7 ms·

How to Balance Money and Meaning

80 points by caser 3y ago

vorpalhex 3y ago
I feel like I am on drugs attempting to read this website. Somehow the ads, despite an adblocker, are so close to the text that I can't tell if this is about the article title or some sort of AI thing.
syndicatedjelly 3y ago
The best way to destroy a passion is to try to make money off of it
huijzer 3y ago
Was this written by ChatGPT? It says a lot but also nothing. I don’t know what to take away exactly.
- creativenolo 3y ago
  > Today's essay is brought to you by SaneBox, the AI email assistant that helps you focus on crucial messages Sounds like it based on this ambiguous statement and the article itself
- goldemerald 3y ago
  Given all the ads builtin to the site about using generative AI, I'm inclined to think so too.
floren 3y ago
> An example of this succeeding is my friend Nicole, who started making watercolor paintings about climate change for fun and sharing on social media. Her work went viral, and after four months, she decided to quit her job and go all in on art. Now, she makes a living through merch and commissioned work. Ironic to bring that up as an example when your header image is an LLM-generated "watercolor" painting. Sorry, Nicole.
- Tadpole9181 3y ago
  [flagged]
- vinceguidry 3y ago
  Every time I start to think HN might be getting better, comments like this still get to the top. Folks, if you don't like the story, just downvote it. It'll go down in the rankings and you won't have to see it again!
  - creativenolo 3y ago
    I didn’t read that comment to be an affirmation that they didn’t like it. It’s an interesting observation.
  - Tadpole9181 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - floren 3y ago
    You can't downvote a story. You can flag stories, but I don't like to flag things. I don't want to flag this story -- I just think it's yet another entry in a million shallow, vague, pointless "hustle" lifestyle newsletters written by wannabe Thinkfluencers.
    - vinceguidry 3y ago
      Ah. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
- ralferoo 3y ago
  Also, one of the pictures in the article, and apparently "one of her more popular posts" is this: https://twitter.com/NicoleKelner/status/1589748415130664960 https://twitter.com/NicoleKelner/status/1589748415130664960 The claim is that using a two-stroke leaf blower for 30 minutes produces as many hydrocarbon emissions as driving a pick-up truck from Texas to Alaska. Clearly she has never actually thought about the logistics of this! The shortest route I could find on Google Maps was from Dumas, TX to Metlakatla, AK at around 2500 miles. I drive a car in the UK, but that would be probably 200L or more (or 100 gallons for US folk) and even more for a truck. There's no way that ANY leaf blower gets through 3 gallons of fuel a minute! In fact, google tells me that a typical leaf blower uses 0.43 gallons per hour. So driving a truck will use approximately 500 times as much. I'm concerned about climate change, but making completely ridiculous claims like this, even if they are pretty watercolours, isn't helping the cause - especially when it's immediately obvious that it's nonsense!
ericmcer 3y ago
These feel like recipes for failure because it doesn't acknowledge that most people lack the ability to: A. Earn enough to employ these strategies B. Succeed at their "passion" in a meaningful way. Here is a more realistic approach if you have a passion and don't know how to balance it with a more boring career choice: Figure out some way to dedicate a few months to it. You most likely don't have the talent or dedication to succeed. After a few months you will realize this and move on with your life having checked that box.
- prepostertron 3y ago
  I think the end result of your more realistic approach is the bivocational approach the author outlined in the article.
  - caser 3y ago
    Yep -- this is where I tend to see people end up after doing a sabbatical. That, or they alternate between periods of highly paid work and periods bumming skydiving, making art, etc.
- boredemployee 3y ago
  I genuinely laughed at your comment. Here's someone who has lightly lived off their passion. First and foremost, look up the origin of the word "passion" if you're not familiar with it. You'll be surprised by its original meaning. Living off something you love and that lights up your eyes doesn’t take months, it takes years, many years. In the initial years, you have to fight against all possible forces, starting with your own imposter syndrome, the lack of money (if you’re not from a wealthy family), and then there’s the phase of convincing everyone around you who doesn’t believe in your "talent" - that is if you come from a culture that needs the validation of others to feel good. Besides that, you still have to deal with the sales and marketing part. It’s not enough to be talented, it’s not enough to do your job well, there are still many variables. All of this doesn’t get resolved in months (maybe very, very lucky people manage to turn their passion into success in months, but that should be less than 1% of the entire sample). Anyway, I could spend many hours talking about this topic that I experienced firsthand for 7 years and was forced to switch to the corporate world because of the pandemic.
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
if you have money, meaning is a quest if you don't have money, meaning is a question > "by making an honest living with part of our time, we can carve out another swath to do the work we really care about" i usually feel too burned out from work to even think about what else i might care about. sometimes it feels like nothing, i would be happy with hot water, a roof, warm bed and internet access. i don't want to be a consultant or entrepreneur or any of that.
iguanayou 3y ago
Where's the data behind that infographic about the leaf blower vs driving a pickup from Texas to Alaska?
- gnabgib 3y ago
  https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-car-vs-truck-vs-leaf-blower.html https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-... "Let's put that in perspective. To equal the hydrocarbon emissions of about a half-hour of yard work with this two-stroke leaf blower, you'd have to drive a Raptor for 3,887 miles, or the distance from Northern Texas to Anchorage, Alaska."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AlbertCory 3y ago
"Follow your passion" is the all-time stupidest advice. Most people don't have one, but when pressed they'll name something they sorta like. "Follow a career you don't hate" is more realistic.
- emerongi 3y ago
  The worst is when you have a passion that you love, but it turns into a job you hate.
- thfuran 3y ago
  And for a lot of people who do have a passion, turning it into the nine to five kind of ruins it. I think it's a pretty rare sort of person who can really love their job for a long time.
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    What is worse is then once you have done your job. You have no left over energy for your own projects anymore. As you have basically consumed the energy you would for your own projects into the job. The only way it works is if you have a passion for something AND for doing it for someone else.
    - creer 3y ago
      Normally, this is the "toxic job" caveat. A career you don't hate, sure. But also a job that's not so toxic that you are exhausted at the end of the day. That's the theory of the day job: in many disciplines it's tough to get to the point where your discipline will comfortably support you. In the meantime there is nothing wrong with a day job. Just, a day job that's not toxic. So you can pursue your discipline the rest of the time.
- 90-00-09 3y ago
  "Follow your passion" can be a valuable outlook on life. The overly broad interpretation of that is what many people find confusing. I think it's fair to say that most engineers have a passion for coding/engineering. Without it spending most of one's waking hours coding would be absolutely unsustainable. Finding passion in this context is about finding the right niche for your work, not switching your career to something else you would (potentially) enjoy, like playing video games. We need to acknowledge that not every hobby or interest is that mythical passion we should view as a career opportunity. Being an engineer doesn't define one's work: spending 2 years of your life on building a new ads format at Meta is technically the same profession as e.g. developing better models for predicting climate change, but the passion factor will be different for different people.
dmje 3y ago
The fact that it feels like it's written by an AI aside (because you know, someone obviously wanted to spend time on a beach instead) - there is an endless cadence to the "entrepreneur, money and life" article of which this is a part. What always strikes me is that these articles rarely mention a sort of quiet, middle way entrepreneur group - of which I consider myself a member. Like most of the people I know who work for themselves or have a little product or a freelance business, I'm not in the game to "100x" anything, I'm not funded, I'm not interested in million dollar deals, and I could give a monkeys about hockeystick growth. Instead I - and many / most of the people I know in this group - are just getting along. We've got a pretty good work / life balance. We get to look at the sea and do the occasional deal and sign some nice work up - we all pay for our mortgages and our families. We're doing business, we're doing entrepreneurship - and we're doing it pretty well without having to make these grand declarations about busting our balls until 35 and then retiring or working 4 hour weeks etc etc. We probably don't ever make any articles like this because it's not the WOO story that everyone wants to read of rabid success or astonishing failure. We're just here, doing what we do and having quite a nice time doing it.
- haswell 3y ago
