Money and you
This week I interviewed Intimacy Coach Angela Wilkinson about what intimacy is and how to achieve it with yourself and other people in your life. Next week I will be interviewing Kare Anderson of Say it Better Coaching.
Money and You
With the economy sliding into a depression, money is obviously one of the biggest concerns on anyone’s mind. Even in the best of times, money is usually a concern, because it is our survival ticket. We pay money for almost everything we acquire. Money is the both the life blood of a business and the life blood of a family. At this time, we can’t really live without it.
Lately I’ve been reading The Analects by Confucius and one of the points he makes is that people will spend three years studying for a salary, but that studying for a salary is not a good reason to study. I agree with his perspective. Doing anything for money ultimately treats money as an end goal and in the process makes it more important than anything else in your life. At the same time, the main purpose of money is forgotten. the main purpose of money is to facilitate a means to an end. In other words, money in and of itself only has value when it is used to secure goals that enrich our lives. If you work all the time and hoard your money, is it really useful? This isn’t to say you shouldn’t save money or have some put aside for hard economic times, like the current ones. But the point Confucius makes is applicable to this time as was in his. Studying with a salary in mind ignores the potential unhappiness you may feel doing that job.
The same is true for business owners. Getting into a business solely to make money is usually an equation that leads to unhappiness. People can tell if you are or are not passionate about what you are doing. And that dictates whether or not they will spend their money.
The relationship you cultivate with money is about attitude. Lots of people have written about how important it is to have a healthy attitude about money and it is important to have that healthy attitude, but part of finding that healthy attitude involves recognizing that money isn’t an end in itself. Study for three years for something you are passionate about and that passion will show up in the quality of work and consequently manifest in the money you earn.
Review: Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson
This is a must have book for anyone who’s starting or running a small business. Levinson includes tons of tactics and strategies that any small business owner can benefit from and best of all can personalize to their own advantages. I have lots of pages dog tagged in my copy, because I know I’ll be referring to them again and again and again. I also like Levinson’s style of writing; he makes readers instantly comfortable with the concepts, while also urging them to incorporate those concepts into how they do business. You can’t go wrong with GuerillaMarketing…what you can learn is how to make your business successful while spending as little as possible.
5 out of 5
