Money

Nobody satisfactorily answered the most important question about my career before I graduated.

It wasn't about software. It wasn't about building a portfolio. It was about money; how to think about it, how to manage it, and how to keep it from managing me. I graduated with no financial literacy, and when I looked around at my friends; whether they were from Trinidad or North Carolina; none of them had it either. We were all talented. We were all broke. And nobody seemed to think those two things were related.

I carried that ignorance into my career for years. When I interned at Buck in LA, I remember calculating what a junior full-time salary looked like versus freelance day rates and realizing the math didn't make sense to me yet. When I bought my first laptop with my own freelance money, I felt rich. I wasn't. I just didn't know what I didn't know.

The real education came later, during the season the industry tanked and took the illusion of stability with it.

All That Glitters

Studios I thought were invincible started closing offices, running massive layoffs, and quietly shutting their doors. These were shops with big reels and bigger reputations. And what I learned is that all that glitters is not gold; many high-profile studios were running far thinner than they appeared, burning through overhead just to maintain the image. When the work dried up, the image couldn't save them.

Eido wasn't immune. We went from thriving to tapping every line of credit we had. I started pulling from personal savings to keep employees paid. The industry didn't look like it was coming back, so I started freelancing on the side to keep us afloat. Even that wasn't enough. Eventually I swallowed my pride and started taking odd jobs; like logo designs for local businesses on Thumbtack and business cards for friends. Whatever kept us moving. After honest, hard conversations with my wife, we decided I should take a full-time role at a tech startup to stabilize things.

That season looked like failure from the outside. From the inside, it was the most formative financial education of my life. My wife and I became a tighter team. We learned to budget with discipline. We built a savings strategy. We started having real conversations about money instead of reactive ones. The debt slowly receded, and what replaced it wasn't just solvency; it was clarity.

The Word Itself

Here's what that season taught me that no class ever did:

That philosophy could be on a spectrum from laissez faire to obsession; but everyone has one whether intentionally defined or not.

A mentor of mine once taught a room of business owners that money doesn't just mean currency; it means possessions. It's whatever "mine" means to you. And it has an inherent power to attract attention, shape behavior, and reveal character. Without a defined relationship to that power, one gets built for you; usually in the form of get as much as you can and don't share it.

I saw that firsthand. At the tech company, I worked with someone whose entire approach to leadership was shaped by what I can only describe as a bad relationship with money. She wasn't compassionate. She was self-seeking, led with laziness, and belittled the people under her. I don't think she was a bad person. I think she was someone who never defined her philosophy of money, and when the pressure came, greed filled the vacuum. That's what happens when the relationship isn't intentional.

Defining the Relationship

My own philosophy is simple: care for my family, save for my children's children, and be generous to those who have less than we do. We give a significant amount away; whether we have a lot or not. That's not a flex. It's a discipline. It trains your restraint, your attitude, and your level-headedness when money starts doing what money does.

What Comes Next

If you're a creative professional, financial maturity isn't optional; it's the foundation everything else sits on. And it has real components: defining your market value so you stop guessing your rates, building a savings strategy that accounts for the feast-and-famine cycle of creative work, understanding taxes and business structure so you're not bleeding money you earned, learning the basics of investing so your money works when you're not, and practicing generosity as a financial discipline rather than an afterthought.

This is the first article in a series. Each of those components gets its own issue, with real frameworks you can apply. But I wanted to start here; with how you think about money; because without that, every tactic is just noise.

So here's what I want from you: hit the survey above and tell me which of those topics you want me to write about next. Your rates? Savings? Taxes? Investing? Something I didn't mention?

Email me with questions if you’ve got any. Until next week ✌🏽 – Joash.