“It is not easy for a person whose quality is frustrated by poverty to rise.” — JUVENAL
There’s no denying that money plays an important role in life, but what exactly is that role? Is money a harmful distraction, or does it help us live more consciously? Which is better, to give or to receive? Is being poor more enlightened than being rich?
Even among highly conscious people, money can be a highly controversial and polarizing topic. Social constraints give us so many conflicting views on this issue that it’s no wonder people are confused. Confusion about money leads us to separate the financial part of our lives. Money became a separate thing, with its own rules and formulas. We see it as something that must be separated from the rest of life, sealed in a vault, lest we be infected by its inhumanness.
Like most people, I grew up with an awkward perception of money. On the one hand, I see evidence that money is a good thing. Intellectually speaking, material wealth seems to matter because money clearly has certain advantages. It can buy food, clothing, shelter, transportation, education, technology, entertainment, medicine, and so on. Given the way society works today, money can solve many problems. Of course, it certainly won’t solve all problems, and it will create new problems of its own, but overall, money is a powerful tool for solving problems. Radio host Earl Nightingale said it best. “There is no substitute for money in the areas where it is useful.”
On the other hand, there are things I don’t like about money. Intuitively, I found it hollow and meaningless. I don’t like it being used as a gatekeeper for certain privileges, such as proper medical care, healthy food, or decent educational resources. What bothers me more is that some people will behave disgracefully for those privileges. While I am sometimes impressed by the achievements of the wealth magnates, many of them gained their wealth in ways I can’t stand.
Have you struggled with a similar conflict? If so, you’re not alone, because this conflict is largely the result of social constraints. There are factors that tell us that money is very important; Others tell us it’s not. Notice what happened over the holidays? Advertisers spend money on advertising! To spend money!!!!! Spend money!! They suggest that the more money we spend, the happier our holidays will be; On the other hand, some classic movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” tell us that interpersonal relationships are much more important to see through the essence of money. Mutually exclusive signals abound.
The social constraints of money also affect how we relate to each other. What kind of predictions would you make about people based on their financial situation? What do you think of a millionaire? What about someone who’s totally broke? What’s it like dating someone who makes ten times as much as you? What if he makes a tenth of what you do?
These mixed associations lead many conscious people to conclude that money itself is the problem. Perhaps it is best to have no it at all, or at least to minimize its role in life. If money really is an interference with a conscious life, wouldn’t the most conscious choice be to avoid money altogether? Do you think you should give up all your possessions and go live in some cave?
Despite what you may conditionally believe, the simple truth is that money has no special rules. It follows the same principles of truth, love and power as any other part of life. Trying to insulate yourself from financial reality is a mistake. In this chapter, I’m going to give you a holistic way of thinking about money that meets both your intuition and your logic.
Money and truth
What is money? Money is a social resource — the main social resource. Money itself has no intrinsic value, but we give it value by social consensus. If you have $100, you can extract the value of $100 from society by spending it, because we all agree that $100 has some value. If we all agree that money is worthless, it has no value.
Because it is a social resource, money is not a perfect medium of exchange. The value of anything, including money itself, is determined by social consensus. It could be a common understanding between two people, like when you buy something from another person; It can also be a group consensus, like when you buy or sell stock in a publicly traded company.
Despite the consequences, you can opt out of the social contract of money. Most people think this is impractical, but it’s a viable option. However, if you still want to use social resources, you have to create your own social contract. This may include “barter” or other forms of exchange. It may also involve using relationships to meet your social needs.
For most people, the social contract of money is too convenient to ignore. It’s not perfect, but it works better than the alternatives. By assigning monetary value to social exchanges and making it easy to transfer money, transactions can also be conducted relatively easily. Buying groceries, working or going online are all examples of social transactions, all of which can be reduced to money. Even money itself can be priced, as anyone in debt can easily prove.
The essence of money is social credit. It is an IOU from the society, so that when you spend money can draw a certain social value. The more money you have, the more society owes you, and the more value you can withdraw.
Now let’s think about the nature of making money. Since money is a social resource, making money means getting more social resources. When you spend money, you convert it into social value. But when you make money, you convert social value into money.
