Tag / money

by Nathan Coumbe

Profit vs. service

You have a really good idea, an idea that people will love, that will make a difference, that will make things better. In fact, the little voice in your head continues to tell you, “This might work.” But you continue to hesitate; you still haven’t shipped. Why not?

Money.

It always come back to money…but I don’t mean money in the way you’re thinking.

You might be a freelancer, a musician, a writer, or a budding entrepreneur: you want to improve the world, and you need to eat. Essentially, you are wrestling with two competing ideas: “Will this make me money?” vs. “Will this help people?”

If you live and work by the former question, you will make very little progress. There is no way for you to know if your endeavor will generate revenue, which means you will probably wait until you are sure it will work before you act. But if you can’t be sure (and you can’t), you won’t act.

Around and around it goes.

If you are searching for “yes” to the money question, you will feel fear every time you create a new video or go to click on the checkout button of a webhosting platform. You’ll be terrified every time you pick up the phone to make a sales call or approach a new customer in a store.

If you are worried about the profit, you revert to a scarcity mindset:

“I don’t know that this article will make money, so I probably shouldn’t post it.”

“Someone else is already doing something similar; I won’t be different enough to standout and earn an income.”

“What if I spent a little money to make this happen, but I never earn it back? I’ll have wasted it!”

Is that true? What if you didn’t make any money back, but you helped someone by spending it? You gave a gift; it was charity.

You do need to eat, which might mean you need a job while you seek to serve other people. If you work to answer the question, “Will this help people?” you will find that your ideas come naturally. They will be much easier to send out into the world: you won’t hesitate, because there is much less riding on the outcome.

In fact, the outcome is practically harmless. You either end up right where you started, or you make change happen. If you only help one person, then the answer to the question is a resounding “YES!”

I think the secret is faith and the right mindset. The right mindset is seeking to help people because you want to help them, not because you want to profit from them. Ironically, if you help enough people, you will be much closer to turning a profit than the fool who is focused on it.

Seth Godin says it all the time: “Ideas that spread, win.” They do. Helping others spreads, which means it wins. If you help people, they will know who you are. If they know who you are, they will come to you for more help. They will probably tell their friends about you as well. Soon you have an audience, people who trust you because you sought to help them, not profit from them. When people trust you, you win.

Live a life of abundance and give, give, give. Have faith that if you help enough people, the money will come.

And if it never does?

Well…you still helped a lot of people.

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by Nathan Coumbe

Money matters

Money is important, whether we wish it to be or not. The keyword here is money.

Your credit score is not money – you cannot buy an amazing, limited-time offer with your credit score. You cannot use your credit score to buy a life-changing course that will help you make more money than you dreamed possible. You need money to do these things.

You need money to be able to improve yourself, your skills, your position; you need it to create, to thrive, to lower the demand your art places on your head.

Creatives, artists, writers, musicians – we, more than anyone else, need to realize the importance of money in our lives. It allows to create more art; it allows us to pay the bills so that we can create more art; it allows us to eat SO THAT WE CAN CREATE MORE ART.

Get money, not an 850 FICO score. We’ve been brainwashed that a credit score is an indicator of wealth, but it isn’t. All a credit score measures is how much interest you’ve paid to banks, how long you’ve been paying them, and how many different types debt you’ve had.

Do you know what a real measure of wealth is?

MONEY!

Money, investments, property, assets – these have been the measures of wealth for centuries now. It’s only been in the last half decade that companies decided to collect a bunch of random information about you and sell it to banks, so that the banks can make huge sums of money off of your ignorance.

Here’s another idea: how many of you have had your personal information compromised and stolen simply because credit bureaus exist? If you are reading this blog right now, if you are breathing, there is a greater than 50% chance that your personal data has been stolen by someone.

BREAK THE CYCLE. Quit thinking that a credit score means something good for anyone but banks. Money matters; wealth matters.

I’ll say this one more time: go make money so that you can create more art.

by Nathan Coumbe

Your time or your money?

40 hours is a lot of time, and this doesn’t even include the time spent getting to and from work; on a good day, it takes me 30 minutes one way to get there – on a bad day, more than an hour.

How much of that 40-hour block is spent actually producing work or making a profit for your company? How much of it is spent staring at a clock?

At what point does making more money become less valuable than having more time?

Can you be satisfied, temporarily, by only making enough to get by while you create and ship something that truly matters to the world?

by Nathan Coumbe

Debt is killing your creativity

Are you a Creative?

Do you make something for the rest of the world to read, see, hear, or consume? Are you an artist, a musician, an actor, a writer, a blogger, photographer, videographer?

It doesn’t matter what your “art” is – you are a Creative.

I have four words to say to all of my fellow Creatives out there:

GET. OUT. OF. DEBT.

It doesn’t matter if you have a little debt or a lot – it is killing you. It’s a weight holding you down, preventing you from giving your best to the world – and we need your best.

How many of you went to college and racked up a massive amount of student loan debt to complete a degree in the arts? I did. By the time I finished my sophomore year of college, I had racked up $25,000 in student loan debt. Ironically, I was working so much as a freelance musician, teacher, and retail associate that, along with my partial scholarships, I could have paid the other half of my tuition out-of-pocket and keep my living expenses paid (as a matter of fact, when I “woke up” in my junior year, that’s actually what I managed to do, but the damage was already done).

