You Are What You Won’t Do For Money

—Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Shortform.

It was a sales pitch, so I take it with a grain of salt, but according to an email I got a few weeks ago, I have a seven-figure opportunity sitting in front of me.

And I’m apparently too stupid or closed-minded to see it. 

All I would have to do is partner with a supplement maker and produce a line of supplements connected to the Daily Stoic brand—marketing their ability to help with “calm, clarity, and resilience”—and I could very easily make several million dollars. They’d handle everything: procurement, production, design, fulfillment. I’d just have to lend my brand and my platform to do it. 

The only problem? I don’t want to. 

I’m not exactly opposed to supplements or vitamins. I actually take a few each morning. I even advertise some on the Daily Dad and Daily Stoic podcasts. Nor am I opposed to making money. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it, and neither did the Stoics (“No one has condemned wisdom to poverty,” Seneca writes in On The Happy Life. “The philosopher shall have considerable wealth, but it will not have been pried from any man’s hands, and it will not be stained with another man’s blood.”)

But I have always declined to do things like Daily Stoic T-shirts and hats and cheap merch: It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t get me excited. It doesn’t seem like a responsible use of my platform. 

So as long as I’m in charge, it won’t be. 

I remain a proud capitalist. I have built companies and invested in many others over the years. I make and sell a lot of things for Daily Stoic. But I like the things we make. I believe in them. They were things I wanted to create for my own personal use or that I thought addressed a real need—that they worked commercially was extra. (Nor do I pressure anyone about them. If you don’t like it…don’t buy it! That’s the other part of capitalism when it works well: It is a voluntary exchange.)

I understand that there is a certain privilege in my attitude, which is why I do my best not to judge people in different financial circumstances. At the same time, I have come to believe that we are defined by the things we don’t do for money. 

Do you know who Audie Murphy is? He’s the most decorated soldier in American history. Before he turned 21, he fought in nine campaigns, was wounded three times, and received 33 medals for valor—including the Medal of Honor, three Purple Hearts, and every combat decoration the Army offers. Once, against an onslaught of 250 German soldiers and six tanks, Murphy ordered his men to fall back to safety—alone, he climbed into a burning tank destroyer and used its single machine gun to hold off the Nazis for over an hour, single-handedly killing 50 of them, refusing to give an inch of ground, holding the woods until reinforcements came. (Read his memoir, To Hell and Back…it’s incredible.)

After the war, he became an actor and a musician. In 1968, he did another courageous deed: he turned down enormous sums of money to appear in a series of cigarette and alcohol commercials. “How would it look: ‘War Hero Drinks Booze’?” he said. “I couldn’t do that to the kids.”

I was also struck by Harry Truman’s ability to rise up through the corrupt Kansas City political machine without being corrupted. “In all this long career, I had certain rules I followed, win, lose or draw,” Truman explained. “I refused to handle any political money in any way whatever. I engaged in no private interest whatever that could be helped by local, state or national governments. I refused presents, hotel accommodations or trips which were paid for by private parties…I made no speeches for money or expenses while I was in the Senate. I lived on the salary I was legally entitled to and considered that I was employed by the taxpayers, and the people of my country, state and nation.” I was even more struck by his post-presidency years because they stand in such contrast to the practice today: Truman was nearly broke after leaving office. In fact, the reason there is a presidential pension is because people were concerned about a destitute former president! Yet for Truman, this outcome was vastly preferred to compromising his principles. 

In Right Thing, Right Now, I tell the story of Martha Graham, who was approached in 1935 with the opportunity of a lifetime: an invitation to present her work at the upcoming Olympics. It was a chance to dance on the world stage, the kind of opportunity that no talented or ambitious person could afford to turn down.

​​Yet there she was, turning it down.

“Three-quarters of my group are Jewish,” she told the emissaries from Berlin. “Do you think that I would go to a country where they treat hundreds of thousands of their coreligionists with the brutality and cruelty that you have shown Jews?” Shocked that self-interest hadn’t worked—that she wouldn’t look the other way like so many others—the Nazis tried a different tactic. “If you don’t come,” they warned, “everyone will know about it and that will be bad for you.”