One way to make money is to sell things. Sell an item to someone who wants it, and you receive money; Another way is to buy things for a certain price and then turn around and sell them for more than they cost. Companies exploit resources around the world and sell them for a profit. Individuals often take the form of buying goods, stocks or bonds at a certain price and then selling them at a higher price. Sometimes the value increases over the course of the transaction (perhaps simply because it is easy to raise the price); Other times, money is often made through the inefficiencies of the market, where one side of the transaction gains from an unbalanced exchange that extracts more value than it provides.
Perhaps the most common way to make money is to sell your time. Get a job and trade your time for money. The more your labor is capable of providing social value, the greater your earning potential. The difference between $25 and $250 an hour is that the latter’s work has greater social value. This is no one’s fault; the difference is due to a social consensus about the value of certain jobs. Notice the difference between absolute and social values. Top athletes may not be doing useful social work in absolute terms, but they are paid based on the collectively recognised social value of their performance, which is currently very high.
Another way to make money is to set up a system that makes money for you, such as a business. This one is my favorite because it provides more leverage than the time of sale. It’s also less risky in the long run because it’s safer to have and control a revenue-generating system than to have a job where you can be fired or laid off. Note 1
You can also make money by selling money itself. By investing in assets, you can earn interest, dividends, or make money in the form of capital gains.
Of course, the last way to make money is to steal. This has been a popular option throughout human history, but I won’t seriously consider it here.
All this is really just common sense, but it’s amazing how easy it is to overlook the simple fact that money was invented to facilitate the exchange of value. It is a great mistake to dismiss money as evil and unnecessary. When properly aligned with truth, love and power, it becomes a valuable tool for conscious living. It’s too important to ignore. If you want to live consciously, you must learn to use money wisely.
Money and love
The principle of love suggests that we adjust our connection to money on a deeper level, so let’s do this in full and see what the process reveals.
There are two basic ways to make money:
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Make a meaningful contribution to society and receive a commensurate reward.
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Use market inefficiencies to extract money without contributing any material value.
The first option involves taking a useful job; To operate a business that provides valuable products or services; Resell value-added goods, or invest in any of the above channels. The second option involves gambling, begging, crime, buying and reselling goods with no added value, or investing in any of them.
Here is another way to annotate the two strategies.
- contribution
- “Sounds”
Unless you exit the monetary system, you must be using one or two of these strategies, one of which is likely to dominate. Either you are creating real social value and getting a fair return, or you are rubbing off on the value created by others.
Note that contributions are essential to the survival and development of a monetary system, but freeloading is not. The only way a freeloader can survive is to extract value from contributors. But eventually someone has to contribute, or there will be no value for freeloaders to extract. Unless you have found a way to be completely self-sufficient, you are always extracting some value from society, like food, clothing, housing. The question is whether you’re putting fair value back into the system to compensate for what you’re extracting.
Some level of freeloading is ok. Children freeload their parents. Those who can’t contribute are skimming off those who can. Whenever we enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labor without paying for it, we are freeloading. We all skimmed off the hard work of our ancestors. But ultimately we have to decide whether to continue on this path or start making a real contribution.
Obviously, your life must include some contribution and some freeloading, but what are your primary strategies for generating income? Are you contributing real social value, or are you skimming off the value of other contributors? If you work for a larger organization, you will also benefit from their revenue-generating strategies. Are you working for a freeloader or a contributor? The big picture must not be overlooked.
Freeloader mentality
Choosing the mooching model means that you get more social value than you contribute. Your focus is on getting rather than giving, so you get more out of the social system than you give in return. The freeloader mentality shows that you can always rely on others to pick up where you fall short. It’s a something-for-nothing attitude. Since you still need to extract values, such as food, clothing, housing — values that others must provide for you, you live on the sacrifices of others. Your burden may be borne by a willing individual (such as a parent) or by society as a whole. Either way, you are surviving by sucking the milk of society.
Sometimes freeloading becomes a habit that is easy to ignore. Many people think they’re doing contribution-based work, but they’re hiding a potential moocher mentality. Their goal is to gain more social value than they actually contribute. This includes lawyers who record more hours than they actually work; The CFO who faked numbers to inflate the company’s stock price; Employees who do their own thing during working hours. This behavior is not consistent with true contributor status.
