This Issue: Don’t Do it for the Money

Everyone knows I have a passion for life. The first sentence in my first book, The Art of the Deal , goes like this: “I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”

That book came out in 1987. It’s almost 20 years later and I’m still making deals and I’m still not doing it for the money. I think time is on my side because I have a lot more money now than I did then.

At the end of that book, I also mention that there are two things I have found myself to be very good at: overcoming obstacles and motivating good people to do their best work. I’ve had some major challenges since then, and thanks to my passion for life, I’ve met them all. I’ve even made a hit television show out of motivating smart people to do and be their best. I certainly didn’t see that one coming, nor did I see Trump University surfacing either. But here we are, with The Apprentice entering yet another season and Trump University expanding in many ways.

I didn’t get involved in either one of these ventures to make money. I had something to offer and the opportunities presented themselves to me. I was simply in the midst of doing my daily deals when these things found their way to me. It’s funny how that can work. Notice that I said I was working, doing my daily deals. I wasn’t sitting around waiting for people to come up with great ideas for me. Thanks to my passion for life, I was focused on my business and moving forward daily when they were presented to me. There’s something about keeping your momentum going that can work like a generator in producing and attracting good energy and great ideas.

If I was in it just for the money, I would never have ended up doing a lot of the things I’ve done. Take Wollman Rink, for example. My decision to renovate it didn’t come from any profit motive. I did it to save the city time and money. I knew I had the ability to get it done in less time and for less money. I loved doing that job because I love New York City and Central Park, and the citizens of New York deserve the best.

Ask yourself what give you a passion for life, then think about the money. If you think about the money first, you’ve got it all wrong. That’s a backwards approach to success, and it won't be very rewarding for very long. Sure, money is a scorecard and it is certainly useful, but it shouldn’t be the be all and end all. See it as the means to an end, but not the total reason for your efforts or endeavors. As Benjamin Franklin put it: “He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money. ”

You might be thinking that it’s easy for me to say what I’m saying because I’m already a billionaire. It probably helps, but even when I was a millionaire, my passion for life stemmed far past the end product. I had to care about what I was doing, while keeping the big picture in mind. I wanted to transform the Commodore Hotel into a beautiful Hyatt Hotel not just because it would be a great success, but because it would help the surrounding, increasingly dilapidated area of Grand Central on 42nd Street. That’s a major thoroughfare, and it was becoming an eyesore and an undesirable location in midtown Manhattan. My success there began a renewal that has continued to this day. Yes, I made money, but there was more to it than just that.

Give your goals substance. Imbue them with a value that exceeds the monetary. Make them count on as many levels as you can. Give them a subtext that will provide them with a dimension that will not only benefit you but other people as well. In other words, get the big picture. Finding your passion for life is an important aspect of thinking big--and a big step towards greater success.

Money is great. Yet if you study the lives of very wealthy people, you will discover that very few of them started out saying, “My goal is to get rich.” Almost without exception, they were driven by a personal passion for life that was so strong, money followed as an afterthought.

Consider Tom Chappell, the founder of Tom’s of Maine. His toothpaste, mouthwash, and other natural products are in more and more stores these days, from Wal-Mart to the corner drugstore. Chappell founded his company in 1970. He still owns it today, and he has been extremely successful in his life. His 2004 sales totaled $40 million. That’s not exactly Procter & Gamble territory, but it’s significant for a man with passion for life who still operates his company from one building in Kennebunk, Maine.

Chappell was a member of the Woodstock generation, an environmentalist and natural-foods fan. Back in 1970, his first product was a non-polluting laundry detergent. While that product was flopping, Chappell introduced a hastily concocted natural toothpaste and a mouthwash. When those products started selling briskly at health food stores, Chappell’s passion kicked in. His toothpaste embodied his values. It was being snapped up by a small but well-defined group of health-conscious consumers. So why stop there? Why not get a tube of his natural toothpaste into every home in America?

