to hope, but frankly don’t, that recent events might have shifted our perceptions of who in our society deserves greater reward (in time and money) than is currently being permitted. I think that if we better understand that we do care about the money, and why, then we are better placed to understand how and why that also applies to everyone else.
Then, maybe, we can start having a more sensible conversation about taxation and public services, and also about the true cost of private services and consumer goods, and who really is earning a greater share of the rewards available. Because too many of them are living at the ‘need’ stage of the analysis, and in no position to get beyond it. And at some stage, there will be a price to be paid for our having allowed that to continue.
