Episode 182 - You Don’t Work To Make Money; You Work Because You’re Told To Act

What if the real reason you work has nothing to do with making money? We dig into a radical shift: provision is set, effort is still required, and the point of work is to act with integrity and purpose. That lens changes everything—how you pick a career, how you handle pressure, and how you measure success when the market shouts one thing and your conscience whispers another.

We walk through the common script—chasing titles, picking degrees for status, equating job choice with income maximization—and replace it with a clearer path. Start by naming your actual gifts. Choose a vocation that lets those strengths serve others while preserving your spiritual practice and your sanity. Whether you’re a plumber or a partner at a firm, you can thrive without selling out your values. We talk candidly about the lure of shortcuts, the quiet forms of manipulation that creep into “respectable” jobs, and why those choices cost more than they pay. The alternative is simple, not easy: show up, work clean, and let outcomes land where they should.

Along the way, we share practical cues for career pivots in a shaky economy, from protecting your schedule to finding teams aligned with your standards. We explore how trust lowers anxiety, sharpens judgment, and makes you easier to live with at home and at work. When you stop worshipping the paycheque, you gain focus, resilience, and the calm that makes better results more likely. If you’re choosing a path, changing lanes, or wrestling with ethical pressure, this conversation will help you reframe work as a place where your best self can stand up and stay standing.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who’s weighing a career move, and leave a review telling us what you’ll do differently this week.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Frame: Trust And Work
• 0:16 Why Do You Work At All
• 1:48 Income Decreed And Human Effort
• 3:20 Choosing Careers Beyond Status
• 5:23 Ethics, Shortcuts, And Inner Turmoil
• 9:15 Clarity, Calm, And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Trust Factor, the podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. Shavuatov, wishing you a good week, despite the fact that the Jays lost. Lick your wounds, my friends. Pick yourself up and move forward. It was fun while it lasted. Now let's get back into reality. We are discussing the differences between people who have trust in God and those who do not, who might be fooling themselves to think that they have trust in God. And what is the fifth area that distinguishes between those two people, those who have trust and those who do not have trust? Has got to do with engaging in worldly means. In other words, your livelihood, making a living. What do you do for a living? Where are you running to to make your money? Are you doing the thing that you're doing for a living that you're waking up every morning to go and do in order to amass funds? You hear this? Am I going to work to make money? If you ask 98% of the population today, this question, why do you go to work? The first answer they will give you is a variation of to make money, to provide for my family, to pay tuition, to do the end, because the work is the means to the end. I'm doing the work to supply or provide for the end, to pay my mortgage. What do you mean? I have bills. I need to work to pay my bills. That is the way the secular world has programmed us. So if your answer to why do you work for a living, why do you get up in the morning and go to an office and spend eight, ten hours in an office, why? The answer, nine out of ten times, is because I need to make money. And you would think that's a normal answer. You might question me right now, thinking to yourself, Jesse, what's wrong with that answer? I mean, isn't that why we all go to work? You know what the answer is? No, that's not why you go to work. According to Sharbi Tachon, and somebody who has trust in their creator knows that my income was determined for me on Rosh Hashanah, just like Mark Halpern said last week. That's determined for me on the Jewish New Year. And that means that no matter what happens, no matter where I work for a living, no matter what I do as a job, I'm going to make that money as long as I step up and make my effort. I can't sit at home. I can't sit on my couch. I can't lay in bed because we know we have to make an effort. God only helps those who help themselves. So I have to get up and I have to make an effort. This is the world that's called Olama Asiyah, the world of doing. We need to be active. We need to actually go out and do things in this world in order to achieve an end result. But the reason I'm going to work is not to make money. It's only because God told me that I need to do something in order to earn my keep. I have to earn it now by the sweat of my brow. I need to make an effort. That's not the way the world was designed originally, by the way. When Adam and Eve came in, it was this is club med, like again, like Mark said. This is club med, a life of club med for the soul. You're just here to nourish your soul and to take from God's spectacularism and grow with it and enjoy it. That's what we were originally brought into this world for. But when we transgressed, when we did wrong, we demonstrated the evil inclination, and now we have to work for the rest of creation in order to bring us back to that point where we are in the next world doing exactly what we were brought into this world to do. So the person who chooses their job doesn't choose it based on what society tells him is going to give them the best odds to earn money. That is exactly the way people function today, by the way, right? Especially in Jewish families. We want doctors, we want lawyers, we want accountants. Why? I'll show you many, many of my friends who are plumbers, electricians, HVAC gas specialists, all these people in the trades working with their hands, and they're making a very, very good living. They're paying all the same bills that everybody else pays who are making a lot more than they are, and there's nothing that they're missing out on in this life. They've got everything that they need and most of the things that they want. They're working with their hands. They're not doctors, they're not lawyers, none of these things. It does not matter