I get this question often enough that I wanted to answer it properly, once, instead of explaining it piece by piece every time it comes up. The short answer: money isn’t the thing I’m chasing — it’s something that follows from the work I choose. The rest of this page explains why, and why that’s a deliberate choice, not a lack of ambition.
I’m not saying money doesn’t matter. I need money, like anyone else — I have responsibilities, and I’ve earned money before. I know how to earn it, and I’m capable of earning considerably more of it than I currently do, if I chose to optimize purely for that.
What I’m saying is narrower: money is necessary, but it isn’t the goal I organize my decisions around. If a piece of work pays less but genuinely challenges me, I’ll choose it over better-paying work that doesn’t — and I think that’s a reasoned choice, not a careless one.
Psychology draws a line between intrinsic motivation — curiosity, mastery, the satisfaction of solving something difficult — and extrinsic motivation, like money or status. Neither is “better”; people are wired differently. I’m just telling you where I fall: intrinsic motivation is what moves me most. Money can and does motivate me when I need it to — it has simply never been the deepest reason I pursue anything.
I’m not interested in becoming slightly better at something everyone around me is already doing — that’s a low bar, and clearing it doesn’t excite me. I don’t benchmark myself against the average in my city or country either.
So the benchmark I actually use is global, not local — and ideally research-grade: work that’s unique, intellectually demanding, and hard to replicate. This isn’t about putting anyone else down — it’s about where I choose to point my own effort.
average
frontier
CS
Science (AI)
PhD
“You already have twelve-plus years of experience — why go back to studying?” Because learning doesn’t have an expiry date tied to professional success, as far as I’m concerned. I went back into formal study — an MS in Data Science with an AI focus — specifically to integrate it with the marketing expertise I already have, not to replace it.
This isn’t because I ran out of ways to monetize what I already know. What I don’t yet know is what becomes possible once I combine that skill set with technical and research capability I haven’t built yet — the same capability curve I map out in detail on my professional evolution page.
Knowledge on its own isn’t the goal — just knowing more doesn’t satisfy me. What I actually want is the full chain below. I don’t want to just operate existing tools well; I want to understand a problem deeply enough to build something different, and bring it into the real world instead of leaving it as an idea.
Thinking
Solving
When I talk about building a kind of monopoly, I don’t mean cornering a market or shutting out competition. I mean something narrower: developing a combination of knowledge and skills that very few other people happen to have put together — in my case, marketing, data science, AI, research thinking, and business understanding, stacked in a way that isn’t common. The point isn’t the combination itself — it’s what it lets me create, solutions other people aren’t positioned to create, because they haven’t built the same stack of capability.
“You already have valuable skills — just monetize them harder.” I understand the logic, and I don’t think it’s wrong for most people. I just don’t think it’s enough for me: if I spent my energy purely optimizing income from the skills I already possess, I’d be capping my own development at whatever I already know how to do.
It isn’t that I’m avoiding money — it’s that I don’t want financial optimization to quietly become a ceiling on the intellectual development I’m still in the middle of.
I don’t make these decisions by checking what a typical definition of success says I should be doing at this stage — and that’s not a rejection of conventional careers, or of people who build wealth as their primary goal. That’s a legitimate way to live. It just isn’t the one I’ve chosen. My direction comes from curiosity and ambition, not an external checklist.
compass
No. Money is necessary and I’m capable of earning considerably more than I currently do. What I’m saying is that it isn’t the goal I organize my decisions around — excellence and capability are.
Because I already know how to monetize my existing skills. Studying AI and data science is about closing a capability gap, not finding new ways to earn.
For most people, yes. For me it would cap my development at whatever I already know how to do — and I’m more interested in what I haven’t built yet.
Not market dominance. A rare combination of marketing, data science, AI, research and business capability that’s hard to replicate — not an attempt to shut out competitors.
It’s seriously under consideration — part of the same direction this page describes, not a separate plan.
I don’t measure my learning only by what it can earn me — I measure it by what kind of thinker, problem-solver, and creator it lets me become. I’m not avoiding money. I’ve put something else ahead of it, for reasons I hope this page makes clear.