Not everything has to be lucrative
Not everything needs to be profitable or efficient to be valuable. The most meaningful work often appears wasteful until it yields significant results.
Mon Jun 01 2026Most people think everything has to have a purpose you can measure. That’s not true, that’s noise.
The truth is, not everything needs to be lucrative. In fact, the moment you force everything to be about profit, you start killing the very things that make great work possible.
Because the best things—real creativity, real taste, real breakthroughs—don’t start with “What does this make?” They start with “What does this mean?” or even better, “What does this feel like when it’s right?”
You can’t spreadsheet your way into meaning.
A walk that clears your head. A piece of music you play just because it’s beautiful. A powerful performance that makes you uncontrollably tearing. A conversation that goes nowhere but changes how you think. None of that is efficient. None of that is optimised. But all of it shapes the kind of person who eventually builds something worth paying attention to.
We forget this when everything becomes a metric. We start confusing input with output, and activity with progress.
But here’s the thing: the most valuable work in your life often looks like waste while you’re doing it.
Until one day, it doesn’t.