Don’t Cash It In

Don’t Cash It In

True godliness with contentment is itself great wealth. . . . But people who long to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many foolish and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, craving money, have wandered from the true faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows. 1 Timothy 6:6, 9-10

When I was an assistant coach with the Pittsburgh Steelers, I received an offer to take a job with another club. I was making around $25,000 at the time, and they were going to offer me a salary in the neighborhood of $30,000. It doesn’t seem like such a big amount to some people, I’m sure, but that $5,000 was a 20 percent increase over what I was making in Pittsburgh and a big difference to me at the time.

I asked Coach Noll if I could talk to him about it. I really wanted to stay in Pittsburgh, but I didn’t want to pass up a chance of making more money. I was secretly hoping he would encourage me to stay by matching the offer. He did encourage me to stay, but told me he would support my decision either way.

The one piece of advice he gave me was to not make my decision based solely on money. Coach Noll urged me to consider who I would be working with, what I could learn from them, what type of environment it would be, and how much responsibility I would be given. He felt those were the important things to weigh, and if I became a good enough coach, eventually my salary would reflect that.

Through my years as a coach, and especially as a head coach, I tried to impress that on players. At times guys became eligible for free agency, and I would have to have an “it’s not just about the money” talk with them. Certainly they had to weigh the differences of financial offers that they received, but as several of them learned, taking more money and moving to a different team sometimes resulted either in an unhappy, disrupted family or with their careers heading in a different direction than they enjoyed with our team. In a couple of instances, guys ended up out of the league more quickly than they would have if they had stayed with us. For them, the short-term financial gain wasn’t worth the long-term results.

Does money have an unhealthy hold on you? Remember, it’s not money itself that is the problem. It’s the love of money that will spin everything out of control.

Uncommon Key > The decisions you make in your life are based on your priorities. Write down your top five priorities. Where does money rank on that list? If it is high in your priorities, make a concerted effort to lower its importance in your life.