For me, money always comes best when I’m pursuing higher purpose

By David McElroy · December 30, 2021

For half an hour, I had forced myself to listen to something I cared nothing about. Hal and I were talking about some new technologies for capturing real estate sales leads from our website. He’s the owner of the realty company where I work and we talk about technology quite a bit.

But this time, the discussion was purely based on finding sales leads and automating the sales funnel to turn leads into clients. The technology is powerful and realistic. I suspect it will work for us. There’s a very good chance it will be profitable.

But the truth is that I simply didn’t care.

Hal has a sales background. In fact, he’s probably the best salesperson I’ve ever known. He enjoys the process. In fact, he gets excited about it.

But as we talked — and I tried to make myself care about what we were talking about — I suddenly had a moment of clarity.

I don’t care about making money, at least for its own sake. I care about ideas. I care about causes. I care about fighting a good fight for something I believe in. When that makes money for me, it’s a nice benefit.

But I’m never going to care about making money as an end in itself.

All of a sudden, I understood something about my past (and my present) which had seemed to escape me until now.

I used to make a nice living. I wasn’t wealthy, but I made a nice income. When I worked in politics, I made between $100,000 and $150,000 a year, depending on the campaign cycle. It was nice money and I had a good time, because I was competitive and I thought I was doing something good.

I had to get out of politics because I no longer believed in what I was doing. For the last few years I was doing it, I stayed with it merely for the money. What had once been exciting and enjoyable became drudgery. By the end, I wasn’t even calling potential clients back — when they called me first. I just couldn’t force myself to keep doing work that had come to feel so dirty and wrong.

For most of the last decade, I’ve struggled to figure out how to get back to the income I once had. For the last four or five years — I’ve lost track of the exact time right now — I’ve been in real estate. The opportunities have been very good, but I’m nowhere close to making the money I had expected.

Tonight, I understand why.

When I owned a couple of small newspapers — many years ago — I often worked between 100 and 110 hours a week. It was a grueling schedule and my body couldn’t keep it up forever, but I did it gladly, because I was doing something I loved. I was doing something which seemed important to me.

I was going to build a great newspaper and then make other great newspapers, building a company that I thought would matter — to me and to my readers. I knew that would make me wealthy and powerful, but that wasn’t my purpose. It was a side effect.

When I think back on my life, every time I’ve been successful at something, it’s been because I thought what I was doing mattered. Those things were often mixed with ego gratification and the desire for power and success, but I was fueled by the desire to do something great, not by the desire for money.

And that’s my real problem in real estate. There’s a lot of money to be made in real estate, simply by bringing buyers and sellers together. There’s nothing wrong with the business, but it simply doesn’t matter to me. I don’t feel as though I’m doing anything that a thousand other people couldn’t do just as well.

I might as well be selling soap. Or shoes. Or whatever.

I’ve often been told, “Do what you love and the money will follow,” but I’ve come to see that as very simplistic. When you do something you love, money might follow — if what you love happens to coincide with what can make money. But if your passion is for painting seashells or stage acting — or writing, for that matter — that passion might bring you absolutely nothing.

Here’s what I suspect is true. If you want to be at peace with yourself — in the long run — you have to do something which you truly care about. That might or might not make you affluent.

It’s also true that you must provide a minimum level of income to support yourself and whatever family counts on you. There’s no way around that. But if you can make that minimum amount you need to meet your needs, you’re better off doing something you care about than you are to do something you hate that makes 10 times the income.

I need to refocus on the things I care about. When I went through a miserably destitute period — about seven or eight years ago — I got so scared by the experience that I started focusing too much on the chase for money. And that hasn’t worked out well for me.

I need to refocus on things that matter to me. And if doing those things happens to bring serious money with them, great. I’m not going to pretend that having a nice income again wouldn’t make my life better. But if I return to chasing the things that matter to me, I’m going to be OK if I don’t make a six-figure income — just as long as I can do well enough to honorably support myself and anybody I care about.

Money isn’t a bad thing. Being wealthy can be a great thing, in fact. But loving money — and setting life up to be a big money grab — probably isn’t going to make you happy. It might not even bring you money. Doing it that way hasn’t worked for me.

Earlier this week, I saw this somewhere, but I don’t know where it came from: “Money is a terrible master, but an excellent servant.”

I think that’s true. Back when I used to make a good living, money was my servant, because it wasn’t my goal. But once I had trouble — and started being afraid of my lack of income — I allowed money to be my master. And I was miserable.

I’ve been thinking for the past few months about some changes that I need to make — and I’m going to talk about those things soon — but what I’m saying here fits right in with that longer-term thinking.

I can’t spend my life doing things which aren’t important to me, even if I fear that not having money will cost me relationships I might want. I have to get back to doing things that matter to me, regardless of the cost.

I hope that pursuing higher purposes will bring me fame and fortune and power. Those would be nice. But if they don’t — if I live a modest life in obscurity instead — I will be much happier than I am today.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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