When someone pays you, they're not giving you something valuable. They're acknowledging that you already gave them something valuable.
Sit with that for a second. It changes more than you'd expect.
Most people see the work they do (or the goods they sell) as giving up something in exchange for something valuable. The money feels like the prize. But money is just an abstract store of value. The good or service you provided? That had the actual value. The money is just an IOU from society that someday you can have something of equivalent value to what you provided.
Here's what makes money fascinating: instead of providing value directly to the person you want value from, you provide it to someone else entirely. Then someone completely different provides the value back to you later. I make a rocking chair, sell it to a stranger, and then use that money to pay a mechanic I've never met to fix my car. The chair buyer and the mechanic never interact. The value flows through society in these indirect loops, connected only by these placeholder IOUs we call dollars.
We take this for granted. But it's remarkable that it works at all.
The Philosophical Shift
If you stop seeing money as valuable in a "primary" sense, you stop asking second-order questions like "what will people pay me for?" and start asking first-order questions like "how can I make people's lives better in ways they can't get elsewhere, or to a greater degree than they can get elsewhere?"
That shift sounds subtle. It isn't.
When you're focused on what people will pay for, you're one step removed from the actual problem. You're trying to predict and optimize for a proxy. When you're focused on making lives better, you're working on the thing itself.
I'm convinced that when I think in those terms, I have more clarity. It makes me more focused on what truly matters. The questions get simpler: Is this actually useful? Does this solve a real problem? Would someone's life be meaningfully better because this exists?
The money follows. It has to. Money is just the acknowledgment that value was created. Focus on the value, and the acknowledgment takes care of itself.
That's assuming people know about the value they can get from you. It's easy to make a great product and have it sit on a shelf. Amazing engineers are surprised by that all the time. That's why marketing is a superpower that too many people spend way too little on. Or target the wrong things.
Where This Goes
I started writing a book about this a while back. I'm fascinated by the implications for businesses and broader society. I think at least a few of our societal ills are caused by misunderstandings in this space. Life got in the way and the project stalled. Maybe I'll finish it someday. Or maybe these ideas will end up as a series of posts here, exploring what this framing means in practice.
For now, the core idea is enough to sit with: money isn't the point. It's just the receipt.