How to enjoy yourself in the pursuit of money

Achieving goals in the competitive money arena has its rewards—but we may be losing the point

One of the more popular buzzwords in practice, if not in verbal usage, is “management by objective”. Originally used by the military to ensure that its large organization toe’d the line, businesses and the harassed everydayman have latched onto the nifty utility of this concept. When we’re stuck in an endless list of to-do things all competing for attention and time, a goal provides the benefit of helping us cut through the morass and focus our energies and efforts on something specific. A goal achieved, no matter how small, gives us the tangible satisfaction of being able to complete something. This feeds our self-esteem and makes our efforts seem worthwhile.

The trouble comes when we measure our achievements against our financial status. In an object-driven driven world, money is easily, by default, the universal measure of how effectively we have met our goals. As a friend of mine loves to quote to remind himself, “If you’re that good, why ain’t you rich?”. A laser focus on just achieving a desired result in terms of monetary gains, however, can have its drawbacks. We may lose the point altogether.

Although research on happiness and the quality of life consistently tells us that it’s not the amount of money we have but it’s the quality of relationships in our lives that count, we still occasionally find ourselves suffering from self-doubt, specially when we look at our bank accounts. How can we achieve and enjoy financial gains without beating ourselves to a pulp and diminishing our self-worth in the process?

Be committed, not attached. Reflecting on her life, Liz Murray, a homeless child of drug-addict parents, who saw herself through high school in two years and blazed her way to Harvard on full scholarship and eventually, media popularity and an international speaking career, made a distinction between attachment and commitment. “Attachment holds us in place in life,” she says. “People are losing their jobs and houses, and there’s an underlying fear that when we lose the things we believe

make us who we are, we’re not a human being anymore. But I know you can lose a lot of things and still have yourself. You’re breathing, standing and still have a pulse. A certain courage comes with that. When I lost attachment to everything, I said, I have a blank slate. Life can be anything I want it to be. “Attachment to achieving a specific financial outcome puts our selfworth in the chopping block. We tend to look outward more for cues on how well we’re doing – when our targets slide, our self-worth does, too.

Commitment, on the other hand, is believing in yourself to achieve something. It’s doing away with the “ifthen” mentality, i.e. “If I have more cash, I can get into business.” Or “If I have more time, I can go for further schooling.” Murray says, “We do that when there’s no real commitment. We’re saying, “I’m committed...unless.’” In her case, her commitment to finish high school made studying in someone’s quiet building hallway an easy and viable option.

Commitment is our internal cheerleader that believes in our abilities and eggs us on to stay on our path, regardless what happens. With commitment, you do not invalidate yourself, instead you can recognize areas of growth as something you have to work it to achieve something. Also, circumstances are seen for what they are – temporary situations. You are still intact and committed–and that’s all you need to ride through the temporary drawback.

Enjoy the process. In my investment lectures, I come across people who declare that once they have learned the science and art of investing, they will start. In investing, as in all else, every incremental part of the process counts. Wisdom accretes. You cannot swallow the ocean in one big gulp. Better that you do baby steps–learn some, do some–and lose yourself in whatever stage of the process you’re in. It can actually take you to that elusive characteristic of adult work–fun!

When a financial target or a specific material level of success is the only overriding thing, we tune out on the present. It’s like holding your breath until you get to the finish line. Nothing matters along the way until the ribbon comes into our field of vision. This perspective is insidious–we stop enjoying what we’re doing in the process of trying to get ourselves to our target.

We’ve experienced and heard about how when we finally achieve a material target, we realize it’s not as fun as its cut out to be. The material outcome just doesn’t live up to the full extent of what we thought our satisfaction level would be. This is because the process is the fun part, the achieved result is the icing on the cake.

Take time, therefore, to celebrate your efforts as you do the incremental steps. It feeds the cycle and gives you the necessary time- out to relax, recoup your energies, learn from errors before they grow, and appreciate what you have done. If you hold out the celebration in the end, essentially you’ll probably be too tired to care and would have missed the point.

In the end, there are only people.

In the pursuit of profit, financial markets, industries and offices have taken on the cloak of machine-like efficiency. Success extols the modern-age machine image: sleek, working, useful. By buying into these, we miss the nature of life–rich and varied, quirky, nonlinear, cyclical, variable– fully embodied in human beings.

When you come down to it, only people drive the wheel. Sure, the climate is changing and acts of God wreak havoc to well-laid plans. But people determine what they take out of every situation and decide on the plan of action. Financial markets crash because of human actions. A recession can be reversed or modified when significant collective human action - e.g. government interceding, investors gaining confidence, consumers increasing their spending - happens. A business succeeds because of the entrepreneur and the organization behind it.

By keeping in mind that only people matter, we nail the crux of the matter in our pursuit of money and profit. In investing in stocks, we pay attention on who are running the companies and discern if these people will help you achieve our financial target. At the workplace, we look at our boss, peers and subordinates as the unique individuals as they are, making our social and professional working relationships more effective, which pave the way for our professional success. In our business, we understand that we will only attain our profit objectives only as far as our ability to understand our organization’s needs.

Not all gurus, experts and teachers are the same–each one has a distinct take to things and we can learn a bit from all of them to sharpen ourselves the way we want. Life is growth and people provide the best avenue for it.

In the end, financial success provide the means to enjoy the physical world and to spread that joy around. But if we solely focus our being and energies in the pursuit of profit, we might miss an important point – that life is rich and multi-dimensional and is meant to be celebrated, not to be worked to death.