I’m not interested in making money

I love money. It allows me to buy anything I want, from clothes, to shinies, and in general all the things that make me feel better. So why don’t I want to make money?

Sure, I toss up a few AdSense here and there on my blog, and I’ll gladly take someone’s money for an ad, but making money from my blog and twitter account has never been a goal of mine.

Lately, for years actually, I’ve had this idea in my mind, of success without financial freedom and it’s something I’ve been focusing on a lot lately. In my job I determine success by meeting goals, project deadlines and generating interest in whatever event or service I am promoting for someone. In my personal life I think of success as how many downloads I get each year from my books and not really how much revenue was made from each. For me, I’d rather continue to see 3,000 downloads of Ave Molech a year, most of which are given away or sold at my dollar sales, than see only 300 downloads a year at the normal price of $10.00.

Is this odd? I don’t know, maybe.

Maybe it’s because of my past, while I grew up very poor, we eventually made our way into middle-class, and even with the hardship my wife and I have faced over the last year we’re still very middle/upper-middle-class society people; which is something I’m content with. Perhaps that is my problem, content-ness.

Whenever I apply for a job I don’t bother to ask how much it pays, nor do I ask for more than is offered, unless I didn’t want the job and am hoping to scare off the client. I’ve never minded working on freelance design projects for well under the cost of a design agency or self-proclaimed “Graphic Guru”, which has come in handy recently with the amount of freelance work I’ve been receiving. Perhaps it’s because I don’t know my worth? I don’t think so.

I enjoy what I do, that is, problem solving and strategizing marketing plans, graphic direction, dabbling with new media outlets – all of which I would be doing if I was paid too or not. The problem, I think, is that I find myself enjoying what I do so much that I don’t consider it work, and therefore I don’t consider that I need to make sure I’m paid on-time or what other people value it at. Work is essentially a hobby of mine I do all day every day.

Of course there is the other problem. I blow all my money.

I can’t hold onto a dime it seems. If I have a dollar in my pocket I’ll spend it on that zucchini bread slice at the Peets Coffee, and when I get paid the first thing I do after paying my bills is look for some new computer hardware, a video game, take the wife out on the town or book a trip to Napa.

So what’s the plan?

I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, but perhaps an idea I should focus on for this year is to better handle my spending, and rather than work around the clock on multiple small projects, pick one or two large projects to sink my teeth into. Or maybe I’ll just ignore all my advice and see if any College kids want to do some unpaid intern work for me on projects I have that pay me only $10 an hour.

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