Chad Silverstein argues that defining what "enough" means is the first step to a meaningful life. He traces his own salary growth and early business struggles to show that more money didn't automatically make things better, and warns against chasing wealth as the goal instead of the work itself.
Chapters
So let this day and my melody line be a productive action for you to take on. To get really clear on an entire section in your worldview about what you believe about money. There is nothing more important than having a very clear, laser focused belief system around money and how it shows up and how it plays itself out in your life. Your chase for it, your desire for it, what you want to do with it, the good, the bad, and you know, all, everything in between. Get clear on all those statements and for what it's worth, just sharing my view. Mine's pretty simple and that is that you either have enough or you don't. The number for me is not as important as either having enough that I can do the things that I want to do in my life, or not having enough to be able to have the freedom and the security that I feel like I need to have. And for me that's worked and served really well that I've never chased money, I never, I always started with the why and started with my purpose. Purpose before profit. It's always served me well. And I think again, it's part of my belief system that I believe that the money is the result of putting out good work and providing value to people. And chasing money just for me doesn't make any sense. And I know that as I think back when I started out of college, I was making 40,000. I started off making $10 an hour. I graduated and my first salary was $40,000. And I remember watching my salary over the course of couple decades from 40 to 60 to 80 to 100. And I remember seeing a climb. And the thing is, is that you start to spend a little bit more when you have it. And that means you need to make more in order to maintain the lifestyle that you have. So you, you make 100, you're going to want to make 200, you make 200, you want to make 400, 400, 800. It, it is a non stop reality. And if you're a young professional, you just have to try to trust me on that. It's important to be able to have financial security. For sure. It's great to be able to have money to do things that you love to do. Yes. But chasing money and making decisions based on that aim is not worth it. And if you end up making the amount of money that you want to make and you're not happy with what you do, it's not going to last long, you're going to be miserable. You gotta love what you do. It's the labor of Love. It's the opus. And doesn't mean it's always gonna be great. And it doesn't mean it's gonna be easy. And it doesn't mean that there's not gonna be times where you don't like it. I used to get sued all the time from a collection at my collection agency. Cause people found things on their credit report. I didn't love that. It came with the territory of the job I was in and I had dealt with it. But there was more love. There were more things that I had that did make me feel great about what I was doing every single day. And the money was the result. And that came for me after four years of running the business because we didn't make money when we first started it. And just, just the gig. You got to know what you believe about money. Get clear on what it is about purpose, where your priorities are. There's no right or wrong answer. I'm just telling you my, my, my take on it, what I've experienced. You got to figure out what it means to you and, and then question and challenge yourself if you're chasing it hardcore and look back, measure backwards and see where you came from and how much you were making. And as you made more money, did your life change or sometimes it gets harder. More money, more problems and sometimes bigger problems.
