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The Direct Co-Relation Between Money And Passion

By Marsha Maung

July 24th , 2007

“I just bought this really cool phone that can download movies and songs directly from the Internet…I don’t even have to attach it to the computer or anything. Just like this…zap! The whole movie. Isn’t this, like, the coolest thing since the invention of the wheel or something?” gushed my friend shoving her new phone into my face.

I smile politely. Oh, yes, I am a little green that I don’t have such a gadgety phone to boast about but then again, it just seems to confirm a basic principle that I live by all this time. I believe in technology but only when technology serves to make life better for me and it makes me happier. It seems that my friend is happier about showing it off than about being able to download and watch movies on her mobile phone. I can do the same thing with my four-year-back model PDA but I don’t. Never done it…probably never will.

It’s the strangest phenomenon for me because our society has become so materialistic that many people’s goals have changed from ‘world peace’ or ‘hungerless world’ and ‘happiness for all children’ to ‘more money’, ‘bigger house’, ‘posher car’, ‘another piece of land’ or simply ‘a new rice cooker that I don’t need’. The goals of human beings have warped into such an incredibly materialistic form that I think, in a certain way, we have lost our sense of direction. People chase money in and out of every door of opportunity; and whenever they pursue something, the ultimate goal is material gain.

This is not to say that I am against ‘earning our keep’ in this world because we, ultimately, need money to survive. And to a certain extent, we need money to be happy but we don’t need truckloads to be happy. It saddens me that the young of today are motivated to work because of financial gain. They wake up every morning with dollar signs flashing in their eyes and swimming in their heads. There’s absolutely no life at work beyond earning more money to finance more flashy things that could ‘enhance’ their existence on earth.

How pathetic.

Money makes us happy…this is a fact that I am not even going to try to contend it…I am a business person, after all, and I can’t say I write the countless ads, articles and books because ‘I love to make my clients happy’. I would love to see them happy but at the end of the day, it’s bores back down to ‘where’s the check?’ But money is a by-product, should be a by-product of us doing something that we love, is passionate about, feel strongly for and we have contributed countless hours of hard work to. When this is how we view the work that we do, money and financial gain becomes secondary.

For instance, I love to sing….I was born with the love to be on stage and when I was young, whenever someone tried to outshine me on stage, I would feel an urgent temptation to put my boot on the person’s behind and give it a really hard shove in the general direction of the floor. This is a passion that I was born (the singing, not the kicking) with and I banked in on it. I performed for years with a fair number of bands on and off and I tell each and every one of the band leaders that I don’t really care how much they pay me…it’s a passion. I do it because I want to and I love to do it. Suffice to say, despite my claim that I didn’t think the money was important, they paid me rather well…some of them paid me OK but they paid me. As you can see, if I had pursued it, I think I could have made quite a reasonable amount of extra income just from doing something that I loved.

The fire. The desire. The drive. The passion. All of that should be the focus when we live our lives…that’s the mission of our journey through life and I believe that each one of us have our own personal mission. It’s our job to find out what that mission is and pursue it. I dare say that God never intended for people to have ‘most money in the world’ as a mission.

Marsha Maung is a Malaysian-based freelance writer and author of short stories like Imperfect (http://marshamaung.com/books/imperfect.html). She's one of the best seo content writer today and have scores of articles and published work under her belt. Flinging aside the ghostwriter title to her name, she decides that it's time to get more of her work published now. That's her dream. What's yours? For more info, visit http://www.marshamaung.com