Making Money With a Purpose

Making money is a significant part of our life. People spend 40 hours or more of their time a week to make money. For that reason, it’s essential to have the right perspective when it comes to making money. Otherwise we may focus on the wrong things and end up at the wrong place.

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a while and I’ve come to a perspective that I’m about to share with you. This perspective helps me connect making money to a greater purpose and makes it more fulfilling.

The Goals of Making Money

Why do people make money? What do they try to achieve? I believe there are two levels of goals in making money: a lower one and a higher one.

The lower goal of making money is to meet your needs.

This is the goal that most people has and there is nothing wrong with it. I also have it as a goal since I do have needs that can only be met with money.

But there is a higher goal.

The higher goal of making money is to make yourself useful to a cause you believe in.

While the lower goal of making money sits on level 1 (Physical) or 4 (Esteem) of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the higher goal sits on level 8 (Transcendence). Consequently, the higher goal is more fulfilling. It’s fine to have the lower goal of making money, but I believe that sooner or later we must adopt the higher goal.

Of course, you can be useful to your cause in many ways. Being useful financially is just one of them. You may want to be useful to your cause in non-financial ways and that’s absolutely fine.

In my case though, I want to contribute financially as well as in other ways.

Now I will share with you what I think is the best way to be useful financially to your cause.

Being Useful Financially To Your Cause

There is one thing that makes you useful financially to your cause : the ability to make money.

Notice that I say the ability to make money and not the amount of money you have.

This, I believe, is an essential principle when it comes to making money:

Having the ability to make money is more important than having money.

It’s not how much you have. It’s how much you can make. There are three reasons why the ability to make money is more important than having money:

1. By having the ability to make money, you won’t be obsessed with having a lot of money because you know that you can always earn the money when you need it.
2. By having the ability to make money, you can easily give money away. Again, that’s because you know that you can earn the money when you need it.
3. By having the ability to make money, you can share your knowledge on how to make money rather than just giving the money itself.

This way you can be useful to your cause in three ways:

1. You have the time to do important things for your cause that aren’t related to making money. That’s because you aren’t so obsessed with having money that your time is occupied with work.
2. Your money can directly help the cause because you’re willing to give it away.
3. You can help other people earn more money. They can then be useful financially to the cause and thereby create a multiplier effect.

As you can see, you are useful in many ways if you have the ability to make money. That’s why you should focus on increasing your ability to make money.

In a future post, I will discuss how to do that.

Photo by jenn_jenn