In his article on entrepreneur.com titled 8 Slow, Difficult Steps to Become a Millionaire, Dharmesh Shah describes one of the steps as to:
“Stop thinking about making a million dollars and start thinking about serving a million people.”
When it comes to money, there are three kinds of people:
- those who love and live for money,
- those who don’t have or care for money,
- those who believe money is the root of all evil.
The big irony is that intrinsically, money is an illusionary worthless commodity only backed by the desire of billions of people to attain it. In capitalism, it is a necessary means for survival, and therefore, even those who despise the very essence of money are inevitably a slave to it’s attainment.
But what is money?
Of course, a dollar used to be nothing more than just a receipt of gold from the bank who held your reserves for you. It was simply easier to just trade bank notes that guaranteed gold reserves. