I'm Keeping the Cash, Planet Earth

Some­thing I need to get off my chest.

A year ago, I made the announce­ment to give all prof­its from Life Coaches Blog away to Con­ser­va­tion Inter­na­tional. It’s not mil­lions – LCB makes pocket change, espe­cially after I closed it. But still, pretty cool right? Make money, give it away, save the Earth, be an awe­some human being.

Well, things changed. I’m keep­ing the cash, planet Earth.

This issue of being deserv­ing is some­thing I’ve wres­tled with for a long, long time. Do I deserve to have the things I want? Do I deserve to profit hand­somely from my con­tri­bu­tions? Do I deserve to look good, get awards, be praised? You’d think the answer is an easy fuck, yeah to all these ques­tions, but it hasn’t always been easy for me. Years of under­valu­ing my work and over­work­ing myself. The very fact that I have to think about whether or not I should get paid for stuff I did is, well.

So. Long way of say­ing: I deserve to keep the money I make from the work I did. I want it. It’ll help me make my life bet­ter and hap­pier. It feels right. It feels good. So I’m doing it. I’m keep­ing the prof­its I make from LCB for myself.

What About the Pandas?

Yes, but what about the pandas?

After mak­ing this deci­sion, I finally under­stood what some­one tried to tell me years ago about contribution.

I told him about my monthly dona­tions to Heroes Against Hunger. I expected a clap on the back, but he essen­tially told me that it wasn’t good enough; giv­ing money wasn’t the same as giv­ing my own time and effort to actu­ally help some­one in the world.

I was con­fused. Hey, these peo­ple are out sav­ing peo­ple from star­va­tion, and my money’s help­ing. How’s that a bad thing?

It’s not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing.

But there’s a point beyond which lit­tle ges­tures given behind a screen become an excuse for not really going out there and doing something.

What dif­fer­ence does join­ing a Face­book page to end vio­lence against women really make? Or adding a ban­ner about for­est con­ser­va­tion on your blog? Or buy­ing that Red t-shirt? Really? In com­par­i­son to going out there, and doing some­thing real in the world for one other person.

I real­ized that with my dona­tions I was using the easy act of donat­ing as an excuse for not doing the dif­fi­cult act of actu­ally mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in the world.

I’m not get­ting on a soap­box and judg­ing, nor am I say­ing don’t give, or that every­one who does uses it as an excuse. All I’m say­ing is that I needed to be more aware and more hon­est to myself about what I was doing, and why. And when I saw that what I was doing wasn’t aligned with what I wanted, I had to make a change.

Update: What a coin­ci­dence. The morn­ing after I posted this, Mer­lin Mann wrote a post that sum­ma­rizes suc­cinctly what I tried to say clumsily.

Related Posts

1. Keep­ing It Fierce