Success: Its about Time, not Money
I heard of Alobar long before I met him. I was at my friend Cliff’s house and I picked up a leatherbound copy of the Necronomicon. It was the first hard-bound edition I ever saw and Cliff had two of them. The one in my hand had all the invocations translated into Enochian in-between the lines. That right there was a lot of work in the pre-internet era. That copy belonged to Bill Seibert, who went by many names, but eventually became most well known as Alobar Greywalker. I was suitably impressed with his dedication to magic.
Alobar recently passed. He was a cantankerous old Mage, and I loved him for it. I am a pretty private person off-line, but he met my wife a few times and we broke bread together more than once. I will miss him. He did not make a lot of money, but when i think about successful people that I actually know he is definitely on that list. He was a successful magician.
I have seen a lot of debate over how to judge a successful magician. Some seem to think that money equals success, and because of my focus on Financial Sorcery, maybe they think I agree. I don’t.
When I look at the people I know who are successful there is one common denominator: TIME.
They spend their time in accordance with their will. That’s it.
Money, Health, Enjoyments, these are things we have a decent amount of control over. Barring extreme circumstance, they can be improved with effort, or renewed and expanded. Time is not a renewable resource. It is ticking away even as you read this, therefore it seems reasonable to judge the success of a life by how that time was used.
Are you spending your time mostly in accordance with your goals? That’s really it.
Alobar was not rich, and I have no doubt that he had a lot of problems stemming from lack of money, but overall he lived a life doing what he loved full time: Magic. He read cards on Jackson Square in New Orleans, one of the most famous places in the world for readers to be.
My friend Jeff rakes in a few million every year, but hates his job that takes 80 hours or more a week. It also makes him kind of a miserable bastard with bad relationships outside that 80 hours too.
If you are in business, the secret is not always about getting bigger. Its about not turning this thing you love into something you hate. That MAY involve scaling up, but it could mean scaling down.
I am convinced that service is at the heart of this satisfaction. I really am. That doesn’t mean a life of charitable works, though it might. It just means that every person I have ever met that felt not just happy, but fulfilled, was serving others in some fashion. It may be the world, or it may be just your family, but something beyond just your own satisfaction seems the central ingredient to a life of purpose.
Want to talk about whose magic is successful and whose isn’t? It’s not about the bank account and its not about the problems that person may have faced…
Time is the fire that consumes the fuel that is life. 
Thinking about how that time can be of service…
Will be the key to money 
or Love 
or health or just being happy… 
