The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [28]
In his book The Monk and the Riddle, Randy Komisar advises you to ask a simple question about your current mode of income: Would you be willing to do this for the rest of your life?
The point is not that you will do it for the rest of your life. But would you be willing? If this was all there was—no brighter tomorrow, no magic promotion or raise or investment that vaults you into the shrouded next level.
Just this. Now.
Would you be happy with this the rest of your life?
If the answer is no—if the thought of doing your current gig for the rest of your life makes you totally depressed—then you owe it to yourself (having only one life to live) to figure out what kind of pursuit you would be willing to live till the end.
And in so doing, it’s important to look at the whole package, both the money and inner rewards. Is the whole package, the money and the meaning, of your current life tolerable to you if this was it for the rest of your life? If either one (or both) of these aspects is off, then you’ve got to start making the appropriate adjustments.
Writing my “subversive” incoherent mess of a memoir might have been metaphysically rewarding to me at that time (Pre-Step 1). But at a certain point, the whole “starving, debt-laden artist” thing was no longer appealing to me.
So at first, I swung totally in the other direction (Step 1) and focused entirely on paying the bills. Which made sense for a while—it was like “financial therapy,” weaning me off my artistically underearning ways of the past.
But as soon as I was on my feet again financially, and I had some flexibility in my workday to ponder such things (Step 2), Randy’s question popped into my mind. And the clear answer to his query was no. I would not feel satisfied spending the rest of my life as a book proposal writer, direct-response copywriter, and marketing consultant. Not to say it was a bad situation. A lot of people would have killed for that setup, with such solid money on such a flexible schedule. But I had to add something in order for my life to feel meaningful.
I always knew that my great passion was writing books. Not editing other people’s books, not writing book proposals for other people’s books or marketing them. But writing my own. That’s what I was originally doing in my “starving memoirist” phase.
Well, with Steps 1 and 2 handled, I now had the flexibility to write on the side, exploring this passion, yet without having to do it in a “starving artist” way. I wrote a proposal for what became my first published book, The Power of Eye Contact. My income in 2008 and 2009 included $10,000 each of those years in advance money from that book. That certainly wasn’t enough to quit my day job, but it at least contributed to my income and allowed me to explore even more this passion on the side.
For these two years on my path of the Art of Earning a Living, I was solidly at Step 3. I had a great freelance income on a flexible schedule, and I was reengaging with my passion for book writing.
■ STEP 4: Toward Full-Time Author
However, in 2010, I got the idea that I wanted my passion—book writing—to be my main income. This is Step 4 in Aligning Your Money and Your Meaning with integrating your money and your meaning fully. I continued to grow my freelancing day job, in a stillshaky market, by 50 percent in 2010, to $75,000. I’m proud of this growth in the freelancing business over the past four years—about 75 percent per year annualized, including two years of a recession. I credit this growth to the sales, marketing, and networking skills I describe later in this book. (It’s often easier to get a far greater return with much less risk by investing in your own earning power via sales and marketing skills, than is available on the stock market. See Success Skill #5 on investing in your own earning power.)
But in line with my new resolution, I continued nurturing my side career, in a more