Women, Men & Money

By WILLIAM DEVINE
Random House (hard cover & paperback), 1998
274 Pages

ill Devine’s first book explores the paradox of using money to create both material prosperity and a fulfilling life.  It also examines, in the light of this paradox, the mechanics of investing in yourself and those you love, and the flaws in what often passes for investment wisdom in our culture.

Excerpt:

onsciously embracing work that fits you invariably entails risk.  Leaning on your talent, taking responsibility for being paid, learning to cultivate your success—this can seem like an uncertain avenue to the profit, connection to others, and sense of self-worth that you seek.

The truth is, though, that you don’t really have an attractive alternative…

If you give up on your talents, stop cultivating them, and instead opt for what seems like a certain paycheck, you sentence yourself to a life of pain.  There’s no middle ground between the risk and the pain, no place to hide out. It’s an either/or choice.

When you fail to cultivate your talents, you live small.  Whether you hide out as an accountant who wants to sculpt, a housewife who wants to be a nurse, or a CEO who longs to teach third graders, you are unaccomplished.

If you dare to take the risk—to cultivate your talent, live beyond the numbers—you put yourself in a position to flourish.  Amazing things can happen for you, as they have for my entrepreneur friend and for Michael the photographer.

Cultivating talent can seem like a complex task, but it is merely nonmathematical and it is the way life works.  The risk in finding and doing work that fits you is not so much that you may lose something essential to you as it is the simple willingness to embrace the unknown. Uncertainty aside, it is the right risk because the payoff is so rich.

Finding and doing work that fits you will secure you the self-esteem, the income, and the sense of connection that we all seek.  This effort is a huge part of how you become accomplished as a human being.

In an important sense this effort is also how to become an attractive human being. Which would you find more interesting: being with someone who can articulate who she is in the world, or being with someone whose actions indicate that she cannot say? Who sounds like a more intriguing partner in life: someone who’s working on bringing forth his talents, or someone who’s chronically bitter about living out a vision pressed on him by a short guy in a bow tie from Amherst?

When you glimpse your talents, start cultivating them at once.  Grab the chance to bring that richness forth, because in a powerful and fundamental sense, that is who you are and that is who your partner wants to meet...