Rule #3 In Business

I have 2 “Core Principles” established for my business, Nfqts, so it’s time for a third.

The first two are:

1. “Everyone’s Important” (more in the Twitter thread below or in this Medium article)

2. “Simplify Everything” (more in the Twitter thread below or in this Medium article.)

So the third core principle is “Money Is Secondary”.

This probably sounds cliche and lame… but I believe it’s more important than people realize. Here are some thoughts on Money and how I want to conduct business.

Money is a great thing to have, especially for businesses. It allows them to function more efficiently and get things done. HOWEVER… a LOT of businesses get put into situations where financial interests take over the essence of what their business was once about.

Businesses will go public to try to accelerate their growth, only to find that they now have a fiduciary duty to investors and it’s no longer practical to do “the right thing”. I believe that once your business becomes purely a numbers game… the soul of the business dies.

Once you start prioritizing profits over people, whether it’s your Customers… or your Employees… then you are simply waiting for the death of your Business. Cutting corners is part of life and a useful tool, but recklessly doing it is destructive, in my view.

This core principle ties into the first… “Everyone’s Important” but… it’s slightly different because it encompasses all of the gaps that aren’t people-related, and it serves as a reminder that money isn’t as important as making the World better.

Right now… I don’t do certain things even though they could put me on the fast track to success. I live in relative poverty and spend my time learning and working hard to try to make things actually better instead. I’m not perfect, but I try because it’s right.

I think that this kind of view is what’s missing in the world today, especially in business. People are very quick to set aside their morals for a buck, and they convince themselves that it’s worth it because they can brag about the amount of worthless paper they have.

I think we ALL get kind of caught up in things that might be considered “taking advantage” without even realizing it, and I am not here to judge or pretend I’m some Saint either. BUT… I need these kinds of rules as a reminder to make the right decisions when things are fuzzy.

And from a more practical view… do I really want to surround myself with people who only care about maximizing profits? I’d rather have a worker that believes in what I’m trying to do than someone who will leave immediately when someone offers them a dollar more.

I’d rather scale slow… and not need VC capital so I can make decisions that benefit the work I want to do. I’ve seen what businesses become once everyone and everything is just an analytic. It’s not fun. It’s not worth my time.

I’d rather make a product that I enjoy or that other people appreciate than make the “flavor of the month” type of bullshit. This kind of approach is going to be hard. There’s a reason why people go bananas on the money side of things… because it can blow things up like crazy.

But with that explosive growth comes an almost impossible standard to maintain. You see it with these NFT projects almost daily. They start mooning and the momentum is impossible to maintain, so they start grasping at thin air to keep it going and they die.

I don’t care if my work takes me 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years… I just want to do it in a way that I can be proud of and hopefully one day I can look around and see a better world. They say to “be the change you want to see in the World” so I am.

Thank you, have a wonderful day!