More Isn't Always More

You always have the choice to make less - and it can be priceless

“Learning for earning!” my accounting professor emphasized, as he turned and looked at each one of us in the eye. Everyone sat up a little straighter in Rolfe Hall despite it being after 8p on a worknight.

“Anything you learn - any new skill in academics - including what you’re learning in this course, should be evaluated by how much you can earn with it. If you’re paying to learn skills that you can’t monetize - well - you’re wasting both your time and your money.”

I sat back in my chair and thought this over. It made so much sense. Why had I never heard this before?

Even though the delivery was blunt, as this particular professor’s usually was, the message stuck with me.

For the next decade or so, I focused my academic and professional efforts on increasing my earning capacity at the expense of nearly everything else. I viewed myself as a hired gun, available to the highest bidder.

It didn’t occur to me until much later that all of the skills I’d acquired could be monetized outside of the confines of the only companies I’d ever known - basically, Fortune 50 behemoths (Wells Fargo, Starbucks and later Amazon).

Society celebrates promotions, expanded job titles and bigger paychecks. You feel like you’re doing something right - after all, you’re being rewarded for all of those hard-earned years you spent ‘learning for earning.’

It was not until having children that I realized I might be missing something. All of my waking hours had been optimized to productivity, work-related deliverables, exercise to blow off steam, and eating super clean to keep the train on the tracks.

I felt lucky that my first kiddo was born during the pandemic so that not only did none of my colleagues see me visibly pregnant, no one noticed my empty desk in Day 1 while I was on maternity leave - because everyone’s desk was empty.

I tried to pretend like I could carry on as I always had, just with a baby in tow.

Any parents out there will know how foolish this is. Sure, you can hire full time childcare for both day and night (if you can afford it) but at the end of the day, when your kid is sick, they want Mom or Dad. When your kid is hurting, they want Mom or Dad.

And when your kid is growing up every day and every night while you’re glued to your laptop, you’re missing out on the only childhood they will ever have.

As one of my physicians told me, were she to drop dead tomorrow, the hospital would have her replacement in two weeks. Meanwhile, her spouse and her children just had one of her. So, which was she going to prioritize?

It took some pretty drastic health consequences for me to realize that I had things totally backwards. Making money is fine, but there’s a real tradeoff to be made between your professional ambitions and your personal life. You cannot do both at a high level at the same time - it is simply not possible. Even though I’d been told this over and over, for some reason I thought I was the special exception to the rule.

I was not.

Your company (at least in the United States) could care less about your decision to have a family. You having kids doesn’t help their bottom line, and it takes you away from using your learning for THEIR earning.

So, what to do?

If you’re smarter than me, and you probably are - you have likely already figured out that it’s fairly straightforward to sell your skills to others.

For example, I was fairly disappointed to realize that as I moved higher and higher up the food chain, I spent a lot more time in meetings and completing performance reviews, and a lot less time building cool stuff in excel. I really like building models in excel. I could literally do it all day. I am world class at it.

Now, another business owner pays me to build their models in excel. I am lucky in that he knew my work from my banking days and approached me about this, but I was also proactive in asking him how he ran his business during the pandemic while I was considering a virtual personal finance consultancy.

He knew what I had learned, and had seen the results - particularly as I expended into real estate investing on my own.

It blew my mind that I could just sell the things I liked to do best and cut out the middle man.

I shake my head as I write this because I could have started doing this years ago.

Would I take a pay cut at first? Yeah, of course. But the things I would build would be mine, and within my control - not the control of a faceless corporate hierarchy.

For some reason, I thought that I needed to be associated with someone else’s brand to be taken seriously or paid well.

It’s simply not true!

If you have skills that your employer is paying you to perform, what’s the risk of experimenting with selling them for yourself? This could be anything from art and music to coding or even tutoring. Anything and everything is fair game.

Are there things to figure out, like health insurance? Yes - but they aren’t insurmountable, especially if you start experimenting while you are still gainfully employed.

Will you have to potentially cut back on expenditures or move to a cheaper city? Potentially - but everything is a choice! You have agency and YOU get to decide. No one is coming to rescue you and deliver the life of your dreams to your doorstep, and the first best decision you can make is taking full ownership for how you spend both your time and your money.

Control your money and you control your time. My professor was right - I just didn’t take his lesson far enough!

And if you do this correctly? You’ll have a more flexible schedule. Time to spend with your loved ones instead of preparing for the next meeting that you know will mostly be a waste of time. Time to explore the great outdoors instead of doing iteration iota of the latest forecast that will be forgotten nearly as soon as it’s published.

Don’t be me! Take some time today to think about this and what special skill you have to offer the world - especially if it’s something you love doing.

It’s a statistical certainty that someone else hates doing that exact thing, or is perhaps just too busy to do it, and would LOVE to pay you for your skills. Think about that for a minute!

Meanwhile, I am back to my “week of adventures before kindergarten starts” with my oldest - the first person to open my eyes to the true cost of the endless pursuit of more.