Another name for the freeloader mentality is the scarcity mentality. Since you do not create your own value, the value you extract must come from someone else. It’s a zero-sum game. What you gain, everyone else loses.
The freeloader mentality makes it difficult to achieve financial prosperity because you have to accept some values that most people would consider negative. Your gain is someone else’s loss, so getting rich requires taking advantage of other people’s gains. In order to reap the benefits of skimming, others must compensate you for the milking with real value. The more wealth you accumulate, the more you steal from others, and the more you force others to help you. So skimming is essentially the same thing as stealing.
Most people don’t accept the idea of “enriching ourselves at the expense of others.” As a result, the mindset of the freeloader is often self-destructive. If you fall into this pattern, you get into a love-hate relationship with money. On the one hand, you want more money. On the other hand, you may not want to do anything to get the money. Because you know that the more you get, the more others give.
If you’re a professional poker player, you know that the more you earn, the more others have to lose, and that someone, somewhere, has to offer real value to make up for your withdrawals. This is not the best motivator for a highly conscious person to become financially wealthy. In order to make money this way, you have to disconnect from your true self and put up walls to disconnect yourself from others.
Some people get around this problem of financial self-destruction by lowering their self-awareness and betraying the principle of love. They learn how to make money while numbing themselves to the full consequences of how; They invent excuses to explain their actions and lower their self-awareness to avoid contact with reality; A car salesman, for example, may overcharge unwitting customers for extra commissions, but when he does so, he depriving himself of the opportunity to form an honest, loving bond with those customers. Accepting the mentality of a freeloader makes him miss the principle of love.
There is a small group of people who can adopt the mindset of a freeloader without lowering their self-awareness. They tilt the principle of love in the direction of self-love and basically reject the principle of unity and the virtues of empathy, compassion, honesty, fairness, contribution and solidarity. This is the mentality of career criminals who deliberately hurt others for their own gain. While I personally do not recommend this, I acknowledge that it is possible to consciously choose this path. Exploring this option fully is beyond the scope of this book, but if you want to learn more about it in order to make more conscious choices about your own path, visit this and browse the article that includes “Dark Workers” in the title.
Unless you can completely suppress your consciousness, the moocher’s mentality makes financial prosperity incompatible with conscious living. This mindset leads you to constantly ask, “How can I get more money?” Rather than “How can I contribute more value?” The more conscious and loving you are, the more hesitant you will be to increase your income in this way, because your gain is someone else’s loss. As a result, those who adopt the moocher mentality often succumb to financial self-sabotage. The solution is to either suppress your conscience or abandon the freeloader mentality and embrace the contributor mentality in a loving gesture.
Contributor mentality
Now let’s consider the contributor mentality, which recognizes that the best way to make money is to create real social value and get a commensurate reward. Because of the inefficiencies of the market, sometimes you’ll be undervalued and sometimes you’ll be overvalued, but the basic idea is that you make money by contributing.
To earn income as a contributor, you must export social value, not personal value. Many people who want to contribute get stuck on this concept. Personal value is anything you say, you are free to decide what is personally valuable to you, and if other people disagree with you, it doesn’t matter. However, social values are determined by social consensus. If you think your work is of great value but few others do, then your work may have high personal value but little or no social value. Let me repeat the key point: your income depends on the social value of your work, not your personal value.
There is no getting around the fact that if you want to generate income through your own efforts, you must create social value. There is no income without social value, and if your skills and efforts are not aligned with creating real social value, you will not earn much income as a contributor.
It’s a very fair system. Since money is a social resource supported by collective values, it makes sense that if you provide something that is not important to the group, you won’t get much reward. As the saying goes, “Find a need and meet it.” That’s true.
My website, for example, provides a fair amount of social value. As individuals, whether you or I value it or not, has nothing to do with economics. It succeeds in generating revenue because there is a consensus that the site’s content is valuable. This makes it possible for the site to generate rich revenue. If it doesn’t provide social value, it won’t have financial potential.
Another name for the contributor mindset is the “affluence mindset,” which holds that wealth can be created from thoughts and actions. Your personal gains are a reflection of the social values you contribute. If you want to earn a high income, you have to contribute a lot of social value. The more social value you provide, the more money you can make. It’s a win-win mentality because you’re putting value into the social system that benefits others.