Over the years, that passion transformed Chappell into one of today’s most innovative marketers. In fact, his marketing concepts work so well that they have been adopted by major corporations. Chappell puts kiosks of his products in unlikely places in stores, for example. What is a toothpaste display doing in the middle of the produce section in a food store? Shoppers don’t understand, but they buy. According to retail analysts, his strategy can boost the sales of most products by as much as 65 percent. A passionate toothpaste maker thought it up, and now people are paying attention. Passion transformed Chappell from a granola guy into a mega-marketer.

Consider, too, the passionate for life of cosmetics magnate, Estee Lauder. Her real name was Josephine Mentzer. When she was a teenager, she whipped up her first batch of skin cream in a sink in the family apartment above her father’s hardware store in Corona, Queens.

Lauder started giving away samples of her creams at parties. People liked her products and started to buy from her. So, she visited every department store in New York until one, Saks Fifth Avenue, gave her counter space where she could sell her products.

That was in 1948. In the decades that followed, she built a company that, in some years, sold 45 percent of all the cosmetics in America and exceeded $3 billion in sales. Phenomenal success.

Her achievements were built on two passions: first, a commitment to high quality; second, fanatical supervision of the way her products were sold. When any department store began to sell her products, Lauder showed up and personally trained her salespeople. She did that in Dallas and Paris. When the GUM state department store in Moscow started to sell her products, Lauder showed up on the first day, too, and taught salespeople how to pitch her wares. The Iron Curtain couldn’t stop her--nothing could.

Chapell and Lauder could not be more different. One is a New England Yankee and the other was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Yet they were both transformed by the passion for life that brings ultimate success.

Let’s remember how lucky we are to live in a country that rewards ambition. Couple that ambition with a passion for life and watch what happens. One day the world will be reading about your success in the pages of glossy magazines.

Generally there are two types of people who claim they “don’t do it for the money”: those who already have plenty of money and those engaged in fundamentally non-lucrative creative or service-oriented fields like the arts or social work. In both cases, passion for life or some other deeply held personal value is what drives them to keep working and succeeding on many levels.

Artists epitomize the idea of working vigorously for something other than money. The creative realm is one of extremes--feast or famine--and the vast majority of artists make little or no money. They often pursue their “real” work as a sideline to some less than fulfilling job that pays the bills. Even successful, well-compensated artists usually started quite modestly and worked for years making no money while honing their talents. Visions of wealth and riches might be a key factor in the ascent of some artists, but even they must enjoy making art for its own sake to be successful at it on any level.

The process of making art, the day-to-day engagement with technique, and the whole experimental/trial-and-error mode at the root of creativity is miles away from the realm of dollars and cents. An artist will not be successful artistically or financially if he or she is not focused on the creative process. Finding a passion for life is separate from the process of moneymaking.

Products or enterprises spawned from passion and whim, rather than some wholly commercial impetus, have a different character. Compare a Motel 6 in Any Rest Stop, U.S.A, to a bed and breakfast in Vermont. Compare a blockbuster Hollywood movie, backed by a multimillion-dollar marketing/merchandising campaign, to a more nuanced film that is an obvious labor of love. When something is done not just for the money, it shows.

There are more than a few professions that require years of study and training, yet assume that whoever makes the effort will not get rich. Law enforcement, social work, environmental preservation, and countless other fields attract the sort of people who work for something besides money. It may be the feeling of making a difference in the community or helping others that motivates people to spend so much time training for a job that may actually result in a long period of financial struggle. In many of these cases, the work and the feeling that comes from seeing the results is its own reward.

Money is essential to the “business of life,” which revolves around food, shelter, intoxication, entertainment, and the rest. But so is the fact that there are aspects of human beings, deep-seated and very basic urges, which have little or nothing to do with money. Of course, money intersects with everything in this society, including our passion for life. That’s why some people who honestly claim they “don’t do it for the money” may actually make a lot of money doing what it is they don’t do for the money.