The iSpy Moment
Choosing the Work That Matters, Even When You Don’t Want To
Most of us don’t get to choose the work that matters most to us.
We want to eat dinner with our kids, but the shift runs late.
We want to say yes to a game on the floor, but the bills on the counter say otherwise.
We want to be the kind of person who pays attention to the small moments —
but the pressure to survive pulls us away from them.
Money gets a lot of blame for this, but here’s the truth I keep circling:
Money itself isn’t the goal.
The point is having enough control of your time to choose the moments that matter.
Not luxury.
Not early retirement.
Not “never working again.”
Just the simple, ordinary freedom to say yes when life offers something real.
And sometimes that “something real” arrives disguised as the last thing you want to do.
So, a few days ago, while waiting outside the pediatrician’s office for my daughter to get her toe checked, she asked:
“Do you want to play iSpy?”
And everything in me wanted to say no.
Not because I was focused on something important.
Not because I was stressed or overwhelmed.
But because playing iSpy wasn’t in my top hundred things I’d choose for that moment.
If I’m honest, the top three would’ve been:
sit still and just think
pull out my phone and look for something to scroll
absolutely not play iSpy
But in that tiny pocket of resistance, I had one of those meta-moments — the kind educators love, the kind I love — where I stepped outside myself and observed my own reaction almost like an anthropologist:
Why don’t I want to do this? What am I resisting? What am I choosing?
And that led me straight into the thought I’ve been circling for months:
Work is the act of surrendering control to something that matters.
It’s not about productivity or output.
It’s about choosing to give yourself over to something — to let it shape your attention, your energy, your time — because it deserves that surrender.
Even when you don’t feel like it.
Especially when you don’t feel like it.
So in that moment, iSpy was the work.
Not the work I wanted to do.
The work I needed to choose.
Because here’s something I’m learning:
If I can’t choose this kind of work — the work of being present with the people I love — then maybe I’m not seeing my life clearly.
If I can’t choose iSpy, how will I ever choose the bigger, deeper versions of this same work?
This is where money comes back in — not as a goal, but as a tool.
I don’t believe money exists to give you endless time so you can do anything you want.
I believe money exists to protect the work that actually matters —
the work you want your life to be made of.
Money is there so I can structure my life to choose moments like this:
to not be the dad who gets home after the kids are asleep
to not be gone all weekend
to not be too drained to notice the invitations my kids are offering
to not trade presence for survival
The kind of dad I want to be — the kind of partner, the kind of human — is the one who values these unpredictable moments and sees them for what they really are: life.
And it’s funny: when I measure everything else against this, almost everything pales in comparison.
Yet playing iSpy still felt like work to start.
Which is why this small moment became a big one.
The Most Important Work in the Room
When you’re stuck in survival mode, you don’t get to choose moments like this.
You don’t get to pick connection over another shift, or presence over the next paycheck.
You don’t get to say yes to iSpy if saying yes means falling behind on the bills.
Money isn’t there so I can do anything I want.
It’s there so I can do this —
so I can say yes when it matters,
so I don’t have to trade these tiny, irreplaceable invitations
for hours of work I didn’t choose.
Because the truth is:
the most important work in the room isn’t always the work we have the freedom to do.
But every step toward financial stability widens that freedom.
It creates the space where connection becomes possible.
Where presence becomes a choice, not a luxury.
Where a simple game of iSpy — offered by a child who won’t always ask —
becomes the work that shapes a life.
This is why I practice money — because time is the real resource,
and money is just the practice that protects it.
Not to do everything.
But to be able, in moments like this,
to do the right thing.
And choosing that — even through resistance — is slowly teaching me how to choose the life I actually want, one quiet, ordinary surrender at a time.
An excellent article that teaches me to look at life in a way that really matters. Thank you!❤️