In the contributor mindset, you see money as payment for the social services you provide. The money you earn is, in society’s parlance, “in exchange for the valuable contributions you provide, you are granted the right to extract the same value from society at a time of your choosing.” What a wonderful thing!
The only real limit on your income is how much social value you can create. If you want to earn more money, develop the skills and talents that contribute to creating significant social value. Focus on giving and taking will take care of itself. The system for rewarding social services is already in place, so all you need to do is plug your services into the existing market.
Earning income from social contributions is a very positive experience. As a result, it doesn’t lower your ego the way the freeloader mentality does. Wealth and consciousness do not conflict in the contributor mindset. In fact, the synergy between them is very good, especially if you reinvest some of your income into your contribution.
If you’re adopting a contributor mindset, just be aware that freecharing members sometimes make the mistake of thinking you’re a peer. As you strive to increase your contribution to society and thus earn a higher income, freeloaders project their values on you, concluding that you must be just like them, exploiting others for personal gain. Don’t let people who are “famous” stop you from going your own way. Let your inspiration come from the desire to provide more social value. Don’t let other people’s misunderstandings stop you from doing your work.
In the contributor model, you always have the option to contribute for free (you can create social value and give it away for free). I like having that option because it means I can make my work available to people who can’t afford it. My website represents a huge personal investment of time and energy on my part, so it’s certainly not free from my point of view. But because I use technology well to keep my operating costs low, it makes sense to me to provide rich content without charging.
I encourage you to consciously choose the contributor mentality, because it is consistent with love, whereas the freeloader mentality clearly is not. Never sacrifice your humanity for money, and never treat a person like a dollar sign. No amount of money is worth the price of this terrible disconnection. Sharing true value with others is an act of love that can earn you a lot of money while increasing your connection to the world and your sense of self. So the good news is that you can create the wealth you want without lowering your ego, as long as you focus on contribution.
Money and Power
The strength principle says you are responsible for your finances. If you don’t like your current environment and want something better, you have to make it happen on your own. You can give control of your finances to someone else, but ultimately the buck stops with you. You are the one who has to live with the consequences of what you experience.
The self-help literature often advises us to set clear financial goals. We are told to decide in advance how much money we want to earn and how much money we want to have in the bank. I always set this goal for myself. Sometimes I implement them, a lot of times I don’t. In the end, I learned an even more important lesson: For our financial goals to be sound, they must reflect our truest, deepest desires. If a goal doesn’t empower you, it’s worthless.
When I thought about it, I realized I didn’t care about the exact amount of money I made. A million dollars means nothing to me. By putting too much emphasis on the exact amount, I gave my power to the money rather than exercising power over it. Money became my master, not my servant. So I decided to stop focusing on financial goals with a specific amount of money and instead go straight for what I thought money would bring me. I thought it would give me the freedom to travel, so I set my travel goals; I thought money would allow me to have a better house, so I set the goal of having a better house; I thought being rich would allow me to make a bigger contribution, so I set a goal to make a bigger contribution. Ironically, when I stopped thinking about money as a goal, I made more money.
The truth is, you don’t need huge savings, or a steady stream of income, to achieve your goals. There are countless ways to do this, many of which require little or no money. Poor people have traveled the world, so why can’t you? When you judge in advance that lack of money is an obstacle to achieving your goals, you weaken yourself. If you want something bad enough, aim for it. Your path may or may not lead you to earn and spend money to achieve your goals. Don’t automatically assume that money is necessary to achieve a particular goal; This Narrows your options and hampers your creativity.
Since money is a medium of exchange, it has power only when it flows. A number in a bank account is completely worthless. The value of money is in exchange, not in possession. When you earn it, you create value. When you spend money, you’re capturing the value that others are creating, enabling them to create even more value. It’s wise to save some of your income, but realize that the saved money will eventually have to flow out again, and if you don’t spend it yourself, someone else will help you when you die.
Money and oneness
The best way to make money is through honest contributions. Do what you think is best for everyone, not just yourself. Align your financial results with everyone’s best interests. Ask yourself. Would anyone be deeply saddened if I stopped contributing? If my company went bankrupt, would anyone cry? If the answer is no, you’re on the wrong track, for sure.
Contributing social value is the primary strategy for making money consciously, but it is not enough in itself to guarantee success. The problem with focusing on social values is that your personal values may not be consistent with the social consensus. When you are trying to provide social values that are not aligned with your personal values, your motivation is weak. You’re not motivated because you feel like you’re doing what you should do, not what you want to do. You get “hungry Artist syndrome” when you try to satisfy your personal worth without providing any social value: you may be motivated by work you enjoy, but it doesn’t earn a living.
The solution is to work within the overlap of individual and social values. This will allow you to both do what you love and create something that other people love. Don’t force yourself to choose between honesty and income. Be satisfied with both.
Social and personal values fluctuate over time, so be prepared to adapt. For the first few years of running a computer games business, it was perfectly consistent with my personal values, but not with social values. I like the work, but I don’t make any money. After a few years, I reached a balance point where I enjoyed my work and earned a good income from it. Soon after that, my personal values changed: making games no longer motivated me, even though the work still had social value. Eventually, I changed careers.
At the moment, personal development work has high social value and is very much in line with my personal values. As a result, I can earn a good income in this field and feel a sense of accomplishment at the same time. Don’t underestimate the importance of a consensus between personal and social values. Both are essential if you want to make money consciously.
Unless you’re really inflexible, with a little thought, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a way to contribute that’s consistent with your personal beliefs. Often the easiest way to create value for others is to share what you love to do. I like working on my own growth, but it doesn’t work for anyone else. However, when I share what I’m doing and teach others what I’ve learned, it does create social value. And when I share my work with millions of people around the world over the Internet, the value I can provide is greatly increased. Once you have a solution that works for you, you can earn a good income while serving the greater good of society. Don’t expect it to be easy, but it will be worth the effort.
Money and Justice
Conscious revenue generation must also be consistent with equity; it arises from oneness. In order to make a sustainable contribution, it’s important that you get a fair return for the value you generate. If you contribute, you should be paid. This mentality keeps the body and its cells healthy. Fairness is wiser than greed or self-sacrifice.
It took me a long time to realize that fairness must be the dominant principle when it comes to money. For most of my adult life, I’ve been on the side of self-sacrifice, where giving without expecting anything in return is noble. After years of hard work, I got little reward for my efforts. I’m giving the value I’ve created to others, and they’re happy to accept it because I’m giving it away for free or very cheaply. Doing so would have bankrupted me, which would have hurt my ability to continue to contribute.
Meanwhile, I see others clearly on the greedy side. They constantly take advantage of people to get economic benefits, which makes them live less and less like “people”. I knew I could never do such a thing, no matter how tempting it looked. But I can’t help but notice that they make a lot more money than I do. I often wonder how much I could contribute if the economy didn’t hold me back, or at least make me worry about my monthly living expenses. I think there must be a third option. This choice is fairness, which naturally arises from the principle of oneness.
I admit that I still often err on the side of self-sacrifice, and this is an area where I still need to grow. These values were ingrained in me from a very young age. But now I realize that too much self-sacrifice is a huge mistake. It goes against the principle of unity. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that in order for my contributions to be sustainable, I had to have fair financial support for the benefits I provided. To sacrifice yourself to help someone else and not get a fair value in return is to be in an abusive relationship.
When an organization practices unfair compensation, the effect is dehumanizing. If you find yourself working in such an environment, you are not only submitting yourself to abuse, you are encouraging others to be abused. Please don’t do this! If you have been mistreated, you should bring your life back into alignment with truth, love and strength.
Money and Power
How can you produce enough value to achieve your desired level of income? You’re the commander of your life, so this is your decision to make. If the current method doesn’t work, you may need to try something else to find what works. Keep asking yourself two questions: How can I create and provide more value? How can I improve my ability to create value? Then use your power to act on what you find true.
When most of us start out on our own, we don’t have the skills to create social value. We can do drudgery, but it does not provide much value because it is too common and easily replaced. To produce significant value, we must invest in ourselves by developing our own talents and skills. If you want to make more money, you must train yourself to create and provide more social value. You can certainly take advantage of educational resources, but never forget that you are responsible for your own learning. If a lack of education is holding you back economically, it’s up to you to fix it. Keep building your skills to enable you to make a meaningful contribution, and then optimize them again. You may be weak right now, but that’s no excuse, because you’re perfectly capable of making small improvements every day, and incremental improvements can make a big difference. If you start down that path today, you can’t even imagine where you’ll be five years from now.
