Money talks, this we know to be true. We can see it in our daily lives every single day, and that goes double for when you have to go food shopping at your local feed store or supermarket or giant package store.
Talking Money also makes the world go ’round. Again, something we can experientially verify through our senses and, well, our experience.
Money is a powerful driver, and it’s totally on automatic. Even if you are utterly bored with money and you are completely uninterested in money, you have to pay the bills, and you can’t ignore your needs and your family’s needs.
Every day, it’s the same routine.
Work. Get money. Drive to work, drive to lunch, drive home and collapse until tomorrow.
The MONEY MOTIVE is IN there, whether you want it to be, intended it to be or allow or don’t allow it to be. The MONEY MOTIVE is right in there, genetically implanted, to keep you interested in working yourself right into the ground.
It’s terrible, it’s awful, and it’s horrifyingly true that it’s there. Dammit, even with a degree in Holiness, there’s a money motive behind everything — again, even if it’s against the wishes of everyone involved.
So how can we use this for our Work?
What, you can’t guess? Sometimes I don’t know why I bother, and that’s the whole idea — when things are going well, it’s not necessarily true that things will FEEL any better, and at some point, you want to just lie down and give up.
It’s at that point that the money motive can work for you, keep you working in spite of the natural tendency to flow toward depression and melancholia, even if you’re not in your late seventies or eighties.
Look, at the age of 79, I don’t find myself looking forward to scrapping it out with a bunch of young rabid marketeering media hypes all over the internet.
Fact is, the internet is alien to me. I grew up with the Pony Express and Western Union.
If I’ve ever accidentally given the impression that I actually LIKE and ENJOY listing stuff on eBay, I’m sure sorry that happened. I have no interest in selling anything.
I develop a GODD game and send it out. In just the first year alone, up to fourteen people might buy it and actually run it, and that’s the level of business I’m used to doing these days.
Suddenly, for no apparent or readily discernable reason, my eBay sales are taking off like passenger planes at Kabul Airport, and I think I know the reason why. Would you like to know why?
What works on youtube works on eBay, that’s why.
See, when you write a powerful title, it includes buzz phrases, key words and search terms galore, all intended to attract fairly average bears to your particular brand of honey.
I’m getting hundreds of VIEWS per day on over 800 listings, around 500 views per week PER LISTING, on average.
Sales are moderate, but exposure is very good, and eventually the sales will catch up with the numbers of views, as I experiment with the body of the text, meaning the description.
If you’re getting hundreds or thousands of hits on your listing and your item is still not selling, there’s a reason for it.
The NUMBER ONE reason for no sales is some problem with the shipping. Either it’s too costly, or too slow.
You have to give the customer a way to get the thing faster, if you want more sales, and shipping has GOT to be free, if you expect to compete with Amazon.
Oh, I hear a question there — what about Amazon?
I spent $40 bucks putting up a store, only to discover that you can’t sell FINE ART without special permission, and they’re not issuing permissions for art these days, according to their website information page.
Also, no CDs, no DVDs, no fine or handcrafted jewelry, no craft items at all, without special permission, and they warn that you might have to get special written permission to sell an item, on a PER ITEM basis.
What creeps. It’s all for their benefit. Amazon is a seller and is in powerful and unfair competition with its sellers.
Ebay is a third-party to the sale, at least at this time, it is. There’s bound to be a leap in there somewhere for greed’s sake, but it hasn’t happened yet, at least not up until tonight.
I’ve been on eBay for 22 years now, and they’ve always been at least one thing — consistent. Amazon just seems so damn UNFRIENDLY to the artist that I can’t support it in any way, even buying things on Amazon. I will go very far out of my way to avoid Amazon.
Now, Etsy might be different — I’ve heard that they are a little more friendly toward artists, but that they don’t have the marketplace anywhere near where Amazon does.
Frankly, I’ve seen what artwork they have up, and it’s very sad, so I surely would not want to put my art into that junkpile they call Amazon.
It’s a kind of pixelated swap-meet, but not as friendly as a swap-meet, if such a thing is possible.
So how to use the Money Motive without Greed…
Well, the Money Motive is always there. You don’t have to conjure it up or anything. It’s operating with or without your participation.
You can depend on it to be there, working in the background, like a long-forgotten but very active program on your desktop computer.
The Money Motive can help you overcome that INERTIA that Gurdjieff warned you about, the powerful force of GRAVITY that keeps you sitting on your fat can while you could be getting to serious WORK and helping others in your Bodhisattva Path.
The thing is, the bills are getting paid, the wolf is howling, but not quite at the door, and the hounds of winter are coming fast and furious, and you’ve got very little time to get ready.
The pressure of monetary gain is subtle when there is no greed for money. By the way, the correct Biblical quotation is, “For the LOVE of money is the root of all Evil,” which has been transmogrified into “Money is the root of all Evil.”
Those two things don’t mean the same. If you can’t actually see and determine the difference between those two statements, perhaps you should forget about Higher Ideas and just focus on the Day Job.
