What is Money Good for?
Imagine this…
You come upon a metric f***ton of cash. Your creative business goes viral, your handpainted mason jar Etsy store gets picked up by Mr. Beast… or a Saudi Prince buys all exclusive rights to your feet pics for $1 Billion with a “B.”
You are set for life. You are over the moon!!! All those dreams you had been working for are now yours.
You can do whatever you want! Travel, luxury resorts, buying that Rolls Royce you’ve been gawking at… Threesomes at the Bunny Ranch…
Everything your heart desires is just a payment away, and you have all the resources you and your kids and your kids’ kids could ever need.
But then WWIII breaks loose…
Missiles fly from Moscow to NYC, from NYC to Beijing, from Beijing to Paris, from Paris to Moscow…
With a few million of your vast wealth you’ve secured a bunker, so you’re safe.
But nanoseconds after the first atom split of the first bomb, the Dollar (and the Yen, and the Euro, and the Pound…) became worthless.
Humankind is thrown into the dark ages. Feudal warlords vying for power in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Your $1 Billion?
Worthless.
Your mason jar and feet pic skills?
Nobody wants them in this economy.
What is your money good for now?!
See, money in the end is short form for value.
“What do you mean ‘value,’ Joe?”
Well, dear reader, I mean value.
I value something based on what it means to me. It’s a number I put on my desire for it.
For instance, I will pay $6 for a bar of soap if it smells really nice. I won’t pay $12 for it though, because I value it 6 value units, but not 12… unless I’ve been camping for a week and I feel dirty and stinky… then the value of that bar of soap to me is higher in that moment than normal.
If I’m not that thirsty, I value a bottle of water at $1. or $4 if it’s artisan mineral water in a nice glass bottle.
But if I haven’t drank water for hours, and I’m in an airport where there’s no other options, then I’ll pay up to $10… more than that and I’ll just wait a couple hours until I’m on the plane and the drink lady comes around.
So value is, well, value.
And we as a society have agreed that $1 means something. Aside from the agreement we’ve made, the $1 itself is completely worthless - at least after the dollar stopped being backed by precious metals.
“Well what do I do with this information, Joe?”
You use it. How? By seeing money for what it is.
It’s very common to put our hopes and dreams to money. To decide that “If I had ‘enough’ money [whatever that means] then I will feel safe/happy/free/able to take risks/etc.”
And there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as we don’t sacrifice our core self to appease the G-ds of money.
Money won’t give you those things. Money CAN’T give you those things. Money is just a number in a banking system (a corrupt banking system.)
But the fact that I can transfer 250 value units to someone in exchange for a blowjob DOES mean something (not that I would, I’m just making a point here, jheez.)
Money is not valuable for itself, it’s valuable because we can get things in exchange for it.
So how do you get more of it?
This is the subject for a longer post, but in short - be the kind of person people want to give money to.
How? By being valuable. If you want to make $250,000/year, answer this question for yourself:
“How will I give $2,500,000 of value to others this year? And who will I give it to?”
Notice I said $2,500.000, not $250,000… why? Because if you create $10 of value, you can reliably, truly, without a doubt, expect to capture $1 of that value. Not all value you give out, you can capture - especially if you want to receive a specific amount of money reliably.
There’s much much more to the game of money, but this is a good start.
May this be the first blog post of many in hopes I can help you build a life you love. A custom, bespoke life that is perfect for YOU ❤️
Hasta next time,
~Joe Buchoff