What Does Your Paycheck Buy?
I was out for a leisurely bike ride with my kids. We cycled through the neighborhood and some nearby woods and cut up a familiar alley, behind the shops and businesses of our town center on the way home. From behind, my son called out for me to wait. I turned around to see that he had stopped to pick something up. He held up a piece of paper and said, "Look what I found."
As I reached him I could see it was a stiff new ten-dollar bill. "Wow," I said,"it's your lucky day." He started to pocket it and then his eyes grew wide as he looked past me toward some bushes on the side of the alley. He dropped his bike and walked over to retrieve an additional five-dollar bill. We started looking around in case there were more notes and our eyes simultaneously locked on three twenty-dollar bills skitting across the pavement in the breeze.
My daughter had caught up by this point and just as we all were beginning to scramble to retrieve the cash my alarm bells went off. My attention was drawn to a nearby industrial dumpster. There in a heap at its base was a dozen stacks of twenty and fifty-dollars bills in thick packets, except they were covered with red ink.
The ink was from one of the exploding dye packs that banks use to mark stolen money. A plain-clothes police officer came around the corner just at that moment to confirm the obvious. We had just arrived at the scene of a bank robbery and had gotten all excited collecting money that had been jettisoned by a fleeing thief and was now marked as illegal tender.
The last year has been unusually soft for the meeting industry, to put it mildly. I had passing thoughts about switching professions last year, but after briefly considering some options it became clear to me that shifting my focus away from what I love to do would be a grave error. There is nothing on earth that satisfies me more than facilitating laughter, connecting with an audience and inspiring others to excel in their lives.
The money we earn from doing things we don't enjoy or don't believe in is kind of like marked money. While it may cover our rent, which is important, its purchasing power doesn't extend to our fulfillment, that sense of rightness that comes from deeply connecting to our livelihood and transmitting joy to others as we perform our job.
So instead of looking for another occupation last year, when I had holes in my schedule I spent the time preparing new material, writing a book about my adventures as a performer over the last thirty years and upgrading what I have to offer as a meeting presenter. As business owners are now realizing that human gatherings an essential component of commerce, I'm more prepared than ever to add value to such an event and customize my material to suit whatever may be its focus.
Do What You Love
Quotable
"For safety's sake, I try not to go to the ATM at night. I also try not to go with my four-year-old who screams, "We've got money! We've got money!"
Paul Clay
Book Review
I highly recommend "The Soul of Money" by Lynne Twist. An inspiring call to look at our relationship to money from a whole new perspective and use it to serve our highest aspirations instead of being run by a conversation of scarcity.
Rick Lewis has been entertaining and inspiring audiences for the last 30 years. The success of The World's Funniest Waiter over the years is based on clean, interactive comedy and high-level circus skills.
