I hate the saying from Benjamin Franklin, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” because most people talk about it as though it means that a dollar you’ve earned now means you won’t have to earn it again later on. Or they have it mean some other kind of nonsense that is basically trying to say, “think about your retirement or other ways of making money”. Genuinely, it makes Benjamin Franklin much more of a sage than what he was trying to be, which was witty and satirical. More than likely, ole philander Benni was saying, “you didn’t spend a penny, so you still have your penny. Congratulations!” That brings me to the topic of something I gave a few minutes to think about before I went to bed last night, the topic of making money and modern marketing.
Now, I don’t care how you make money, or what you do with it. I’ll save my thoughts on budgets for another time. Frankly, I’ve learned the hard way about money, finance, budgeting, etc. That isn’t to say I don’t know how, but I’ve learned how to do things better and more efficient. And if there is one thing someone should be, it is efficient. But, I do think a lot about it because of my own history, especially with how I was raised. For myself, I don’t care if someone makes a lot or a little, but I don’t agree with the ideology of most entrepreneurs that have this underlining thought that the money is out there, you just gotta be yourself and carve out your niche.
Here is what I mean, for some reason, probably because of capitalism and a less than adequate attention span, there are so many podcasts, blogs, “thought leaders”, and companies that promote this hustle culture mentality —if you grind enough, be dedicated, enrich your life, people will invest in you, then you’ll see the money come in. Maybe, you’ve heard some other kind of angle you’d like to take. On the whole, they state, you are a brand, so how are you going to gain attention and make people buy stuff you get a percentage from in the sale.
The key factor in all of this is attention. Attention comes in so many ways: content, sex appeal, aesthetic, products, marketing utilization, social media, luck of the draw. How can you make this one post double or triple, and then build on top of that. It is all a deck of cards that is basically geared towards, if you can say enough ethereal things that make people double tap, then you got a chance at making other people buy your stuff. In other words, how are you holding people’s attention. Now, if you’re influencer or product ambassador, good for you seriously. I’m not jealous, but I wonder about what it is telling us when we really think about it. This ideology’s basic premise is construct everything in a way that makes everyone wish and believe it can be them or empower them to do more.
In a way, most marketing within this current over socialized and networked world that we live in is still running Gatorade’s commercial “Mike vs Mia” playing the piece of composition from Irvin Berlin, “Anything You Can Do”. Except instead of a cut throat approach, it runs a more foggier angle. Wherein people are encouraged to learn to do anything others do because it WILL pay you too. If I need more evidence of it, go to YouTube and search anything about side hustles, money on YouTube, etc.
So what’s my beef with it, nothing actually. These are just some thoughts I had about it. You probably don’t care, and I don’t care about what you think of this. It is what it is. However, I spent five minutes thinking about this. Nevertheless, I will give my opinion on making money via side hustle avenues. If you want to make money and make a lot it, a good deal of it is doing the hard work and being appealing to everyone, which means not being too unique. You have to make a large group believe you and they are simpatico, even we all know you really can’t get along with 10 people a large portion of the time. However, much of it is probability. Likelihood. You’re playing a numbers game based upon a range of factors that you cannot calculate and control to pinpoint why something happened. Correlation doesn’t equal causation. It could just be something that happened, yet you draw conclusions, which are really just assumptions in this case. Hume taught me that one and that one is for free.
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