I've extolled the virtues of getting fired here at BlogLESS before. I think everyone should get fired from a gig for standing up for their principles at least once, and this weekend – while you're upacking your winter sweaters – I wanted to give you something to think about with regards to the seemingly less accessible half of this equation. After all, it's easy to get fired: it's harder, though, to quit.

So get out your pencil and paper, this is going to require a little math. And listen: Don't think you can do this in your head and internalize it. You can't. You've got to see the numbers. Otherwise, its all going to seem like sound and fury, which I promise it's not. The payoff is huge. The day I really internalized this was the day my life got a lot happier. A lot.

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One of the questions that has been on my mind recently is, "what exactly happened on Wall Street last week, and why?" Thankfully, we have the New York Times' Freakonomics column, which offered a beautifully clear summary in a guest post by economists Doug Diamond and Anil Kashyap on Thursday. I paraphrase what they say below.

1. The US Treasury nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on September 8, and has since replaced the management of both companies and will presumably oversee their operation.
2. On Monday, the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history was made by Lehman Brothers.
3. On Tuesday, the Federal Reserve made a bridge loan to A.I.G., the largest insurance company in the world, securing the option to purchase up to 80 percent of the shares the company.

In short, the Fed has intervened on an unprecedented scale, in an unprecedented form, and in firms unprecedentedly far removed from its own supervisory authority. Wow! That's about the craziest thing that's happened in the financial universe since the Great Depression.

But why?

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If you're keeping up with the design-blogosphere, you've probably already seen that the British Royal Mint recently revealed their new coinage.

If not, then you have now.

The young gentleman responsible for these designs (which were chosen from a public contest) is Matthew Dent, who says this:

I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It's easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.

I've always thought that being charged to design currency would be an interesting design project. It certainly seems as if it would be incredibly high-stakes: as if literally everyone would have an opinion, as if this moment of design would really count. But would it?

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For several years, I worked with a startup, which, more than anything else, is really just a process of convincing yourself that all the pain now is worth the rewards in the future. Or else your startup is privately funded, in which case you basically work for a corporation with a policy where employees can give themselves their own job titles, but I digress, and anyway, this was not the case for me.

From my experience dealing with people in both situations, though, I think it is safe to assume that either way, you are surrounded by people thinking about money. I did this. I inadvertently surrounded myself with people who thought and cared a lot more about money than I did.

And you know what? Slowly but surely, I started to care about money. It crept up on me. I started thinking about it. I started using it as motivation for myself and the people on my team.

I turned into exactly what I didn't want to be, and it was because I had nothing else. The hours were crap, the pay was bad, the responsibility was enormous. I had no social life to speak of, and barely any sleep. It was everything it wasn't supposed to be.

So that ended (I won't tell you how). And after a several-month tailspin coming out of the experience, I am glad to say I've finally got something else again: My little design firm, Design Less Better.

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