There is one metaphor that is widely use by life insurance agent to sell their product; some one who is willing to sacrifice his health for wealth but later end up sacrificing all of his wealth for his health. Sounds familiar?

You may not like it when your agent approaches you with such a generic metaphor. I don’t like it at all, especially with that agent’s typical dramatized tone and expression. But let us put this like and dislike aside and think of it, not because you want to buy an insurance cover, but the true essence of the metaphor. See?

Shifting my career from professional 9 to 5 job to my current professional business consultant and corporate advisor, I have seen more and more of this situation in individuals as well in businesses. In the case of individuals are more straight forward and obvious than of businesses. So let’s talk of businesses.

You have heard or read how many start-ups are collapse in the last 2-3 years. Then people start saying “gone is the era of burning money”. But I was – in fact still am – stunned with “how easy and quick” a start-up raised US$ 1 million, not to mention how ridiculous the business model, sometimes, to my simple and old school mind. Anthony Stevens and Lous Strauss in their book Chasing Digital put it this way; “….a start-up can raise $1 million in a few weeks with a glossy-looking pitch deck and a few handshakes.”

For us in Indonesia, let’s not forget how rich people burned their money in coal, where many of them ended up in court fighting to get their money back or to proof that they have legal possession of a certain coal concession. Not a few of them ended up selling their houses to pay the bank.

What I am trying to portrait here is burning money isn’t a domain of certain business or start-up only. And, therefore, the point I want to raise is how and where you should burn your money? You don’t want to find yourself burning your midnight oil, even if it was only took you “a few weeks with a glossy-looking pitch and a few handshakes.” to get what you have in your bank account now.

Most of start-ups burning their midnight oil in chasing valuation, sometimes virtual valuations. All energies, money, times and efforts are spent to create “perception”. But the problem is that perception could vanish in a count of days, weeks or months. I am sure your brain start picking up a certain company now that you knew has gone.

Perception could be a dangerous animal especially if you don’t have a tangible product to sustain the perception. There is a totally different basis of perception between, for example, Teh Botol Sosro with Bukalapak.

Many people known to me are busy trying to digitalize their business. Well, I am not here to judge, but thinking that all businesses could be digitalize is wrong, especially when you are not able to create an eco-system of your business platform to leverage the monetizing source. In my opinion there is a misleading euphoria and out of context thinking in digitalizing business, that – in my exaggerated words – a doctor could inject you digitally, or that you could cut a wood from forest digitally (at least not until Doctor Strange’s defying nature’s law could be realized).

This is where the metaphor of burning midnight oil in business could be applied, putting the resources to the right battle field. Your business may not have all the eco-systems to create a new monetizing source or leverage the current monetizing system that requires you to turn it digitally. May be your business is not a data driven business, may be what you need is to work together with other’s business platform that could create mutual benefits. Just don’t do it for the sake of doing it, or even worse, just to be where the wind blows.

Like nature’s law called gravity, there is a business’ law called money. No matter how high you fly, gravity will eventually bring you down.