On money, by Nancy Dorrier

I am thinking about my relationship with money.  It is hard to tell the difference between my relationship and our relationship, “our” being our culture’s. The cultural conversation mostly seems like a reality -- ain’t  no “conversation” to it.  You gotta be kidding me!  Take in more than you spend? Even THEY are struggling with that “reality” in Congress. 

Don’t live high on the hog, higher than your means. 

Save for your old age. 

Get the best deal. 

Don’t give money to beggars, it just perpetuates the problem. 

Don’t show off.

Then there is:  Don’t talk about money, definitely not about how much something costs. 

I barely look at the bill when it comes from the waiter. I just give them my credit card. When I am with someone who examines the bill for dinner with great care and attention, it embarrasses me a little, not for myself, but for them and their rudeness and tediousness.

Don’t buy a new car. Buy used. I always buy new. I just like it. I like the smell. I like that it is my car. I last bought a Toyota Prius in 2008 and before that a Ford Explorer in 1992. The Ford is my garden truck now or Ikea hauling truck. Matthew, my office mate, is now using it temporarily, his girlfriend having totaled his Volvo through an encounter with a deer. She didn’t total it. The deer did and did himself in in the process. Do deer have small brains? They stand there with the gun aimed at them and just look back. On Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece Theatre show, his lordship just couldn’t pull the trigger.

Recently in Asia, we needed to change money several times, in Thailand, not in Cambodia, in Vietnam, in Brunei, and in Singapore. It looked like play money with somebody’s picture on it that I didn’t know. It felt like play money. When I spent it, I was just playing.

Then we went to a gallery in Singapore and found an artist, age 100, a Japanese woman, Toko Shinoda. A painting that was $18,000 Singapore would have been U.S. $13,850.  I pictured buying this simple serene painting and removing all of my furniture except for the wooden bench Eric made for me and sitting and looking at this painting.

Then I come home to actually do that, clear things out, but without the painting so I will have to go back to Singapore or Tokyo or wherever she is. Anyway, back to clearing out my boxes and emptying my house and finding so many magazines and books and CDs I am not reading or listening to and shift from one foot to the other doing nothing. Frozen. But won’t I want to read that Pema Chodron article in Shambhala Sun? Or in some cases, reread it?

If I let all of my clothes, CDs, jewelry, books, magazines go, what then would be possible?  What then? I would have space for the new. The new idea, the new writing, the new observation, the bench and the piece of art.

I would be working to be not just a down-with-the-people philanthropist, but also an art patron and collector and benefactor. I could invite you in to see my collection, like I did today over Skype with Bhavna.

Joe says we aren’t serious about making our numbers.

He says why are we doing creative writing? What does that have to do with it?

I said we do that on the weekend; it is kind of a hobby. A lame answer. I remembered later that I had actually asked for creative writing regarding the retreat or at least summary writing: What did you learn, what are you at work on now?

What would it look like if we were going for it? I asked, and he said we would be saying go get it, get to work, go get it.  I asked okay, was the work we did on the proposal today going to get it? Is that what you mean?  Yes, yes, yes, that is making your numbers.

Crunching your numbers.

The left brain and the right brain meet, and now what is possible?

Just do it meets let’s write a poem.

Go get it meets let’s find out what their outcomes are.

Charge them what it is worth meets what can we get to come out of our mouths.

Just jump in the water meets we are very close to swimming; we are close to it but still in the shallows.

Okay, just say half what it’s worth but twice what we usually say and see what happens.

Going to school now on designing higher-value higher-fee engagements.

On doing the intellectual work of determining and researching and finding out and ascertaining and hypothesizing the actual business value of our work.

And delivering that time and again.

Doing the documentation to show that.

That is what will get what it’s worth to come out of our mouths.

What is this work worth not in consultant hours and design time and writing-it-up time and travel time and all of that, but what is it worth to the client if they have that team working well, beautifully together, if they have that software integrated, if they have that acquisition merged?

Going to School.