Would You Do It For Free?

This post on working for free was originally written and published on 17/03/2008 on my old site, ‘The God Is You’, and may conflict with my current philosophy.

I‘VE OFTEN HEARD people say, when discussing their careers, that they “love it so much they’d do it for free.” And this always makes me wonder, would they? If there truly were no way to make any money from their career, would they still do it? And if they were making no money from it, would that then be because their service or product was of no value to anyone else? Read on for the answer…

Imagine if you were a musician – a guitarist, let’s say. Your music is popular, people are happily putting their hand in their pocket to come and watch you play and buy your music. You’re getting paid well for what you do. It pays you more than enough to have to do anything else to live the life you want to live. You love what you do, and you say, “I’ve love this so much, I’d do it for free.”

Suddenly, all your music stops selling and people stop coming to watch you play. You are now no longer making money from performing and recording. But you love what you do, so do continue to do it? Let’s say you do carry on. Eventually, your funds start to run dry as you’ve no money coming in from anywhere. You love what you do, so you can’t stop.

What Would YOU Do?

You take to sitting in a treehouse in your pyjamas, living on berries, guitar in hand, reasoning it’s the only way you can continue playing. Eventually, you run out of money. It’s decision time: do you quit playing the guitar and get a job instead? Or do you make your way to tribe-inhabited lands where you must catch your food with a spear – just so you can continue doing what you love? If you’re not getting paid, who’s listening? What are you moving? No one and nothing.

Let’s pretend you’re a therapist. You have an office with a nice comfy couch for your clients, who gladly hand-over their hard-earned money for the unchallenged opportunity to vent their frustrations. You’re doing well for yourself. You live in a nice place, drive a fast car, and go on exotic holidays. You love what you do, and you say, “I’ve love this so much, I’d do it for free.”

All of a sudden, people stop coming to you for help, and your client list shrinks. You love what you do, so you continue to do it. You move your office into a caravan – which also doubles as your home – and offer your clients cardboard boxes to sit on instead of the comfy couch. You see where I’m going with this?

The Cold, Hard Truth

For your product, career or service to drop in value is for you to allow it to do so. The market determines what you can charge for your service and how much to pay your employees. The better your product, the more the market will support a higher price, allowing you to live even better. To work for free is not honouring your existence and potential as a human being, since you’re not pushing your life to the maximum.

When people wail that they’d do what they do for free, is this a dig or a misunderstanding of capitalism, maybe? Spiritualists will happily defame capitalism all day long, spouting idioms such as “love conquers all” and “money isn’t everything.” Getting paid as much as you can to do something you love is what being human is all about – it allows you to reinvest into your excellent life: read, humanpreneur.

So What Is capitalism?

As I said before, capitalism is the free (marginally, today) movement of product and service from the producers to consumers in exchange for equal value. Without capitalism, nothing would have any value, and so there would be no demand for anything other than bows, arrows and loincloths. There’s no shame in earning money from what you do. It’s a capitalist economy (although not free like it is intended to be) that gives your career the value it is giving to you, to your customers and to your employees.

Were it not for capitalism, you’d likely not be doing what you do since there wouldn’t be a market for it. Without capitalism, your days would probably be spent climbing trees looking for fruit, wandering around in a robe muttering ancient spells or toiling away in squalor in payment for a stale loaf of bread. The whole “I’d do it for free” argument, therefore, is redundant.

Finally…

Another point to note is that even if you were wealthy enough anyway to be able keep your therapy business running for free, it would scarcely get the business it would otherwise get if you were charging. When something is free, or well below the expected market price, people wonder why. Not only that, but for any takers of your free service, they wouldn’t appreciate it, anyway, since noone appreciates something that is handed to them on a silver platter.

In conclusion, if you’d do what you do for free – the question should be, is it really the right business for you? Only you can answer that.

To freedom,

Scotty Stevens
The Humanpreneur
"mecum et incipio et finio"

Disclaimer: As per my Terms And Conditions, this post reflects my philosophy at the time of writing, and may not necessarily correlate with my life's outlook as you read it, now.

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