At least as early as 2012, Seth Godin was able to claim that the biggest chasm in pricing is between $0.00 and $0.01.
Until you start charging, it’s really hard to know what your work is worth (in the market).
Once you’re able to make the leap from giving everything away to charging for some of it, you can start to experience your own price story.
And, once you’re there, it’s much easier to align your price story with your money story — and your values.
Re-reading my notes from the On Being Gathering last Presidents Day weekend, I came across the following line from the poet David Whyte:
“Go beyond yourself. Be more generous than you thought you could be.”
Virtually every source I trust on this insists that value-creation is the only worthwhile (or ethical) focus if you want to make money.
Steve Pressfield says we have the right to our work, but not to the results. Seth Godin says to charge a lot (a topic for another time) — and be worth more than you charge. Mark McGuinness and Naomi Dunford each talk about plussing (or even doubling) the distinctively valuable parts of our work.
This isn’t a shortcut. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s also not inconsistent with the idea of working for free only as an intentional investment.
Rather, it’s a choice to fly without a net, to trust that generous work that matters will be noticed and richly rewarded — sometimes even with money.
It’s internship season again: people are proudly announcing what they’ve lined up for the summer, or starting to really scramble to get something set up.
Unpaid internships are such a part of the culture now, and there’s (rightfully) plenty of debate as to whether that’s healthy or not.
The trick is that there’s a fine line between an investment in future opportunities versus indentured servitude. And it really pays to know the difference — in the short run and the long.
If you’ve got an opportunity to be a linchpin, it might be appropriate to intentionally work for free for a short time. (And, of course, it’s worth showing up as a linchpin in any role — especially if you’re not yet getting paid, but wish to.)
If it doesn’t look like there’s a realistic shot at becoming a (paid) linchpin anytime soon, however, it might be worth asking some tougher questions about whether it’s worth doing, or whether your talents might be better invested — and invested in — somewhere else.
The internship industrial complex runs in large part on the assumption that there’s no other way. Could we start turning a different ratchet instead — one that rewards organizations that offer great work (and fair compensation), as well as people who show up and do great work (even if only for a short while)?
When was the last time more stuff was the solution?
Way too much of our economy is dedicated to making more junk, and way too much of our culture is dedicated to making us want to buy it.
This isn’t utopia. We’ll always be making and buying things.
The question is whether they’re the right ones.
This question is at the heart of any money story.
It tends to be especially sharp when you’re just starting out: “If only I could make some money, I’d be OK.”
But, once money starts happening, you pretty quickly confront the question of how much it will take to feel OK now: you used to worry about buying food; now, you’re trying to go to the right restaurants.
Pricing isn’t easy for anybody. But Seth Godin provides a good guiding principle when he says to “charge a lot and be worth more than you charge.” After all, if it’s true — as he also says — that price is a story, you can create a story about delivering magic even if it costs a lot of money.
“Enough” sits at the intersection of what you charge and what you’re worth. Once they start charging, some people get obsessed with charging a lot — just because they can. “This is what the market will bear,” they say. Or maybe “This is a measure of the value I’ve created in the world.”
Other people are focused on being worth more than they charge — sometimes to their own disadvantage. The graduate student on his umpteenth unpaid internship with no job prospect in sight. The do-gooder with student debt working for pennies with a nonprofit.
It’s easy to poke fun at the first group, and I’d agree that they’re often in the wrong — or at least adopting a posture I don’t condone. But the second group is tricky. They — and their good intentions — are often hidden in plain sight. The question is, is it better? Is it right?
Everyone has to confront the question of “enough” at some point. It’s better to do it early and often. Otherwise you might never have enough.
Industrialism scales sameness: once we’ve figured out how to make a tomato that can take the rigors of growth and transport, we devote an entire town to producing as many of them as possible. Then we trust that their sheer ubiquity will teach people that that product is what tomatoes are supposed to be like. Taste and nutrition are secondary concerns in this mode — if they come up at all.
Agrarian scaling starts with the specific and builds toward influence — not replication — across contexts. It’s the answer to a different question: “How do we teach people what tomatoes are supposed to taste like and make them available only when they taste like that?”, rather than “How can we make it possible for anyone, anywhere to buy something called a tomato at any time?”
If you’re trying to make a difference, you need to know and decide which kind of tomatoes you’re producing, and why.
Capitalism means the greatest rewards go to owners.
If your concept of owner-capitalism is rooted in the image of the robber barons of the previous Gilded Age, it’s worth taking a look around at how ownership looks and is rewarded in the connection economy.
