Don't do it for money

Do it and they will ruin your life. Don’t, and they will make it easier.

I spent my entire career path doing something because I wanted to earn money by doing it. But doing that cost me months in the hospital, unuseful stress situations and doubts all the time.

I don’t want to give you generic advice here, but hear me out and at the end of this article you’ll understand my point of view.

First of all, money is cool

Look, I’m not a person against money or riches, it is totally the opposite of that. I believe money is great to have. When you have money, you can solve most of the problems in life and all the money problems.

Free to pay the bills, buy the new phones and cars, go out for dinner, etc. You name it.

But there is a hidden game that you are playing when you are looking for money that people do not tell you about.

The chasing game is a sick money game.

I’ll tell you more.

A little bit of background

After finishing school, I decided I wanted to study marketing, so one path was going to university and taking a degree in marketing and communications.

I did, or at least I’ve tried that path for the first year. Then I dropped out because I saw it was very slow to learn the way you should be learning marketing in the last 10 years.

They were teaching me traditional marketing, instead of digital.

So I dropped out and started to look for alternatives.

At the end, I opted for a master in Digital Marketing online. It was cool, but not enough. I wanted to do something practical during the studies, not just study.

So there I was thinking about what I could do to create a deeper knowledge of what I was studying. At that time, my passion was technology, especially smartphones. I was crazy about it, every new piece of tech, software, etc. So I ended up opening a blog about it.

I wanted to combine what I was studying with what I really liked.

At the beginning it was hard. I had to understand how to put out the thing on a blog, how to write, how to open an instagram account for a page, really a lot. But it was fun, I wasn’t feeling it.

I was creating this with passion, I wanted to learn.

I wasn’t thinking at all, how can I monetize this and be a millionaire? And because of that, and continuing to write and publish about the latest news in tech, the blog started to have a following, and google was starting to recognize it as a trustworthy source. I was really happy with what I was building and proud of it. People that were following me could see it.

Thanks to that blog, I started to have a team of editors working for me for nothing. At the age of 20, I was coordinating a team of 7 people. To be clear, I was paying them at all (on the other side I wasn’t even earning - I was doing that for passion).

The blog made me land, in the course of the years, 2 jobs. The first in e-commerce and the second in an AI startup. Without me applying for anything, just because I was able to attract attention thanks to it.

Fast forward, I messed up

Moving fast forward a few years, I started to feel the necessity of opening something of mine, not that the blog wasn’t, but it wasn’t making me earn anything, or at least at that time I couldn’t think of anything to monetize from that blog.

(even if I opened a community on AI, but that story is for another time).

So I started to look for ways I could make money fast.

I wanted to create something people would pay me for, I wanted to be a successful entrepreneur. At the time, I was in love (I still am) with augmented reality, I was learning how to build experiences, so I decided to monetize that.

The first attempt was building a marketplace. Like amazon but where you could actually buy directly after you were looking at the objects in your house or other space where you could point your camera and preview before buying. I think that was an amazing idea, but I was going to compete in a very hard market with no money to fund this thing.

So after developing an alpha version of the app for 6 months, I decided - because I needed money fast - to offer e-commerce to implement augmented reality solutions.

Oh man, that was probably one of the worst ideas I had.

E-commerce didn’t care about it. They didn’t know this technology could actually help them. So for 2 years I tried and tried but failed every time to sell this service without even having success in it. Only one free trial that didn’t convert at all.

The shift

After those 2 years and something, I started to offer adjacent services in the 3D space, offering 3D configurators because I see that those were paying my bills. I never wanted to go for it, but if this thing was giving money, why not offer it, right?

Why not become an expert in it and take the money that people are willing to pay you for?

So I did this for 2 years. I offered 3D configurators, but inside of me, every time I was creating them for clients, I was feeling that they weren’t my path, even if the money were good. I continued. I started to chase more and more because I wanted more money. But at the end, I ended up being tired from what I was doing.

I started to struggle and stress about it.

Then one day I come to a realization.

Everything I started, I started because I WANTED money.

So I questioned myself and started to wonder, “What if I adopt a mentality of fuck you money?”

(For context, the year before that I started to study how the mind and the metaphysical world works, but hey, also this is a story for another day.)

There is where it shifted.

I started doing something that I actually wanted to do for real, knowing that if I did it, money would come to me.

And that is true today.

I started to write and create again on my own without AI helping me in the creative part, and suddenly (but for real), the next day, a paid collaboration request for one of my videos came. Some job positions I applied for started to want me for an interview, and other things are coming their way.

So now every day I spend in front of the computer, or for me, I just know money will come.

I should have listened and brought this advice that a friend of mine told me 10 years ago:

Money is a consequence of what you do.

And I found this real for the principle of “cause and effect”. You cannot change an effect (money) by changing an effect. You need to change the cause.

Conclusion

You know, I’m not saying to believe me and to actually listen to me. In the end, it is mostly a thing of belief and consciousness.

I also think sometimes we have to do things that we don’t want to do to reach things we want.

As far as we know, that thing we are doing is just a bridge, and we are not lying to ourselves. I believe that every one of us will reach what it wants.

But my shift is real, and I strongly advise trying it, even if it’s hard.

What I see is that the richest and wealthiest people solve a problem they care about or they like to solve, and then money follows them.

This is my perspective, writing from my journey.

If you arrived at this point, know that I really appreciate you reading this. Thanks.

Antonio.