  As someone mid-sabbatical with a plan to transition to something entirely self-run, it’s really good to read this comment. I’ve done the busting my balls in big tech thing and burned out hard, which made me realize I needed to make a serious change. But it’s pretty common to find content focused on exactly what you describe instead of the “I’m just doing what I need to do so I can pay bills and lead a happy life”. I want to build something successful, but not so successful that I’m back to burnout mode. Some people seem happier to burn themselves out for their own endeavor, but I just want to find a good balance between paying bills and enjoying life. I’ve been building out a series of blog posts talking about the sabbatical itself, and how I’ve spent my time, and just wanted to mention that I’d be one of the first readers if you or someone like you decided to write about their “middle way” experiences. I hope I can write about that eventually, but it’s all aspirational at this point.
- thegrim33 3y ago
  Well you obviously didn't read the article, as the article very explicitly covers an approach that is "[..] the choice to make income in a way that leaves time to pursue meaning outside of work in the form of art, hobbies, or side projects." How is that any different than what you just spent 4 paragraphs describing? It's incredibly ironic that you try to diss the article as sounding like it was written by an AI, when your comment reads as copy+paste echo chamber commentary on work ethics/money which isn't actually connected to the article you're supposedly commenting on.
38932ur98u 3y ago
Damn, I would have loved for this article to have any substance. As someone who has been doing consulting the last two years, these kinds of questions are always on my mind. And I have no good answers.
- caser 3y ago
  Hey, author of the post here. My takeaway after trying all these strategies is that there's no one right answer. All paths can work but also have failure states. If you want to talk, feel free to drop me a note - hi@nosmallplans.io. I spent 2 years doing consulting before shifting into other work, happy to share more specific thoughts / reflections offline.
iteratethis 3y ago
Statistically, I'm thinking the group being able to have "life changing money" in their thirties or forties is quite small. Likewise, making reliable income from a passion in the area of arts, music, is only for the few. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try, I'm just saying we need advise for the rest of us. If you're not in that 1% group that will make it big at a young age or can retire early, I propose the pseudo-retirement. I'm middle-aged and slowly but surely optimizing my expenses. Paying down the mortgage. Optimizing the energy use of our home. Going from 2 cars down to 1. Buying extremely durable goods. Cutting useless daily expenses. The idea is to bring expenses down to such a manageable level so that much less income is needed to keep everything going. Somewhere in the age range of 50-60, we pseudo-retire. We switch to a simple job nearby. We're in our forties and could already make it on 2 minimum wage jobs right now. We still have a lot of room to cost optimize and if we really stretch it, 1.5 minimum wage jobs in 5 years is on the table, as well as 1 minimum wage job in 10 years. Quite likely we'll go for 2 x 3-4 days/week jobs, but even 2 x full-time would be fine. The main motivation for this strategy is the very high retirement age (about 70-71) by the time we get there but also to get out of our demanding, stressful jobs. They're frying our brains and sanity.
tomcar288 3y ago
When you build a business that makes money, you need to create value for someone. It can be anyone really: your neighbor down the street, people in another zip code or country, a demographic all over the world, etc. There's just one person in the entire world for which you can NOT create value for: yourself. No one will pay you to create value for yourself. This is the essential difference between work and play. Work is creating value for others. Play is creating value for yourself. Money and "Meaning" are far more mutually exclusive than people realize. the fastest way to make something UNfun is to get paid for it. Just try this experiment: imagine anything you want to do for fun, then realistically imagine what it's like to get paid for it. If you're really honest with yourself and understand the equivalent job, you'll see that it becomes quickly unfun the moment you get paid.
- claudiulodro 3y ago
  This is a really interesting and clever way of thinking about it, and I think you've hit the nail on the head! I'm bookmarking this comment. I've tried to start a bunch of businesses and side projects over the years in that intersection of money and meaning, and in retrospect that's been a big reason they haven't been successful: I created something with value for myself and then tried to find other people that would also get value from it. That's much more difficult, marketing-focused, and roundabout than just doing something that I know creates value directly and trying to find meaning in that.

