Making Stacks of Money Will Leave You Incredibly Demotivated and Burned Out
There's a better form of motivation that will give you high energy and passion for life. It's not obvious.
Money nukes your motivation.
I see it all the time. A guy contacted me today. He has a 9-figure social media agency. He’s high as a kite on money. The guy can’t get enough.
The obsession with money drips off every word he writes. It’s sickening. He’s not motivated. He’s stuck in the quicksand of greed and doesn’t know why.
Somehow, we think enormous amounts of money will make life easy.
The opposite is true.
All the riches in the world can be a burden
I retired from my job earlier this year. The first few weeks were incredible. I had all this free time to do what I love: writing.
Slowly, though, I hit a rough patch. I suddenly became incredibly demotivated.
People think financial inequality in society is a problem. The majority of Americans think that all they need is the gap between rich and poor to close and life would be unicorns and rainbows.
In one sense I agree with them. In another sense they’re totally wrong.
One of my mentors has a new startup. It will do extremely well. I expect him to sell it for tens of millions of dollars. He said this:
“I want to sell this business before it makes too much money.”
What the hell! I questioned him to find out why.
“I don’t ever want to get filthy rich. Otherwise, my three daughters will have the burden of a large inheritance that will kill their motivation in life.” Pwahhhh.
Mind blown.
Then I found this quote recently.
In the early phase of running our agency, I was very motivated because I was worried about money — paying for dinner, or for rent, or payroll.
But once I finally had money, I became incredibly demotivated. It was like I was just coasting, and I didn’t care to put in the extra effort to make another million bucks. – Andrew Wilkinson
The “One Pillar” Life
At an event a few years ago Gary Vaynerchuk introduced the idea that so many people have built their life on a single pillar.
They’ve found one hack.
They’ve found one arbitrage.
They’ve found one gap in the market.
They’ve found one freebie a mate has given them.
They’ve found one employer who is willing to pay them a handsome salary.
This is so true. I see it all the time with millennials. They’ve made a little money from tech stocks or crypto and suddenly they think they have all of humanity for the last few thousand years figured out. All that really happened is they got lucky.
That tiny bit of luck caused their life to be built on one pillar of ignorance. That ignorance leads them to talk down to everybody else. Had that one pillar never been discovered, they’d be nowhere.
What you really need to be resilient
I believe in a multi-pillar life. I have several ways that I feed my family. It has been difficult to do. The temptation was just to crush it on Medium dot com and then do nothing else.
I refused to do it. Tech platforms can light your dreams on fire and then pour gasoline on top for sh*ts and giggles. So can a company you work for and trust.
Don’t do it.
Build several pillars of excellence. How? Expand your skills. I teach. I own an online business. I sell NFTs. I invest in stocks. I invest in crypto. I write on Twitter, Substack, Quora, LinkedIn, Medium and Bitclout.
If one thing pillar dies then the rest of the foundation will keep me standing tall until I can replace the broken pillar with another one. Get it?
One pillar relies on luck.
A multi-pillar life is built on the assumption your luck will run out.
The goal isn’t stacks of money. The goal is multiple pillars that allow you to live life with less stress and stay motivated during the inevitable tough times.
The bizarre paradox of having stacks of money
Gary Vaynerchuk goes on to explain that when you’ve got financial success in your life, you tend not to put in the work to keep it.
It’s easy to get lazy when you’ve got enough.
But an empty stomach and a family of crying babies will sure as hell get your butt into motion if you “don’t feel like it.”
The hard financial times are the motivation you need to change your life.
In 2011 I left a business I loved. Most of my material possessions had to disappear as a result. I thought my life was over. Nope. It was just getting started.
Yesterday I went through all my phone notes since 2012. There were notes in there I’d forgotten about. I used to leave my home at 6 am for work. I’d get to the gym, workout for an hour, get breakfast, and then start work one hour before all of my colleagues.
As a result, I moved up the company ladder of an enterprise with 40,000 people faster than anybody could believe. This was no accident. I had motivation. I had no money, no business, no more employees to kiss my ass, and all my results were wiped out.
If you’d asked me my thoughts back in 2011, I would have said losing everything was the worst thing that ever happened to me. If you ask me now, I’ll tell you this:
Losing everything is a huge f*cking gift. It’s free motivation.
When you’ve got nothing, there’s so much to gain.
Takeaway
Stop praying for equality, or for life to be fair, or for someone to come and save you.
Nobody’s coming to save you. You have to save yourself.
See hardships and financial challenges as motivation successful people don’t have. Lots of money will drain all your motivation, anyway. Forget about stacks of money. Burn the path to your Lambo dreams.
Get free motivation from having not much, and then use it to buy back your time so you can do whatever you want. That’s a far better life than stacks of money.
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