what you do for a living. You can be in the garbage business, the waste management business. You can be the guy on the back of the truck picking up the trash, or you can be the CEO of a waste management company making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year. You don't have to be a lawyer in order to do that. In fact, there are many lawyers who are just getting by. There are many lawyers who aren't even working in their field. They spent untold fortunes to get into the industry, lawyers and accountants, and they're not practicing because only after they've graduated and gotten into the workforce did they realize that it is not for them. They got in it for the wrong reason. They were chasing money, they were chasing a dream, and at the end of the day, it wasn't fulfilled. So now what? They go out and they try and figure out, just like we said earlier, that you have to position your vocation, what you do for a living, based on your attributes. Have you done the soul searching? Do you know what you're cut out for? Once you've established what God gave you as talents, innate talents, to be able to change this world in a positive way, and each and every one of us has it because we're all here and we all have our unique role. God imbued you with a unique role. If you figured out what that talent is, then find the vocation that's going to allow you to extract as much as you can from that vocation to be able to fulfill your test in this world. Not the money. The money was determined on Rosh Hashanah. That's it. Just get up and give 100%, and the rest will come irrespective of what you're doing. He says accordingly, this person will choose to engage in an occupation that he is sure will preserve his Torah observance. If that's in your mind, if in your mind when it comes time, and you know there's a lot of young people listening to this podcast, and you don't have to be young, you know, we're living in an economy right now that is that is really uncertain. A lot of people have lost their jobs and now they're getting a second chance, a new opportunity, and a new career. What are you gonna choose? Are you gonna choose wisely? Have you been around long enough to recognize, to see God's handiwork in your life, that you know that it doesn't matter what you do for a living, it just matters that you do, and that you do good, that you choose a vocation that is in line with what God wants from you? And if you do that, if you're choosing it because you want to preserve your Torah, and better than that, you want to share your Torah, you want to make the world a better place, then you are on the right track, my friends. That's an individual who trusts in God, and that person will not engage in any occupation that is in any way detrimental to his Torah observance, or that may bring him to defy the will of his creator, or that he should not, through his occupation, God forbid, bring sickness upon himself rather than healing. Do you know how difficult it is for people who choose to live a life of corruption? People make an actual choice to say, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not here to work for a living. I'm not here to be like the masses. I want to get as much as I can as quickly as I can and with as little effort as I can. Why? Because I'm emotionally and intellectually lazy and I'm driven by my greed, by my evil inclination for money. So I'm going to do whatever it takes to make a lot of money really, really fast, and I'm going to risk and throw out all of my morals and ethics and my teachings and my Torah in order to get there. And then when they're there, their life is always in turmoil. Always to the point where they're always watching over their shoulder. They're always concerned with what their family thinks about them, their spouses, their children, how this is going to end, if it's going to end well or not. Who's going to come knocking on the door? When is that not going to appear? They're always concerned. They're not living a settled life. They're always on edge, always on guard. It's a terrible way to live, my friends. It's not just somebody who's outwardly a criminal. That person has it difficult, no question. He may not even realize it. Or if he does, he recognizes it's a trade-off. To make that easy money comes at the cost of his emotional health and well-being and that of his families. But I'm talking about anybody, just your average sales guy, or just your average manufacturer who says to himself, you know what, I can cut corners. I can manipulate the system. I can lie, cheat, and steal, even within an ethical business. I don't need to be a gangster, a mobster, a criminal, straight out, flat out thief. I can be an accountant. I can be a salesperson. I can be an administrator in a company. It doesn't matter. I can always find an opportunity to manipulate the system to be able to make it work better for me in an unethical manner. Are we doing that? Do we find ourselves doing that? And if we do, then you have to remember that you're questioning now your trust with your creator. You're questioning your understanding or belief or knowledge that God determined your income on Rosh Hashanah. All you need to do, my friend, is show up. That's it. You don't need to be crafty and creative. You don't have to figure out a way to manipulate the system. You don't have to figure out a way to come out on top and ahead of your neighbor. All you need to do is show up. The question is, if you find yourself trying to always manipulate the system, do you really believe that your money, that your income, that everything that you have comes from your creator? It's a big question, Mark, my friends. We should all have clarity when it comes to where our money is coming from. Because when you have that clarity, when you know it's coming from God, not when you think, not when you believe, but when you know with absolute certainty that it comes from your creator and he controls absolutely everything, and everything is perfect, then and only then can you operate at your highest level. The real you shines through. You're not living a life of emotional distress. You are calm and at ease, and those who interact with you will recognize immediately who the real you is, because it will be front and center. That wraps it up for today, my friends. Looking forward to a wonderful week. We'll speak again tomorrow.