How to be useful to others

Today, I decided that I no longer want to build a company. In the last years, this has been one of my core desires. It was also one of the biggest sources of procrastination.

My motivation behind building a company is the desire to be useful. I believe that money is a neutral indicator that show you're adding value to the lives of others. Therefore, to be useful is to get rich. And the way to get rich is to build a company. The problem is, I'm just not interested in money.

Here is a simple (albeit not easy) idea to build a business. Pick a problem you have solved for yourself or a skill that you learned and find the people who are interested in doing the same. In my case, one option would be to find someone who is interested in learning to program and start to teach them. Once you start looking at your experience like this, you'll find many opportunities to monetise. I have thought about this for a long time. And the conclusion I came to was that I don't care about teaching what I already know. I want to learn new things and write about what I learned instead.

This created a dilemma I didn't know how to navigate. I want to treat my work as a professional. Treating your work as a professional means to not wait for inspiration, and to do the hard, but valuable things. It means to be useful. And to be useful, or so I believed, it's important to get as rich as possible. But focusing on money felt like a distraction from what I actually wanted to do. In other words, treating my works as a professional seemed like an obstacle to treating my work as a professional.

The way to resolve this contradiction is by understanding that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure. This is known as Goodhart's law and is especially relevant for policy-making. For example, let's assume that a city is plagued by a rat infestation. In an attempt to decimate said infestation the city council starts to recompense the killing of rats monetarily. While this is done with the best of intentions, instead of helping to solve the infestation problem, it will actually make it worse. Because soon after the policy becomes known, people start to purposefully farm rats in order to sell them, simply because that makes it possible to kill much more rats. The way I thought about money was just as counterproductive as this imagined policy.

Yes, money is a useful indicator that you are adding value to other people. But as soon as you start to use it as a target, its usefulness ceases. Focusing on money will drain the fun out of everything. It made me feel guilty for doing something I found interesting and rewarding, because I wasn't thinking about how to monetise it. Doing something purely for the money is counterproductive. But if not money, what can you focus on instead of you want to be useful?

To be useful means to be valuable. And to be valuable means to be able to do things that only you can do. To get there, you have to constantly learn new things. Follow your curiosity, and learn to do the things that many people need, but only few can do. And trust that the money will come later. There isn't a formula to this, no clear recipe to follow. But one way to definitely miss it, is by focusing on the money.