80 points by caser 3y ago

I feel like I am on drugs attempting to read this website. Somehow the ads, despite an adblocker, are so close to the text that I can't tell if this is about the article title or some sort of AI thing.

syndicatedjelly 3y ago

The best way to destroy a passion is to try to make money off of it

huijzer 3y ago

Was this written by ChatGPT? It says a lot but also nothing. I don’t know what to take away exactly.

creativenolo 3y ago
> Today's essay is brought to you by SaneBox, the AI email assistant that helps you focus on crucial messages Sounds like it based on this ambiguous statement and the article itself
goldemerald 3y ago
Given all the ads builtin to the site about using generative AI, I'm inclined to think so too.

floren 3y ago

> An example of this succeeding is my friend Nicole, who started making watercolor paintings about climate change for fun and sharing on social media. Her work went viral, and after four months, she decided to quit her job and go all in on art. Now, she makes a living through merch and commissioned work. Ironic to bring that up as an example when your header image is an LLM-generated "watercolor" painting. Sorry, Nicole.

Tadpole9181 3y ago
[flagged]
vinceguidry 3y ago
Every time I start to think HN might be getting better, comments like this still get to the top. Folks, if you don't like the story, just downvote it. It'll go down in the rankings and you won't have to see it again!
- creativenolo 3y ago
  I didn’t read that comment to be an affirmation that they didn’t like it. It’s an interesting observation.
- Tadpole9181 3y ago
  [flagged]
- floren 3y ago
  You can't downvote a story. You can flag stories, but I don't like to flag things. I don't want to flag this story -- I just think it's yet another entry in a million shallow, vague, pointless "hustle" lifestyle newsletters written by wannabe Thinkfluencers.
  - vinceguidry 3y ago
    Ah. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
ralferoo 3y ago
Also, one of the pictures in the article, and apparently "one of her more popular posts" is this: https://twitter.com/NicoleKelner/status/1589748415130664960 https://twitter.com/NicoleKelner/status/1589748415130664960 The claim is that using a two-stroke leaf blower for 30 minutes produces as many hydrocarbon emissions as driving a pick-up truck from Texas to Alaska. Clearly she has never actually thought about the logistics of this! The shortest route I could find on Google Maps was from Dumas, TX to Metlakatla, AK at around 2500 miles. I drive a car in the UK, but that would be probably 200L or more (or 100 gallons for US folk) and even more for a truck. There's no way that ANY leaf blower gets through 3 gallons of fuel a minute! In fact, google tells me that a typical leaf blower uses 0.43 gallons per hour. So driving a truck will use approximately 500 times as much. I'm concerned about climate change, but making completely ridiculous claims like this, even if they are pretty watercolours, isn't helping the cause - especially when it's immediately obvious that it's nonsense!

ericmcer 3y ago

These feel like recipes for failure because it doesn't acknowledge that most people lack the ability to: A. Earn enough to employ these strategies B. Succeed at their "passion" in a meaningful way. Here is a more realistic approach if you have a passion and don't know how to balance it with a more boring career choice: Figure out some way to dedicate a few months to it. You most likely don't have the talent or dedication to succeed. After a few months you will realize this and move on with your life having checked that box.

prepostertron 3y ago
I think the end result of your more realistic approach is the bivocational approach the author outlined in the article.
- caser 3y ago
  Yep -- this is where I tend to see people end up after doing a sabbatical. That, or they alternate between periods of highly paid work and periods bumming skydiving, making art, etc.
boredemployee 3y ago
I genuinely laughed at your comment. Here's someone who has lightly lived off their passion. First and foremost, look up the origin of the word "passion" if you're not familiar with it. You'll be surprised by its original meaning. Living off something you love and that lights up your eyes doesn’t take months, it takes years, many years. In the initial years, you have to fight against all possible forces, starting with your own imposter syndrome, the lack of money (if you’re not from a wealthy family), and then there’s the phase of convincing everyone around you who doesn’t believe in your "talent" - that is if you come from a culture that needs the validation of others to feel good. Besides that, you still have to deal with the sales and marketing part. It’s not enough to be talented, it’s not enough to do your job well, there are still many variables. All of this doesn’t get resolved in months (maybe very, very lucky people manage to turn their passion into success in months, but that should be less than 1% of the entire sample). Anyway, I could spend many hours talking about this topic that I experienced firsthand for 7 years and was forced to switch to the corporate world because of the pandemic.