The thing is, your WORK PRACTICE could actually become your Day Job! You could easily earn enough through your online sales to cover your monthly expenses, and more — and if you get a “hit”, you could become a millionaire.
No hype here. There’s LOTS of opportunities for online marketers. The field is brand-new and hasn’t been mapped yet, and there’s so many avenues to be explored.
Here’s an example of one avenue that has yet to be explored — galaxy science fiction magazine now exists as galaxyezine.com and I have several stories up on there, but there could be hundreds more.
The thing people want most is entertainment, and reading is one of those entertainments that some folks still enjoy and practice, although the literary atmosphere is getting more rarified every day.
Never you mind the total lack of interest. Interest is attracted by some sort of expectation of personal gain.
In short, every single action in life carries the potential for PAYOFF.
Payoff is the thing that makes it all tick. Doesn’t have to be material payoff, either, and as a matter of fact, speaking clinically, emotional payoffs are more of an operant factor in human activity than even money.
People will literally starve to death before they lift a finger to help themselves, and that’s an important idea, if you ever plan to earn a livelihood.
It means that someone willing to put in the time and effort can earn reward in that area — for example, let’s take the Galaxy sci-fi angle.
What if the site contained all the stories ever published in Galaxy? Well, that’s already available, as are the radio broadcasts, and they’re all free, so what’s in it for someone working on the website?
Well, you don’t offer the stories. People don’t actually want the stories. THEY WANT TO BE TOLD WHAT TO DO.
Just rate all the stories in Galaxy and point to the free text or audio story online, and there you have the beginnings of a sci-fi CLUB, with zoom meetings and social media marketing and all that jazz.
In short, it could function as a HUB for sci-fi fans of the literary kind and, although it’s a mighty slim percentage of the reading population, which itself is a small part of the general population, otherwise known as “The Great Unwashed”, it could expand naturally into a very powerful organization that could issue awards for new stories, novels, films and tv shows.
There’s a hell of a lot going on right now, and people appreciate and need some way to FILTER the stuff down to a few really palatable choices, and that means that YOU have an opening in the marketplace, if you only knew how to make it happen, but you don’t.
No problem, I do, and what’s more, I’m willing to share it. You have but to ask. My motive? I’m 79 and I have a lot of valuable information that will save you TONS of time and money.
My motive is to pass the baton, what other motive would you expect? You’ll have the same motivation if and when you reach what used to be called “Old Age”.
The fact is, regardless of what they say, 79 is the new 80. Everything hurts. You just want to lie there and breathe, and sometimes that’s all you CAN do, and yet, there’s no opportunity to retire, not in this age of COVID 19 and the destruction of democracy and all that that entails.
You need some help getting up on your feet, and it helps to know that your efforts are not in vain, and if they’re paying SOME of the bills, you’ll be more likely to get up out of bed, even if you can no longer spring out of bed, and get to work every single day without fail.
Retirement? It’s a joke, invented by Republicans. There’s no room for retirement, no room for retired persons.
The Universe speaks to you. It says, “Keep moving, just keep moving, nothing to see here, folks,” like a New York cop at the scene of a jumper.
Depression, Despair, Despondency, Dependency, Deterioration. Those are the signs of no-motivation, and the cure CAN be to do something that makes money, because no matter how much in denial we may be, money IS at the root of our daily worry.
When you’re doing something that pays the bills, it’s easier to breathe, easier to function and easier to work in a really serious way.
You need money just to do what you’re going to have to do to that house, remember? I mean, of course, you, the Essential Self, the Being — not your housing house, although there are reams of philosophy that would argue that point until the end of time.
Making money doesn’t just mean paying the bills. It means that you wrote good listings, put them up well, presumably handled the transactions well and comported yourself well in all details.
Gosh, do you realize what a huge WIN that is for you?
It means that you are SUCCEEDING at something. I don’t care what you openly think about success, but the fact is that failing and failing and failing is just gosh-darn depressing.
Sorry about the “gosh-darn” swear words, but I just couldn’t help myself. Of course that doesn’t stop Anthony Scaramucci from going even further than I have done, with his language.
I prefer my “gosh-darn” to his “f*cking B*llsh*t, if for no other reason than when I say it, you know I mean it, and you’d better gosh-darn duck for cover or lose your scalp.
So making money isn’t all about money. Actually, making money online involves the mastery of a number of skills, and if you’re above the age of three-and-a-half, you’re too old.
It’s all about the thumb, swiping and jabbing and swiffing and blapping that cell phone into submission.
For a kid, it’s easy — just go like this. For a grownup, it’s a painful process of retraining the reflexes and re-learning how things go.
For some, it’s far too late — the years have taken their toll. For others, not so lucky, they remain in the workplace and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against them and, by opposing, end them, and you can quote me on that!
I know not what course others have taken, but as for me, give me liberty and cake — you can keep the rest.
We are having regular, well-attended meetings about YOUR eBay Practice, and you are very cordially invited to take part in those meetings — ask anyone on the forum, and the dates are posted on the activities calendar, of course. The what? Go find it.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby