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by Silhouette 5634 days ago
> I'm glad I'm striving for the happiest life, rather than the most money.

I've found so far that, at least in my professional career, one of these often implies the other. It just happens that the implication is the "wrong" way around in my case. :-)

For example, moving to jobs with better working conditions and/or more interesting projects, leaving full-time work for the freedom of independent contracting, and ultimately forming my own company to build things that I hope others will enjoy or benefit from, are all moves I've made primarily for reasons other than money, but all tend to increase the money coming in as well.

I suppose I prefer to do worthwhile things with my working hours, but worthwhile things by their nature also tend to be better rewarded in a business environment.

(Edit: As a curious aside, my total amount of money coming in has actually decreased quite significantly in the past few years since I left full-time employment, but that is because while I have been earning higher rates per hour, I can now choose to spend fewer hours on the everyday pays-the-bills stuff in order to invest time in the newer ideas with better long-term potential for interesting work and/or high profitability. It had not even occurred to me before writing this post, but at some point I have stopped judging my financial position by the bottom line, and started judging it by the rate of income from different endeavours multiplied by the time I expect to spend on each of them in the future, with a footnote that the things I am doing right now still need to be above the threshold for paying the bills etc.)

1 comments

I think this is most likely going to be true - especially for us in the tech industry. Rather than being the "wrong" way around, I think you've got it the right way and everyone explicitly chasing money has it the wrong way. :)
Money is a side-effect of great ideas (at least in this industry) :)