Money 3: Living Generously

Last week I got an opportunity to work with Pinterest. Good money. Interesting work. Six months of steady income. I turned it down.

Not because I didn't want it. Because for the next six months, it would pull me almost entirely away from the things I need to be building right now; the context of my life as it stands today. More money does not mean it's a good decision. And if that's the only thing you take away from this piece, you've already positioned yourself in the top 10% of our industry.

But here's what I want you to sit with: how do you get to the place where you can look at a good opportunity and say no? Where dollar signs don't make your heart rate spike? Where you can evaluate an offer against your actual life instead of your anxiety?

The answer isn't budgeting. It isn't a better rate. It's something most people in our industry never talk about.

It's generosity.

I know that sounds disconnected. Stay with me.

In the first article in this series, I talked about the power of money; how it attracts attention, shapes behavior, and reveals character. I said that 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. Generosity is how you break that cycle. It's the discipline that loosens money's grip on you.

Most people think generosity is what you do after you've made enough. I'm arguing it's what you practice in order to think clearly about money at all.

Here's the logic: when you train yourself to give; whether that's financially, through mentorship, by covering a meal, by helping a young creative find their footing; you're training yourself to hold money loosely. And when you hold money loosely, you make decisions from principle instead of from panic. You stop saying yes to everything with a number attached. You develop the discernment to know when an opportunity serves your life and when it just serves your bank account.

That discernment is what separates a creative professional from someone who just has skills.

I've watched people who chase money with a clenched fist. They stay discontent, anxious, and eager. Every decision gets filtered through how much more can I make, and over time that filter corrodes everything; relationships, reputation, the quality of their work, their families. Life is the sum total of the decisions you make. If every decision comes from that place of grasping, the outcomes are predictable.

Now I want to be careful here. I'm not saying throw your money around without thought. Generosity without principle can backfire. Giving without direction; without a community you're committed to, without a reason behind it; isn't generosity. It's just spending. The discipline is intentional. You give toward something. You give to people you're invested in. You give because you've decided that the people in your care matter more than the balance in your account.

During the hardest season of my business; when I was doing logo designs on Thumbtack and pulling from personal savings to keep Eido alive; my wife and I were still giving. The amount changed. The principle didn't. And what I learned in that season is that generosity doesn't wait for abundance. It's what carries you through the scarcity. Not because it magically refills your bank account, but because it trains your character to hold steady when everything feels like it's falling apart.

That character is what I'm really talking about. This isn't a self-help newsletter. It's meant to develop creative professionals into leaders. And leadership in our industry is taught almost exclusively at the technical level; learn the software, build the reel, land the job. Almost nobody teaches it at the character level. But the leaders I respect most; the ones who built things that lasted, who people genuinely want to work with; all share this trait. They hold their success loosely. They invest in people. They operate from something deeper than the next invoice.

The goal of your profession isn't to maximize your income. It's sustainability; in character and in career. How you think about money determines how well you navigate your life. And generosity is the training ground.

Think about it beyond finances. Every meaningful relationship in my career came because someone was generous with me first; with their time, their knowledge, their network. People paved the road I'm walking on. And the way I honor that is by paving it for someone else. That's what mentoring young creatives is. That's what this newsletter is. Generosity scales far beyond a dollar amount.

So here's what I'm inviting you to consider: find one way this week to be generous that costs you something. Not a tip. Not a token. Something that requires you to loosen your grip. Cover dinner for a friend. Spend an hour with a junior creative who needs direction. Share a lead you could have kept. See what it does to the way you think about the next financial decision that crosses your desk.

While everything around you says live by how much you can make, I'm inviting you to live by principle. That's the whole game.

Until next week ✌🏽 – Joash.