What Would You Do If Money Were No Object? Alan Watts' Question

“What would you like to do if money were no object?” is the question British-born philosopher Alan Watts said he put to students who came to him for career advice. His answer was blunt: find the thing you would do for free, then work out how to make a living from it, because a life spent doing what you dislike just to keep doing it is wasted. Australian cartoonist Gavin Aung Than turned that short talk into one of the best-known strips on his webcomic Zen Pencils, reproduced below.

The question is worth asking, and it is also worth asking carefully. It can reveal what genuinely motivates you, but it does not make rent, family duties or job markets disappear. This page walks through the comic, the ideas behind it, what psychology research says about motivation, and a practical way to use the question without treating money worries as a failure of imagination.

Who Alan Watts was, and where the question comes from

Alan Watts (1915–1973) was born in Chislehurst, Kent, moved to the United States in 1938 and became an American citizen in 1943. He became famous for explaining Zen Buddhism, Taoism and Hindu philosophy to Western audiences, in books such as The Way of Zen (1957), The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), and in popular radio talks on the Berkeley station KPFA. He liked to call himself a “philosophical entertainer”.

The money passage comes from one of his recorded lectures. A roughly three-minute edit titled “What If Money Was No Object?”, set to music, went viral on YouTube in 2013, four decades after his death, and introduced him to a new generation. The Zen Pencils strip adapts that audio almost word for word.

What the comic shows

Zen Pencils, created by Gavin Aung Than after he left a job in newspaper design, adapts inspirational quotes, poems and speeches into comic strips. In this strip, number 98 on the site, Watts appears as a bearded lecturer at a blackboard listing three questions: what do you desire, what makes you itch, what sort of situation would you like?

A group of students confesses they have no idea what to do after college. When pressed, they light up: they want to be painters, poets, writers, or live outdoors and ride horses. Then their faces fall as they recite the common wisdom that nobody can earn money that way. Watts points at one young woman and tells her to do it anyway, and to “forget the money”.

The next panels follow that same young woman into an alternative future. She works at a grey office desk, her brain is literally lifted out and dropped into a jar, and she ends up running inside a giant hamster wheel. Watts’s narration explains why: if you treat getting money as the most important thing, you “will spend your life completely wasting your time”, doing things you dislike in order to keep living so you can keep doing them. The final page shows the other future: she becomes a horse rider, wins trophies, teaches children and ends up running her own riding school at sunset. Watts’s narration argues that if you truly like what you do, you can become a master of it, and mastery is what eventually earns a good fee.

Why the question works: what motivation research says

Watts was speaking as a philosopher, but psychology has since studied something close to his point. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed self-determination theory, set out in their 1985 book on intrinsic motivation. It describes three basic needs that support well-being: autonomy (feeling your choices are your own), competence (feeling capable) and relatedness (feeling connected to others).

Work that meets those needs tends to be sustained longer and with more satisfaction. Deci’s early experiments, starting in 1971, also found something surprising: students paid for each puzzle they solved later spent less free time on the puzzles than students who were never paid. External rewards can sometimes crowd out the enjoyment of an activity people already liked, while encouragement and positive feedback tended to increase it.

So the “money is no object” question is a handy shortcut. By removing pay from the picture for a moment, it helps separate activities you value for their own sake from those you do only for the reward.

Where the advice falls short

Taken literally, “forget the money” is advice that is easier to follow if you already have some. Many people support children or relatives, carry debt or live where few jobs exist in their field of interest. For them, financial necessity is not a lack of imagination; it is a fact to plan around.

There is also a well-known debate about “follow your passion” advice. Author and computer scientist Cal Newport argued in So Good They Can’t Ignore You (2012) that passion often grows after people become skilled at something and gain control over their work, rather than existing in advance. Watts himself made a similar point in the talk: you become good at what you are interested in, and mastery is what eventually makes it pay. That part of his message is often lost in quote graphics.

Common myths about the money question

• “If you love it, you will never work a day in your life.” Any meaningful work has dull and hard days; the difference is whether the overall effort feels worthwhile.
• “Passion must become your job.” Many people keep a loved activity as a serious hobby precisely so money does not change it.
• “Choosing security means giving up.” A stable job can fund and protect time for what matters most to you.

A practical way to use the question

Instead of an all-or-nothing leap, try treating the question as a source of information. A few steps help:

1. Write your honest answer. List what you would spend a free year doing, without editing it for practicality.
2. Look for the underlying needs. Does your answer point to creativity, being outdoors, helping people, solving problems, or independence? Those needs can often be met in more than one way.
3. Find a small version now. An hour a week of painting, volunteering or learning a skill gives you real evidence about whether you still love it when it takes effort.
4. Map the paths to income. Talk to people who already earn a living in that area and ask what their week actually looks like.
5. Build a bridge. Savings, part-time work or a gradual shift can reduce risk while you test a change.

Repeat the question every few years. Answers change as people do, and a reply that once sounded impossible can become realistic with time and skill.

The lasting value of the question

The comic remains popular because it puts a simple mirror in front of the reader. Most of us rarely stop to ask whether our daily routine serves what we care about or only keeps the routine going. Watts’s challenge, in Gavin Aung Than’s drawings, invites that check-in without prescribing one answer.

Ask it with kindness toward yourself: the goal is not to feel guilty about a sensible job, but to make sure that some part of your time goes to the work or play you would choose even if nobody paid you.

Sources: comic by Gavin Aung Than, Zen Pencils #98: Alan Watts, What if money was no object?, via Why Dont You Try This; Wikipedia: Alan Watts; Wikipedia: Zen Pencils; Wikipedia: Self-determination theory.

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