What if money didn’t matter?

HOW MANY TIMES DID YOU ASKED YOURSELF IF WHAT YOU WERE DOING WITH YOUR LIFE WAS WHAT YOU ALWAYS WANTED?

And how many times was your answer “Yes”? If you are one of those people who is in love with their job and can’t imagine themselves doing anything else, congratulations, this video is not for you. In the other hand, if you are one of the other 95% of people who are working on something they are good at but they hate and they only do it because of the money: seriously, check out this video and change your life!

Alan Watts (1915-1973) was an English philosopher and writer who played a large part in popularising Zen Buddhism in the west. He gained a wide following after moving to the United States where he published numerous books on Zen and Eastern philosophy. During the 60s and 70s he toured extensively on the college lecture circuit and became a celebrity among the growing youth movement. Watts had over 25 books published and recorded over 400 lectures, many of which have found a new audience on YouTube.

I’ve been asking myself since I was a kid what was that thing that I wanted to do that would give me money enough to live well, or that would please my parents, or that would make me fit into a social group; but I didn’t realize that all this time I was wrong… I was so wrong!

I’m 28 years old and I’ve taken a lot of bad decissions during my whole life, but if I have to regret something I do, I want it to be either “Giving up everything to do what I really love” or “Falling in love so deep that everything else loses its value and importance”.

What about you? Do you want to change your life?

* This video has spanish subtitles but even for those of you who speak english, I recommend you to read the transcript, it is worth it and you should not miss a single word.

Alan Watts – What If Money Didn’t Matter

(Speech Transcript)

What do you desire?

What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?

Let’s suppose – I do this often in vocational guidance of students. They come to me and say, “Well, uh, we’re getting out of college, and we haven’t the faintest idea of what we want to do.”

So I always ask the question, “What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?”

Well, it’s so amazing. As a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, “Well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers. But as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way.”

Or another person says, “I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses.”

I said, “Do you want to teach at a riding school? Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do?”

When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do. I will say to him, “you do that, and forget the money.

Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You will be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is STUPID!

Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

And after all, if you do really like what your’e doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.

So don’t worry too much. Somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you’ll find others who are.

But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is we’re bringing up children, and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. It’s all wretch and no vomit. It never gets there!

And so therefore it’s so important to consider this question. “What do I desire?”