In order to provide the social value THAT I can provide today, I had to invest a lot of time in self-development and education. While many of my peers were slacking off in high school, I took tough honors classes and put in the effort necessary to get straight A’s. I also learned programming on the side. After graduating from college, I continued to read hundreds of books on a variety of subjects and attended seminars and workshops to continue my education. In my opinion, school is everywhere. If you want to be able to create real value, you must commit to lifelong learning.
If you think most people would never make such a commitment, you’re right. Developing socially valuable skills is hard work, but those who put in the time and effort will ultimately be richly rewarded, not only financially but internally in terms of creative self-expression. Make sure your self-education is practical. Chances are, you’ve developed a skill you’re passionate about, but no one will pay for it. There’s nothing wrong with acquiring interesting knowledge that has no financial value, just don’t complain that no one is willing to open their wallet for you.
Try to be an authority on areas where your personal interests and social needs overlap, so you can make money more easily. When I was a teenager, I liked playing video games. Maybe I could become a game tester, but the pay is usually close to minimum wage, so that doesn’t seem like a good option. However, I also think it would be fun to make games, which provide more social value, so THAT I can earn a decent income from these efforts, even while I’m still in school.
If you can’t find the overlap between what you like and what people are willing to pay for, push harder. Don’t just satisfy one or the other. Hang in there and you’ll eventually find a way to have both. You’ll love your job even more if you can earn a good salary doing something you love. From my experience, it’s much more fun to work with a lot of cash flow than with a lot of debt.
Money and Courage
Don’t expect people to know how much your skills and talents are worth. If you let someone else decide your salary, you’re not going to get paid well. You have to ask for what you want. If you’re asking for a fair price, and there’s a real demand for the value you can provide, there will be people willing to pay for your efforts.
Don’t be timid or cowardly when it comes to payment; it’s a sign that you don’t believe in your own worth. If you can’t deliver what you say you can, don’t ask to be paid until you’re ready. But if you know you have real value to offer, have the courage to ask for fair pay in exchange. Be direct, but be able to provide a solid case for why you’re worth the price.
Use questions from your heart to guide you in choosing revenue-making opportunities that focus on principles. Ask yourself. Is this the way your heart wants? If not, let it go and put your time and energy elsewhere. Have the courage to put people first and money second. Respect what consciousness is telling you. If it feels wrong, it feels wrong. As long as you don’t think it’s exactly right, it’s wrong. Don’t chase soulless profits.
Even if you’re already on the heart-centered path, it takes courage to let yourself go. Sometimes you need to fend off dark attacks, and it’s bad luck when it happens, but it happens. I am happy to say that for most of my adult life, I have never prosecuted anyone. But sometimes, I do find it necessary to defend myself, such as when hackers attack my website. Even if you do your best to truly help others, you may have to deal with people who have no qualms about trampling on others for personal gain. If you know you’re on the path you want to be on, don’t let questions like this stop you from moving forward. Try to recover and move on.
Sometimes you’ll be surprised at the support you receive when you prove that you really do put people first. On several occasions, hackers have e-mailed me to let me know about a security hole in the site’s configuration and even offered suggestions for fixing it. Instead of using their skills to hurt my site, they are helping me protect it. I found that the more my work was aligned with truth, love and strength, the more kindness I generated and the more support I received from unexpected places. When you commit to a heart-centered path, it often feels like the universe is supporting you.
Money and Wisdom
Wisdom is the ultimate source of wealth. You can generate the income you want by cultivating your creative self-expression and providing great value to others. Instead of trying to get money, focus on creating and providing value for others, and a lot of resources will flow back to you. Real wealth comes from within.
By making smart choices, you should be able to increase your ability to provide value to society, thereby increasing your income. This requires you to optimize long-term value creation over short-term profits. Bypass the low-hanging fruit to pursue bigger opportunities that inspire you, challenge you, and allow you to grow.
If you feel you have to act inauthentic to get paid, you’re off track. Don’t dehumanize yourself and others by pretending to be who you are. If you can express yourself creatively and authentically, you can provide value to others while satisfying your own needs.
