The Purpose of Your Career Isn’t Money, It’s Being Useful

Working to be of service is the only compass you need.

Most of my career, whether I like to admit it or not, was spent chasing money. A career was a way to earn a living that would supposedly get me that house and car, which would make it all worthwhile.

This is a common view of the purpose of our careers. If you don’t consciously reflect on the purpose of your career, by default, you will fall into this basket.

Your career will become nothing more than promotions, bonuses, side-investments, and attempting to work your way to the companies that have the best products and brand in the market (another one of my mistakes).

Lately, I have had an obsession with the word useful. It’s the sort of word that resets and abruptly stops you making bad decisions.

Whether it’s the attention-seeking need to build up followers online, or write a New York Times best-selling book, or earn more money so you can start a cool business and live the dream entrepreneur lifestyle — the word usefulness is a stark reminder.

Being useful is a superpower. It’s the catalyst for the majority of one’s success in their career. Writing takes up a big chunk of my career and whenever I am distracted by vanity metrics like statistics, usefulness reminds me why I do it.

We Are So Much More Than Money

Money is simply digits on the screen of your internet banking app. It’s impossible to derive any meaning from it or be motivated to wake up each day and get your assed kicked by the business world to get more of it.

The purpose of being useful in your career is much different. When you are useful, you help people. Being helpful is remembered long after any amount of money you might earn or trophy in the form of a luxury car you might drive.

• A promotion feels good for a few weeks.
• A pay increase is nice for a few days until your expenses rise to meet the new income.
• A bonus feels good until you have spent it and it hasn’t improved your quality of life found through a purposeful career.

If you measure your self-worth based on money, you will keep showing up to work each day feeling as though something is missing.

This is how I felt in my 20’s when I had a business making money, but I was running around with an out-of-control ego and not being very useful.

If staff needed help, I was too busy. If a job needed to be done, someone else could do it because they worked for me. If the company wasn’t doing well, it was everyone else’s fault and the staff was lazy.

I wasn’t being useful. I was being busy and not taking responsibility which is the opposite of being useful.

“Work to Become, Not to Acquire”

This is a quote from Elbert Hubbard and it sums up being useful beautifully. When you are useful and you focus on being useful, you become someone else — a better person.

And being a better person delivers meaning back into the purpose of your career. You show up to work differently when you feel like your work has meaning and is helping you become a better person.

Most of the problems in your career can be solved by becoming a better person. Complaining, blaming, and gossiping doesn’t fix problems or serve any usefulness.

Once your basic expenses are covered early in your career, acquiring money or things doesn’t move the dial on your fulfillment levels. Fulfillment can only come from having a purpose centered around being useful.

To Be Useful Is to Be of Service

That’s another way to look at it. Being useful is to be of service and that means serving people other than yourself.

One day, when you have left this world and only your physical body remains, ready to be placed into the ground of the cemetery, those attending your funeral will reflect on and tell stories about how you served them.

Service in your career looks like:

• Helping others with their problems.
• Going out of your way to teach and mentor.
• Building others up rather than tearing them down for your own benefit.

Usefulness is in direct proportion to how you help others using the platform of your career. Will you use your platform to be useful?

When Do You Ever Have Enough?

That’s the problem with having money as the purpose of your career. When do you have enough? When can you stop earning enough of it?

You can’t. You never have enough because there is always more you think you can do in life by having more money. Money paints illusions, fantasy lands, and dreams that, when you touch them with your five fingers, are nothing more than a magic trick performed by an average circus magician.

To wake up each day and serve the gods of money is to completely forget your real purpose, which is to be useful.

Usefulness makes each day worth it.

Being Useful Is a Compass

There comes a point in everyone’s career where we ask ourselves: “What’s next?” This is a hard question to answer and being useful is the panacea.

When I think about what’s next for my writing career and associate it with usefulness, the next step becomes how to be more useful. That involves having more life experiences, learning new skills, and helping more people.

A common question I get is: “How do you create content online?” It’s such a puzzling question that leaves people to wait many years and make no progress. The answer, again, is to be useful.

The article you write, the video you make, the interview you do, the podcast you record has one purpose in your career: to be useful.

Make the content as useful as it can be.

If you decide to go into leadership, being useful guides you yet again and tells you to be helpful to the people you lead.

Teach your team, give them opportunities, give them things you never got in your career, expose them to new ideas, let them attend that conference, allow them to shadow that department. Again, be useful to your team.

It’s Not Too Late to Change

The purpose of your career to date doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you have never thought about your career through the eyes of being useful. What matters is that you do something about.

Wake up tomorrow and make your challenge for the day to be useful. If you really want to shoot the lights out, try and be the most useful person you can be. Meanwhile, let the deposits into your bank account and the desire for them to increase take a backseat.

Strangely enough, though, being useful also makes you crazy amounts of money when usefulness is your focus. Crazy huh?

The purpose of your career is not money. It is to enjoy your work, do something that helps others, work with awesome people, and not have regrets when it’s all over one day.

If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net