I spent a month on a simple experiment. Could I willfully increase my personal worth by earning $1,000 more every week. This was essentially an attempt to become more valuable. The results were, yes I could earn $1,000 more each week. However, I lost about $3,840 that month. Ouch?
After a month of hard work, sales, marketing, and planning, I was also
Inversely, in the past week I’ve committed 60% of my time and work into the health and wellness industry pro bono. The result? An immediate increase in value. How much? Well, that’s just the thing. None of it has been money, but if measured out for business purposes it amounts to about $5,000 in usable opportunities this month alone, and an estimated $15,000 by the first quarter of next year. Not a bad return on investment for one week of making people’s lives better.
As I said, I had the concept of value all wrong. Trying to measure in money instead of meaning, I was collecting something that can be taken away, money, in lieu of something that by virtue of its quality isn’t so liquid a commodity, meaning. But let’s not get overly esoteric now, although I love being esoteric. I’m not saying to give all your time and money to every and any cause and charity and expect 5 figures for 40 hours of being a “nice guy.”
Meaning implies discernment, and value implies quality. It wasn’t simply a good deed, it was THE good deed I should have done, a special and almost transcendent kind of “good” that makes me more valuable by adding value to the world, not trying to take it from someone else because I won a capitalist competition. Not that I dislike capitalism (I intend to die an unapologetic plutocrat) but it’s a much better game when money is a measurement of the good you do at work, not simply how good you do at work.
If you take anything away from reading this I may hope that tomorrow you may all be several thousand dollars richer, not because you took something valuable out of the world, but because you put something valuable back in.