Money Energy

[VinceG]

Money is energy. It's a particular type of energy. There are others. But people like money, and it's not hard to see why. It's portable, storable, and you can do a lot with it. You can be old or ugly and still be powerful with money. Storing money energy is a true skill, because money tends to lose its value in the long run.

What's interesting to me about money is the dependence aspect, and how little it's paid attention to. Probably because money is so tied to status. Status is another type of energy that can be separated from all other types. Stage performers are intimately aware of this, as they know certain behaviors convey high status and some convey low status.

Money is probably the most addictive substance on the planet. So many people survive and are happy on $1 per day in the world, yet most Americans would feel it "impossible" to live on $5k/year less than they're making now. More money easily worms its way into the "necessary" part of your budget. Breaking this addiction is possible, but I think it's probably harder than stopping smoking.

A funny thing about money is, the less you have of it, in general the happier you are. Money being energy, it's not hard to see why. You need to devote more mental energy to manage $100k/year than you need to manage $15k. You need to devote mental energy to increasing your ability to make more per year. These two dynamics add up quickly.

Attention is a type of energy that you only have a finite amount of. You can't make more attention, you can just learn how to make the most of what you have. The more of your attention you're devoting to money, the less of it you have to devote to other things. A peculiar aspect of money is that methods to gain it lose their effectiveness over time. So people can spend significant fractions of their total attentive energy over their lifetimes practicing a dying method. This combined with the dependence aspect of money makes for some very miserable Americans.

But if you truly understand money, get it at a deeper level, then money can't help but draw itself to you. The first thing to understand about money is that you have to approach it, it won't approach you, at least not at first. If you want somebody to pay you for performing them a service, you need to provide a service that they want. This escapes many businesses and would-be businessmen, particularly artists.

There's a convenience aspect to money that you ignore at your peril. People use money when they want convenience, to avoid having to spend their time and their attention. They do not want to use money to gain the opportunity to do work. This is an inevitable consequence of the nature of money energy.

If you're a freelancer, you're going to find it very hard to find and keep clients unless you're good at conveying to a potential employer that you can avoid the main problems of most freelancing arrangements, the ones that cause the employers to spend their time rectifying. Those main problems are communicative in nature. Technical ability is subordinate to communicative ability.

In my freelancing arrangements, I am very careful to communicate properly with the right people. Any and all communications problems I can easily show to be on their end. They disappeared, they gave me the wrong information. When they do this, I can charge more. I am a great performer, but what allows me to make a decent living with only two or three clients is my ability to communicate.

But I see all the time people who are resisting the peculiar dynamics of money. The chief engineer of my former company, a good friend of mine, does this constantly. He argues and complains and resists all the time, which is why he makes a small amount of money relative to his skills and has no hope of any more. His considerable skills keep him employed, his harsh style limits his earning potential.

In contrast, I make hiring me as painless as could be. When you call me, I ask for the relevant details of the job, then I tell them, I'm good, and get to work. I understand that they're hiring me to fix a problem and that my idiosyncrasies when it comes to doing good work are my problem, not my employer's. My friend will whine and complain that this, that or the other wasn't done by the last guy, making more problems for us, while my brain's working on getting around the obstacle. I take responsibility for my work, and take responsibility for protecting myself.

When you go into business for yourself, this convenience aspect to money will cause you all kinds of pain until you can grasp the concept. Because money is so fungible, a service can be worth $50 or $5000 depending on how it's described. What's really really key to aligning yourself with money is to realize that these explanations, and these values are very important. Pricing yourself is tough until you can get it.

The key is knowing what you're providing to your customer, knowing what he/she wants, and selling him only that service. You have to get inside that customer's head. Your customer wants convenience, he doesn't want to have to articulate what he wants. He wants to look at your offering and think, "oh that's perfect," then make the purchase and have what you sold him perfectly match that image in his head of what he was buying.

It's a lot of work, and people often spend way more time honing their skills than on figuring out what their potential customers want. You should actually do it the other way around. Figure out what your clients want, then figure out a way to do it with your current skill set.

And figure out a way to communicate it tersely. The best response you can get from a businessman is "OK, great." If you've done your job right, that's exactly what you'll get, and lots of people screw this up too. What this response means is, "I trust your judgment to get this done. Do it and send me a bill." I made the mistake of getting too wordy, and asking for clarification. Nobody wants to go back and forth. Just do what makes the most sense at the time, and send a good report and a bill. Chances are it'll be good enough, and if it's not, you'll have a learning experience.

Money is convenience. Convenience is money. Align with other people's convenience and they'll reward you with lots of their money. Convenience isn't that hard of a thing to align yourself with. But if you're too overly protective of your time, aligning yourself with protection, you'll lose out on lots of opportunities to make money. If you're too overly concerned with perfect understanding, aligning yourself with deep connection, you'll fail too. Business connections are remarkably loose and are often conceived of very differently on both ends. Connection takes work, and work is not convenience.