Every week I receive offers (often from other entrepreneurs) that have the potential to make me a lot of money, but require me to do something that is not consistent with authenticity, love and strength. For example, I can boost my monthly income by thousands of additional dollars if I recommend products that I know deep down in my heart will not help anyone. The promoters even had endorsement letters ready, and I just had to slap my name on them and send them away. I always reject such offers without hesitation. Unfortunately, many people in the business world believe that the whole point of doing business is to make as much money as possible. This is a very wrong idea. The focus of business is to create and provide value for the benefit of all, not at the expense of others.
What about tithes? Is it wise to give a certain percentage of your income to charity? I’ve made monthly charitable donations for years, but it’s not a significant part of my income and I don’t think it’s a big deal. If a charity is doing something that I think is so important that I feel I should donate a lot of money to it, I will do the work myself. What I can now see is that the best way FOR me to contribute is through my own business, rather than paying a charity to do this work on my behalf. But I still donate some money because I think it could be used for something different than what I’m doing.
When your finances are healthy, you have the extra capacity to take on projects that aren’t profit-driven. My website maintains a popular forum that attracts thousands of participants from all over the world. I don’t charge anything for them, although I spend time and money maintaining them. From a financial perspective, these forums are a failure; However, they provide a valuable public service, and participants often tell me how much these forums help them. I’m happy to continue to offer this service, and although it doesn’t generate much revenue, I think it’s successful because it serves the business purpose of helping people grow.
If you give more value than you get, and make sure you’re treated fairly without falling into self-sacrifice mode, the excess value you provide will spill over, and that’s good. Exceptional service gets attention because it is so rare. People will be happy to recommend you to their family, friends, and colleagues, which will lead to a steady stream of new opportunities. This is true whether you are self-employed or working for someone else.
It makes sense to give more than you receive, because that’s how growth happens. This is how I built my website traffic from the ground up. I produced and gave away the equivalent of 20 books of original content for nothing. All of this value generates a lot of referrals. The content was certainly good enough for me to charge for it, but I deliberately decided to overload the benevolent side to maximise the growth rate. There’s no reason you shouldn’t use a similar strategy yourself. Step it up on the service side and you’ll soon find people lining up to pay you.
The last
To make money without lowering your sense of self, you must combine income with authenticity, love and power. If you make a valuable social contribution, then by any reasonable measure of fairness, you should be paid. But this will not happen automatically. You must consciously cultivate this condition while at the same time trying to follow the mind-centered path.
I used to think I needed a certain amount of savings to feel completely safe. But now I realize that money is not a source of security. We live in a world of rapid and accelerating change. Even if you hoard a lot of cash, you don’t know if it will have value in the future. It can be lost, stolen, or even invalid. The only true security is wisdom — our increasing ability to align ourselves with truth, love, and strength. It’s not just a personal problem, it’s a collective problem. As humans, our only true security lies in our intelligence, but fortunately, that’s all we need.
Strange as it may seem, I’ve found that the easiest way to feel financially secure is to be calm about the possibility of ending up broke and penniless. Because the future contains so many unknown variables, I can’t predict exactly where I’ll end up. I don’t even know how long I have left. So I have to accept that no matter what I do, the end result of my life is still uncertain. I was finally able to make peace with the uncertainty because I realized that the best thing I could do was to make smart choices in the moment. I believe in choices that are consistent with truth, love and strength, and THAT’s all I ask of myself.
I never really expected to retire because I would rather die “on stage”. But if ONE day I burn myself out and have no money to meet my basic needs, I hope that someone or someone who gets enough value from my work will see me through my final days. Even if that doesn’t happen, I still have the peace of knowing that I’ve lived my life consciously. If for some reason my life is going to end the hard way, so be it, it’s a price worth paying.
Ironically, once I let go of my obsession with specific financial results and realized THAT I could accept the worst, all the energy that had been occupied by fear, worry and concern began to flow to my work, thus enabling me to generate more income than I had before. Perhaps the best path to wealth is to release your fear of poverty. Realize that no matter how much money you have, life is still worth living.
Do your best to create and share your value with others, and you will create a richer, more fulfilling world for all. If you want to fully enjoy the richness of the human experience, be sure to take good care of your… (See next chapter)
- Recommend a short and interesting book – rich Dad, Poor Dad. ↩