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

if you have money, meaning is a quest if you don't have money, meaning is a question > "by making an honest living with part of our time, we can carve out another swath to do the work we really care about" i usually feel too burned out from work to even think about what else i might care about. sometimes it feels like nothing, i would be happy with hot water, a roof, warm bed and internet access. i don't want to be a consultant or entrepreneur or any of that.

iguanayou 3y ago

Where's the data behind that infographic about the leaf blower vs driving a pickup from Texas to Alaska?

gnabgib 3y ago
https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-car-vs-truck-vs-leaf-blower.html https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-... "Let's put that in perspective. To equal the hydrocarbon emissions of about a half-hour of yard work with this two-stroke leaf blower, you'd have to drive a Raptor for 3,887 miles, or the distance from Northern Texas to Anchorage, Alaska."

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

AlbertCory 3y ago

"Follow your passion" is the all-time stupidest advice. Most people don't have one, but when pressed they'll name something they sorta like. "Follow a career you don't hate" is more realistic.

emerongi 3y ago
The worst is when you have a passion that you love, but it turns into a job you hate.
thfuran 3y ago
And for a lot of people who do have a passion, turning it into the nine to five kind of ruins it. I think it's a pretty rare sort of person who can really love their job for a long time.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  What is worse is then once you have done your job. You have no left over energy for your own projects anymore. As you have basically consumed the energy you would for your own projects into the job. The only way it works is if you have a passion for something AND for doing it for someone else.
  - creer 3y ago
    Normally, this is the "toxic job" caveat. A career you don't hate, sure. But also a job that's not so toxic that you are exhausted at the end of the day. That's the theory of the day job: in many disciplines it's tough to get to the point where your discipline will comfortably support you. In the meantime there is nothing wrong with a day job. Just, a day job that's not toxic. So you can pursue your discipline the rest of the time.
90-00-09 3y ago
"Follow your passion" can be a valuable outlook on life. The overly broad interpretation of that is what many people find confusing. I think it's fair to say that most engineers have a passion for coding/engineering. Without it spending most of one's waking hours coding would be absolutely unsustainable. Finding passion in this context is about finding the right niche for your work, not switching your career to something else you would (potentially) enjoy, like playing video games. We need to acknowledge that not every hobby or interest is that mythical passion we should view as a career opportunity. Being an engineer doesn't define one's work: spending 2 years of your life on building a new ads format at Meta is technically the same profession as e.g. developing better models for predicting climate change, but the passion factor will be different for different people.

dmje 3y ago

The fact that it feels like it's written by an AI aside (because you know, someone obviously wanted to spend time on a beach instead) - there is an endless cadence to the "entrepreneur, money and life" article of which this is a part. What always strikes me is that these articles rarely mention a sort of quiet, middle way entrepreneur group - of which I consider myself a member. Like most of the people I know who work for themselves or have a little product or a freelance business, I'm not in the game to "100x" anything, I'm not funded, I'm not interested in million dollar deals, and I could give a monkeys about hockeystick growth. Instead I - and many / most of the people I know in this group - are just getting along. We've got a pretty good work / life balance. We get to look at the sea and do the occasional deal and sign some nice work up - we all pay for our mortgages and our families. We're doing business, we're doing entrepreneurship - and we're doing it pretty well without having to make these grand declarations about busting our balls until 35 and then retiring or working 4 hour weeks etc etc. We probably don't ever make any articles like this because it's not the WOO story that everyone wants to read of rabid success or astonishing failure. We're just here, doing what we do and having quite a nice time doing it.