Internet giants own enormous (and enormously valuable) tangible and intangible assets ranging from search engines to our attention. The fact that we sometimes don’t have to pay for them might obscure the dynamic a little bit (you expect to see a robber baron actually making and handling money), but it hardly obviates the business model.
What’s perhaps even harder to see are the assets each of us own (or sometimes rent) and how they’re rewarded. Many of these are intangible, like college degrees. Others are only semi-tangible, like our emotional labor. (If you’re coaching someone, you yourself are the asset. The challenge, as most coaches learn sooner rather than later, is that you can only earn money from that asset when you “rent” yourself.) And some are rented (like this WordPress site.)
A few questions follow:
Ain’t no money in poetry
That’s what sets the poet free
I’ve had all the freedom I can stand.
— Guy Clark, “Cold Dog Soup”
***
Part of my own fear and anxiety around money is rooted in the idea (perhaps misguided, perhaps not) that managing money and participating in markets implies culpability for an often flawed system.
But another, perhaps deeper, part of it has to do with the idea of trading freedom for money. If, as they say, it’s called “compensation” for a reason, in what ways am I beholden to my sources of income — and how beholden am I comfortable being?
(NB: It’s possible to trade money for freedom or time, of course — you can hire a driver, a babysitter, a chef, an assistant, or even a vacuum cleaner. I just haven’t gotten to a point in life yet where I’ve been able to make big trades in that direction.)
With a little experience and some reflection, it seems that a feeling of independence and some level of intentionality are touchstones in my relationship with money. I never want to feel totally beholden (and I’d like more independence over time), and I prefer to earn, invest, and spend money with intention.
One of the easiest ways to do both of these is to start small. Even this daily blog is in some way a daily act of freedom (and I intentionally do it for free); meanwhile, with the money I do have, I’ve tried to manage progressively more of it on my own, and to allocate more and more of it in ways that strike the best balance I can see between shoring up my own foundations and doing the least harm to others who might be related to me by money.
The challenge, of course, is that the perfect “freedom” of having no money does not feel very free. Some amount of attention and intention is required to achieve sufficiency and independence in the world of money and things.
For a long time, I lived more or less in ignorance of all things financial.
Of course that had a lot to do with fear — the world of finance seemed big, opaque, and most of all complex. And therefore it was easier (in the short term, anyway) to simply bury my head in the sand.
Part of the fear, though, had to do with something other than confronting complexity. It was the intuition that money decisions are on some level moral decisions — and so the more I knew, the more culpable I might be.
In time, I came to see that there is such a thing as culpable ignorance, too. I’m using money (and it’s being earned, spent, and invested on my behalf) in the market as it exists.
The morals seem to be at least two: first, what I didn’t (and don’t) know about money can hurt. I’ve foregone a lot of potential earnings by failure to get a clue. Second, non-action does not confer blamelessness. Maintaining an unsophisticated relationship with money and markets wasn’t changing anyone or anything for the better.
From those two insights, I decided first to try to learn something about how money works in general and how my money works in particular, and then to ensure that I was making intentional decisions with the money I control.
I still don’t know much — and much of what I do know is uncomfortable — but I have found it easier to deal with the moral questions of money with a little knowledge and a little more control.
Start with Beth and the tacos, followed by the conversation in the car
The idea of a money story came in handy for me on a road trip last summer.
My friend and I stopped for lunch in Napa and ordered a fish taco at the upscale market downtown. We discovered with a bump that each order consisted of a single taco, for which $8 felt a little steep. One thing led to another, and we had the seeds of our first little conflict of the trip.
Of course it wasn’t really about the money: $8 — or even $16 — was a pretty small sum in the context of a month-long trip. Instead, it was really a clash of stories and values. Was an $8 taco a vacation indulgence or a “bougie” affront to good sense that couldn’t be justified even in context?
A day and a half later, we began the next big stretch of driving, and a few hours of relatively desolate Nevada landscape presented the perfect opportunity to open a conversation about our money stories.
We probably spent 200 miles trading stories about our experiences and memories of growing up, noting the similarities and differences, and gaining new appreciation for parts of ourselves and each other that we had never really dealt with directly in a decade of friendship.
Money stories are complex and often taboo, but they are always at play in our interactions with ourselves, others, and the choices we face ($8 taco, anyone?). It might not be easy, but asking someone about their money story can be quite revealing and — done right — enriching for both of you.
Next time the universe offers you an $8 taco, what might you learn about yourself and the people you care about?
Colin Steele 