Every morning I wake up thinking about revenues and expenses. I fall asleep planning some new hare-brained idea to try out in the business. Betweentimes I grind through piles of high priority tasks.
I started my career wanting to work to earn money to have freedom to party and to do fun things. The odd thing is that to truly earn money you need to give up the day to day focus on money. You need to look at other things or you will fail when you reach artificial summits in the foothills of wealth. Money for me is no longer a means to purchase goods and services for my happiness. Money is now a scoreboard on life’s video game.
I have been financially independent for several years and could stop working to do anything I wish. But what other game could I play?
I am now working and making many other people wealthy – my employees, my clients, and those I mentor. This is a positive side effect, but still just a side effect of my competitive drive to move my company up the grand scoreboard of economics.
There is nothing else in life I do as well as this. My basketball skills are questionable, my writing is passable, but anything having to do with business has been honed through painful fires. Recruiting, negotiating, marketing, sales, operations, the law, programming, training all are world class.
People don’t know you for your inner world. They generally don’t care if you’re a nice guy, or that you have good intentions. They remember you for what you do; if you volunteer for the Red Cross every day they think of you as a charitable person. If you are like Laurel’s dad and will help anyone with anything they ask, they will remember you as a kind person. If you work in writing, you are an author.
In the world of economics, I am surrounded by titans thousands of times larger than I am. I am so small as to be invisible. To others, I am a hundred times larger than they are. I’d like my business to join the titans one day.
Even my business failures are grander than my wins elsewhere. The enemies I made in romance hate me more for what I did in business than in the home.