haswell 3y ago
As someone mid-sabbatical with a plan to transition to something entirely self-run, it’s really good to read this comment. I’ve done the busting my balls in big tech thing and burned out hard, which made me realize I needed to make a serious change. But it’s pretty common to find content focused on exactly what you describe instead of the “I’m just doing what I need to do so I can pay bills and lead a happy life”. I want to build something successful, but not so successful that I’m back to burnout mode. Some people seem happier to burn themselves out for their own endeavor, but I just want to find a good balance between paying bills and enjoying life. I’ve been building out a series of blog posts talking about the sabbatical itself, and how I’ve spent my time, and just wanted to mention that I’d be one of the first readers if you or someone like you decided to write about their “middle way” experiences. I hope I can write about that eventually, but it’s all aspirational at this point.
thegrim33 3y ago
Well you obviously didn't read the article, as the article very explicitly covers an approach that is "[..] the choice to make income in a way that leaves time to pursue meaning outside of work in the form of art, hobbies, or side projects." How is that any different than what you just spent 4 paragraphs describing? It's incredibly ironic that you try to diss the article as sounding like it was written by an AI, when your comment reads as copy+paste echo chamber commentary on work ethics/money which isn't actually connected to the article you're supposedly commenting on.

38932ur98u 3y ago

Damn, I would have loved for this article to have any substance. As someone who has been doing consulting the last two years, these kinds of questions are always on my mind. And I have no good answers.

caser 3y ago
Hey, author of the post here. My takeaway after trying all these strategies is that there's no one right answer. All paths can work but also have failure states. If you want to talk, feel free to drop me a note - hi@nosmallplans.io. I spent 2 years doing consulting before shifting into other work, happy to share more specific thoughts / reflections offline.

iteratethis 3y ago

Statistically, I'm thinking the group being able to have "life changing money" in their thirties or forties is quite small. Likewise, making reliable income from a passion in the area of arts, music, is only for the few. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try, I'm just saying we need advise for the rest of us. If you're not in that 1% group that will make it big at a young age or can retire early, I propose the pseudo-retirement. I'm middle-aged and slowly but surely optimizing my expenses. Paying down the mortgage. Optimizing the energy use of our home. Going from 2 cars down to 1. Buying extremely durable goods. Cutting useless daily expenses. The idea is to bring expenses down to such a manageable level so that much less income is needed to keep everything going. Somewhere in the age range of 50-60, we pseudo-retire. We switch to a simple job nearby. We're in our forties and could already make it on 2 minimum wage jobs right now. We still have a lot of room to cost optimize and if we really stretch it, 1.5 minimum wage jobs in 5 years is on the table, as well as 1 minimum wage job in 10 years. Quite likely we'll go for 2 x 3-4 days/week jobs, but even 2 x full-time would be fine. The main motivation for this strategy is the very high retirement age (about 70-71) by the time we get there but also to get out of our demanding, stressful jobs. They're frying our brains and sanity.

tomcar288 3y ago

When you build a business that makes money, you need to create value for someone. It can be anyone really: your neighbor down the street, people in another zip code or country, a demographic all over the world, etc. There's just one person in the entire world for which you can NOT create value for: yourself. No one will pay you to create value for yourself. This is the essential difference between work and play. Work is creating value for others. Play is creating value for yourself. Money and "Meaning" are far more mutually exclusive than people realize. the fastest way to make something UNfun is to get paid for it. Just try this experiment: imagine anything you want to do for fun, then realistically imagine what it's like to get paid for it. If you're really honest with yourself and understand the equivalent job, you'll see that it becomes quickly unfun the moment you get paid.

claudiulodro 3y ago
This is a really interesting and clever way of thinking about it, and I think you've hit the nail on the head! I'm bookmarking this comment. I've tried to start a bunch of businesses and side projects over the years in that intersection of money and meaning, and in retrospect that's been a big reason they haven't been successful: I created something with value for myself and then tried to find other people that would also get value from it. That's much more difficult, marketing-focused, and roundabout than just doing something that I know creates value directly and trying to find meaning in that.