Did you put your instrument, your camera, your computer, or maybe even your art supplies on a credit card? Did you borrow money for a car? I did – two cars, actually, and the first one was somewhere near 30% interest!

It may feel normal, but debt is preventing you from making your greatest contributions to the rest of the world.

Debt is making your career decisions for you.

You didn’t make a bad decision by studying your art or your craft – you simply made a bad decision with money.

How many of you took an 8-5 job after you finished your degree because you had to pay the bills? What opportunities have you turned down over the years because you had the weight of your debts hanging around your neck? How many of you have quit your art because you have to spend so much time making money at a “real job” instead of creating?

What would you do differently today if the obligations of paying the minimum payments to which you are so accustomed weren’t around anymore? Would you move to a new city? Take a more enjoyable job? Would you quit the 8-5 grind? Would you start creating again?

Debt sucks.

Debt may be normal in our society today, but I don’t care. I know from personal experience how damaging it is to our creativity. Make the decision today – declare debt to be the enemy of your art.

“How can I possibly live without debt?”

A year and a half ago, my wife and I made the decision to declare debt as the enemy of our art. Since then, we’ve gotten on a budget, told our money where to go, and paid off nearly $30,000 in student loan, consumer, and car debt. We are on a plan to be totally debt free within two more years.

No, we don’t make six figures. No, we don’t live rent-free with relatives. We simply have sacrificed, planned, and made the decision to change. We still have fun, even on a budget; we still eat awesome food every now and then. But we have decided to make our own decisions about what we want to do in life, not let the crushing weight of our debts make those decisions for us. It can be done; we are living proof.

The world needs your creativity. We need your art, your words, your music, your voice. Please don’t let debt stifle it anymore.

P.S.

If you want to know how we have been so successful in throwing off the yoke of debt, please feel free to reach out to me here on my blog or at any of the social media sites listed on the home page. I have a lot of resources I’d love to share with you, as well as some awesome people you should listen to. It would be my pleasure to talk to you.

We are big fans of the Dave Ramsey Baby Steps as a roadmap for getting out of debt and building wealth, as well as his company’s EveryDollar budgeting app for keeping track of your money and telling it where to go.

by Nathan Coumbe

What would you do all day?

If you had all the money in the world, or if money was not an issue, what would do all day?

Cats on stacks on stacks!

In the search for a meaningful career, most everyone has been asked the question, “What would you do if money was not a factor in your decision?” I have been wrestling with that question ever since I had to declare a major in college. 

For the past year, I have been struggling not to define a career, but to understand my vocation, my calling in life. This question was one I asked of myself over and over again, with rather disappointing results. The answers are always the same: read books, learn new skills such as jiu-jitsu or computer programming, study history, play music, increase my education, spend time exercising…countless other hobbies and passions could be added to this list, so I will not bore you with them. The problem I have with that question is that money is a factor in this sort of decision, so I have never really been able to take money out of the equation. 

This idea took on new life for me when somebody added a twist to the question. A friend of mine named Lindsey Strahan, who is a fantastic artist and up-and-coming graphic designer, had this same discussion with me. However, she added something to the question: if money was not an issue, what would you do all day long to help other people? The moment that she asked the question a switch flipped in my brain. 

Serving other people is what a person does with his or her calling; we cannot work or exist in a vacuum without others. We live in an interdependent world, to take a word from Dr. Stephen R. Covey and his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Therefore, our callings, and by extension our careers and jobs, must serve other people in some way. I am not saying that we must all be involved in customer service, but to be viable in the market, our ideas and passions must help another person. 

With that in mind, I started brainstorming about what I would do all day. I realized that while on the surface all of the ideas I listed above seemed unrelated, they had a common thread weaving through them: I would spend all day learning and researching new things, new ideas, and new passions. My DISC personality profile, my StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment, and every other aptitude or personality test I had ever taken all become much clearer. I already knew my strengths, and I have always known my passions, and so I had a clearer answer than I had ever had before: I am called to be a fountain of knowledge for other people. 

This simple statement could be satisfied by so many different careers – I could be a teacher, a professor, a researcher, a librarian, an information broker, a consultant for people who need to learn how to combine this skill with that area…the possibilities are seemingly endless. There is no need to be tied down by a specific job title or role. I now know “who I want to be” instead of “what I want to be,” an idea presented to me in Dan Miller’s 48 Days to the Work You Love. Now I can make decisions on how I will make money based on my newly refined idea of my own vocation.

I hope that my struggle to answer this seemingly easy question will help others to find their vocation. So I will pose the same question to you, the reader: if money were not an issue, what would you spend your time doing to help other people? Think on that, write it down, and please feel free to let me know. I would love to hear what you’re called to do in this world. 

Until next time, keep digging!

P.S. If you would like more help finding your calling, I highly recommend Dan Miller’s book 48 Days to the Work You Love as further reading. One of my college professors referred it to me, and it has radically changed my life! It’s one of the best things I have ever purchased. Also, I really encourage all of you to follow Lindsey Strahan on Instagram @very.lindsey. She is a great artist and a wonderful friend. You will love her work!