But Graham knew precisely the opposite was true. “If I don’t come,” she said, “everyone will know why I didn’t and that will be bad for you.” She may have been a starving artist well into her forties and could have used the money and exposure, but it wasn’t worth her integrity. It wasn’t worth her soul. By acting on her principles, she struck a public blow against an evil not enough people had yet condemned. 

Back in April, I told this story on stage at the global gathering of the Entrepreneur’s Organization. Everyone broke out in applause at Graham’s line, but as they say–and as Graham would have experienced–you can’t live on gratitude or respect. It must have been a hard choice. It must have been a scary choice. It was the right thing to do as a person…but it didn’t change the fact that she still had her financial obligations as a businesswoman with dancers to support.

Every entrepreneur knows that struggle. You have your views…and you also have payroll to meet. Or investors to satisfy. Or your ego to fill…

It’s the scene in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby approaches the young Nick Carraway, the cousin of Daisy Buchanan, the love of Gatsby’s life. Ultimately hoping to win back Daisy, Gatsby tries to first win over Carraway. “I carry on a little business on the side, a sort of sideline,” Gatsby tells him. “And I thought that if you don’t make very much…this would interest you. It wouldn’t take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential thing.”

It’s only later that Nick, understanding more clearly that Gatsby was a gangster and a bootlegger, comes to see that “under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life.” Gatsby was trying to draw him in, hoping to hook him on the money and the lifestyle. 

I have not always been good at this and I have gotten myself into some fixes that might have gone badly for me. I sometimes look back at clients and people I worked for in my twenties—and even later—and I feel the urge to take a shower. Growing up, I suspect I heard my parents talk more about financial success than about integrity or ethics. It took time for me to develop both the character and the confidence to be better able to say “NO” to things that gave me the ick or that seemed iffy. 

I wrestle with it still. I turned down a talk last year from an organization I thought was a scam. I weighed whether I should cancel another one recently with someone whose politics I find abhorrent.  

My reading has helped me get better at this. Perhaps because my inclination was to make money, I found it particularly impressive when people turned down an opportunity to make money. Especially when those people really needed it. Especially when it was a lot of money.  

Imagine if you had been offered one of those enormous greenwashing contracts from LIV, a Saudi-backed rival league. Ditching the PGA (and trying to bully their old league into letting them keep their privileges in the process) wasn’t technically illegal. But it was definitely pretty gross.

Rory McIlroy turned down hundreds of millions of easy dollars because he believed that the new league was bad for the game. That where his money comes from matters. That his choices don’t just reflect his own values and priorities, they shape those of the many young players, the future generation of golfers, who look up to him. And that a decision “you make in your life purely for money,” he explained, “doesn’t usually end up going the right way.”

(And by the way, what was his reward for this? His game took a major hit from the distraction and the PGA hung him out to dry!)

But that can be how it goes. 

Do you know what they called Truman when he was elected to the Senate? The colleagues who didn’t snub him as a hick referred to him as the “Senator from Pendergast”—implying that he was bought and purchased, in the pocket of Tom Pendergast, the all-powerful Kansas City boss. Truman, who had forgone millions in bribes and deals, still got stuck with a reputation for being corrupt! 

If you’re making the right decision because you want to be rewarded reputationally, you’re probably going to be disappointed. 

Even though I feel like I’ve made some expensive decisions about what I won’t do in my career—as well as some expensive decisions in how we do what we do (I talk about our manufacturing and import decisions here)—I still have to put up with people accusing me of “$toicism” or being a grifter or whatever. There are plenty of people who dislike the coins we make or the courses we have done—or even the fact that I write books! I turn down all sorts of lucrative ads—from gambling sites and alcohol companies and THC companies and crypto—and still, the comments sections on our videos and the podcast are filled with complaints about advertisers. I’m sure someone will respond to this very email with a disagreement about whoever sponsored it. 

That’s something Marcus Aurelius talks about in Meditations—the frustrating experience of “earning a bad reputation by good deeds.” It can even be more galling than that. Someone else will do some kind of Stoic supplement at some point! They’ll probably make a bunch of money from it. 

That person will just not be me. 

You can’t call it a principle, as the expression goes, unless it has cost you something—money, access, friends, followers, convenience, an opportunity to get ahead. 

You shouldn’t call yourself rich unless your hands are clean.

It’s not really your platform unless you decide what goes on it. 

You’re not free if you can’t say no.

And you don’t know who you are unless you know what you won’t do for money.