Don’t Chase Money, Let the Money Chase You

A simple statement indeed, yet a profound one that can have multiple dimensions and varied interpretations.  Let us think of this within the ambit of our work (employed or self-employed) context, keeping our skills in the center of things for the moment. We all need money and we all seem to be chasing it for various reasons. It could be for buying a house, a car, shopping, vacation, maintaining a lifestyle and the list goes on.

Now whether the money is chasing us or not is not incumbent on any single factor, but one of the prime drivers or it is ‘Our Skills’.

Yes, there are societal reasons that have pressured us down over ages and I know enough examples where people have been discouraged to even change careers leave alone starting something. We can’t ignore this dimension, but that cannot become an excuse for many other things that we can manage, if not control.

Let us be honest to ourselves. How many of us have researched about what are the sought after skills in the coming decade ? If yes, How many have done something or anything about it ? I have asked a simple question to about 500 people through my career. A pointed binary. Our parents paid for our education and post that how many of us paid from our pockets to go for further education?

An astonishing 99.5% people had excuses, but the answer was, ‘we have never invested money from our pockets to pursue new skills’.

In a world where our jobs or business can go away anytime, isn’t this something that we need to invest in ?

Easy to give a discourse. Yeah ! Give a practical suggestion. Well, for starters Internet has opened the world to us and we have started absorbing lot of content. Some may argue that we consume irrelevant content on various social platforms, but that is not the issue. Humans will consume information and like the simple defense forces saying goes ‘life is lived with discipline’. And hence, we chose what we want to consume from the internet and then leverage it for furthering ourselves.

If we want money to chase us, we need to chase the right skills and the right content and to top it all. The leap of faith that we can do something to make this saying (heading) come alive, for us and within our lifetime.

Now we are not saying billions of dollars is what I need but the intent is to reverse the equation on who is chasing what. Are we chasing money or money is chasing us ?

• The new era is going to bring us jobs that have not even been conceptualized. And it is upon us to explore these pastures where we can have both satisfaction and money.
• Leap of faith is hard, trusting yourself in face of unknown is frightening. And worse still, looking around and seeing people saying that you’re a maverick is scary. Calculate and go for it.
• Never get demoralized by defeat, because changing the equation is about defeating the previous equation of who is chasing what.

The world is becoming different and we need to start thinking differently. Whether it is job, start up, family business – if our lives start with money in mind then we will be outpaced by a maverick who is just around the corner.