Reverend Ken's Blog: September 27, 2012

September 27, 2012 (Thursday)
(Post 611, Day 271 of 2012, 636 days since original post)

Daily Comment

To quote Cyndi Lauper, "Money changes everything."

For me, usually not for the better.

I am not certain why I have this diffidence about money matters, but I can tell you this: Anything I have ever tried to do for the sole or primary purpose of making money, has failed.

I have no stomach for pursuing wealth. In fact, even when I've been successful at accumulating surplus money, I have managed to give it all back (and then some) or spend it or somehow end up, at best, only slightly better off.

I have heard that if you do something you enjoy, the money will come. I can't dispute that, but everything I've ever enjoyed doing has become less enjoyable, and in a few cases, odious, when I've tried to turn it into a money-making proposition.

That is despite my enjoyment. A recent example is photography. For fifty-five years, I have enjoyed taking pictures. I think some of my photos were quite good. Recently, I read about the money-making possibilities of micro-stock photography. I spent a little money on information on how to make a go of this, there are online courses available.

Then I spent quite a bit of money upgrading my camera, buying lenses, software, etc.

I read the courseware. Nothing in it turned me off, but pretty soon I found myself taking fewer pictures, and feeling uninspired when I took my camera out. I was turned off to photography.

That is just a recent example. Past examples include almost everything I ever did that I don't do any more.

I even stopped playing bass for quite a while, because I had gotten unhappy monetizing it, trying to make money playing. Pretty soon, I had lots of other priorities. During those years (twelve!), I forgot how much I enjoyed it. When I started back into it, it was just for the fun of it. When it became a chore, when I joined a gigging band that was focused on being a 'success,' it got bad for me again, and I stopped playing for almost a year.

I came back to it after moving to Syracuse. I decided that I would not play for money, or for any reason other than the enjoyment of playing. As a result, these days, I enjoy my bass playing more than ever.

I don't believe that money is the root of all evil, at all, but I believe that, for me, the pursuit of money is.

Which is interesting, because, in the past, I have shown that I can be successful at it, at least in the short run: Temporarily. For whatever reason, this success is not inspirational, and I don't get a whole lot of pleasure in it after the novelty wears off.

And, after the novelty wears off, I find the things that I enjoyed doing, the things that were responsible for that success, no longer give me as much pleasure; as a result, I stop doing them, or don't give them enough time, and that results in losing whatever I had gained that way.

In some cases, that enjoyable thing (for instance,the processes I used to become, temporarily, a successful equity investor) stopped producing good results. That's what happened with my greatest investing success: The techniques I used that brought me success, stopped being working, and I lost a lot of money - a lot - waiting for the process to regain its past success. It didn't. I stopped using it, and, years later, I checked: It never came back.

An expensive lesson.

Or, there was the time in my early 20s that I had considerable success as a sales rep, traveling all over the Northeast. I was good at it, but when I wanted to enoy my success, I found out that the time spent away from home had negatively affected my relationships - I was on a different schedule, and enjoying a different lifestyle than most of my friends. As soon as I became dissatisfied with constantly being on the road (see hundreds of pop songs about the pitfalls of life on the road), my business suffered, and pretty soon, events came to bear that put me out of that business.

Every time I've ever tried to do a job where I didn't like the work, just to be employed and have an income, I, or the job, have failed.

So it goes.

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