A few years ago, I tried my hand at affiliate marketing. I sucked at it and I hated it and I wasted a lot of time and money trying to figure it out. I read a lot of stuff about how to do it properly to make huge sums of money. For a while, I thought that this is what I wanted, large sums of money. But something about the whole thing seemed sketchy to me. I didn’t like the idea of persuading people to buy stuff that I never tried, yet implicitly endorsed. Some of the tactics used were also very shady to me, and so I quit. I learned a ton, though, so in the end I am still glad I tried it.

Still, I couldn’t figure out what bothered me about the whole thing. There are plenty of affiliate marketers doing it with integrity and making buttloads of money, so it couldn’t be an integrity thing. Just keep it clean. So what then? It turns out, the reason it bothered me was that I wasn’t really speaking my truth. I wasn’t really bringing any value to the table, which turns out is pretty important to me. Sure, someone filled out a survey and I got paid $1.25 for my efforts to bring the user to do so. So what? Did the world become a better place? Was the user better off for filling out the survey? Maybe, possibly, but probably minimally.

I think this is probably what bothered me with my earlier jobs. I was helping people solve problems, sure, but did I make the world a little bit better? Not really. I helped companies become incrementally more efficient, thus lining their pockets ever so slightly more, and I’m not even sure I did that to be honest.

This is very obviously the altruistic side of me coming out, but that’s not the entire truth either. I still like making money. I still like eating deliciously unhealthy food and splurging on ridiculousness and partying with beautiful women (in my dreams, ok!). That’s a simple truth. Another truth, though, a more important one is this: before my time is up, I need to know that what I’ve done on this planet contributed, in some small way, to making this world a better place. I need it. Sometimes it’s hard to digest the signal from the noise, and sometimes finding your truth is hard to do. But sometimes it’s staring you right in the face.