money motion

"To play at the top of your form, you cannot be emotionally involved in the results." --Arnold Snyder, Card Player magazine

Showing--your true--emotions in a game of Poker makes you predictable. An expensive idea. Somebody at your table will be taking advantage of your vulnerability. To add insult to injury, sure as hell you will be a victim of your emotionally altered state of mind, and your impaired judgment will cost you. Overt excitement is counter productive for the purpose of making money, and so it is letting other players see how angry or how depressed you are.

Permitting emotions to be important disables rational thinking and overrides adequate decision making. Duh. What a concept! You knew that, of course, and you would not make the mistake of worrying about outcomes or of getting aroused in expectation of money you may be getting in the future.

You have noticed, we are not talking about Poker anymore. The word 'money' alone is a crank you can use to drive the best of us crazy with. I don't mean crisp bank notes. No. The associations each one of us comes up with involuntarily, when the issue of money enters the thought process, are clouding our rational mind. Our fears, hopes, dreams, and traumatic experiences easily dominate the moment. Collective fears--about the recession for instance, expressed in the media or at the water cooler--may affect us more than the recession itself.

Pleasant emotions about the expectation of huge piles of future dough and uncomfortable money-related emotional states are equally distracting. To be exact, it hardly matters whether you think of money as a past experience, as your current situation, or as a future event. Further, it is of little consequence if you feel positively or in negative terms about money.

The fact THAT you are permitting yourself to react to money with ANY emotional state renders every single undertaking less productive and less profitable.

Our emotional responses to money are similar to our reaction to mom. When you are at a critical point of negotiating an important business transaction or you are being interviewed for your dream job, the last thing you desire is for your mother to pop in. Well, unless something went awry with you in the distant past.

Loving your mom or mammon has nothing to do with this phenomenon. It's not about losing interest in money or in spending time with dear old mom. On the contrary, and as you may recall it's not even about mom or money. The money--and your mom--IN YOUR HEAD must respect boundaries. Just as listening to your mother's chatter about her experience at the hair salon can't possibly improve your game at the card table, the voices in your head chattering away about money need to shut up!

While you are working on the suicide clutch of your 1948 Harley-Davidson Panhead, it is incredibly dumb to be in tatters over your financial situation. Are we finally agreeing with each other? Now, while you are working on ANYTHING, it is advisable to leave your stupid emotions aside.

You cannot make decent money while thinking about money and worse, while being bullied or lured into a corner by your money-induced emotions.

I know, I have said the same thing over and over again, but in this case redundancy was necessary. Why? Because you and I, we both have allowed the occasional meddling of money-baggage and money-hype with our work that we should have solely focused on. You haven't? Good for you. Most of us are guilty of having done so too often and for too long.

Not being "emotionally involved in the results" of your business supports the purpose of a business to produce hefty profits. What is more important to you, your silly emotions or profit? In all likelihood you can't have both. We cannot be happy if we permit emotions to run our lives, and we can't succeed financially when we give our emotions the upper hand in business decisions.

Whatever you are feeling as far as money is concerned is poisonous for the actual making of money. As paradoxical as this idea may look to you, it is simplifying life.

Just work!

No painful worries are wearing you down. No addictive hopes are lifting you up to fake highs until natural boom-and-bust cycles are tossing you back into the ditch of--equally artificial--hopelessness.

Do what you know best. You will live through times with a bunch of money. Relatively speaking, that is. And it is probable that you will be experiencing times with relatively little income. Not everybody goes from a small income to a large one over the decades and fortunately, not everyone drops from lofty monetary highs to pitiful lows. Realistically, both versions can happen to any of us. Whatever it will be for you, you'll fare better leaving your damn emotions out of the equation.

Work. And enjoy your work. Especially if and when you hate it.

Egbert Sukop

P.S.: My new book 'How to Better Hate Your Job' is rebellious in its nature. Who would have thought! A provocative perspective on employment, work, and money. Go get your copy!