What would you do without money?

June 2022

As a child, I remember asking my parents why we had to have money. To my childlike mind, money seemed a totally unnecessary contrivance. Why couldn’t we just go down to the store and get whatever we wanted whenever we needed it?  Why did Daddy have to spend all week long away from home doing things he didn’t seem to have fun doing?

While my folks gave me a very rational, grownup explanation about money being an important means of exchange in an economic system—yet in much simpler terms, something akin to the Liza Minelli / Joel Grey song from the musical Cabaret, Money makes the world go ‘round—. I still, decades later, wonder about this conundrum. It's almost like we’re all playing a giant game of Monopoly, where if you don’t draw enough “Get out of Jail Free” cards, you lose. What’s the point of it all, other than to be the one with all the money at the end of the game, and everyone else loses?

A dozen or so years ago when I started my leadership development program dedicated to accelerating the advancement of women to senior leadership, I was stunned to discover just how many of these “high-potentials” would tell us, in confidence, that theirs were not such great places to work.  When some confided, “I wouldn’t want to lead a place like that, no matter how much they paid me,” I knew we had a bigger problem than was obvious on the surface.  

It was pervasive sentiments like these that caused me to write my first book, The WOW Factor Workplace: How to Create a Best Place to Work Culture. Life is simply too short not to love what you do every day. Yet, still, an awful lot of people don’t seem to love what they do for a living.

Consider the concept of what you do for a living. What that phrase really boils down to is What do you do to earn money?  I often wonder how many people would spend their days doing what they do each day if they didn’t feel compelled to earn money for whatever reasons.

As a child, I loved visiting my granddad’s garage. Granddad owned his own business as an auto mechanic, specializing in transmission repair. He started Dick’s Auto Service while in his 20s, during the Great Depression, when his job as a sales representative for Chrysler Corporation essentially went away because so few people could afford to buy new cars anymore.

To earn a living, Granddad decided to repair people’s old cars, to help keep them going for as long as possible. He spent virtually every day of his life, for 50 years, doing that. Whether he made a lot of money wasn’t the point. He simply enjoyed doing what he did. He loved going down to the garage to work on cars and talk to people. Sometimes he’d take me with him, just to watch. 

My granddad seemed to love people and he gained tremendous fulfillment from helping them in whatever way he could. He told me, time and again, about the importance of helping people. It was especially important during the Great Depression when many people didn’t have any money, yet they needed a car to get around in—to try to find a job, or to drive to a farm or a dairy to get some milk or food to prevent their children from starving.

Sometimes we would drive in his old pick-up truck out to the country, where we would visit some of his customers, like Mrs. Mitchell.  She had an old rundown shack of a house, with a big dog and a bunch of chickens running around her big garden. We’d sit on the porch for a while chatting with Mrs. Mitchell. Then when it was time to go, she would give my granddad some freshly collected eggs and a bunch of rhubarb stalks which she would happily cut off from some big overgrown plants. 

One time on the drive back, I asked Granddad why we went all the way out there, just to get eggs and rhubarb, when he and Nana had plenty of food at home. He told me that sometimes the only way people could pay him when he fixed their cars was to give him something they grew or made themselves.  Not understanding, I would ask Why?

With a smile, Granddad replied, “Because it’s the right thing to do. These good people are my friends. I’ve done business this way ever since the Depression. When good people need a little help and you can help them, it makes you feel good, and it helps them feel better. Some people have money to pay me to fix their cars. Some people don’t have much money, so they find other ways to pay me. I always tell people that I’m happy to fix their cars for free, just because I like to do it. But they don’t feel good about that. They usually want to give me at least a little something in return.

“So, I fix their cars and they give me what they can. In Mrs. Mitchell’s case, she’ll give me a few eggs and some fresh fruit or vegetables from her garden. Mrs. Haines does some ironing for Nana. That way, everyone feels good, and we all have a good life. Helping each other is what makes the world go around.”  

So, today, as prices spiral out of control and some businesses are forced to close their doors, think about what you do for a living. What makes you feel good? What is it that makes a good life? Perhaps we’d all be better off if we got back to the basics. Is money really what makes the world go around or is there something even more fundamental to having a good life, like helping each other?

What if, suddenly, ready access to money just went away? What would you do for a living, just because you love doing it and you could help someone else in the process?   

Would you keep doing what you are doing now for a living if you weren’t paid money, or paid at all, to do it?  What might you do instead? The time to do so may be about here.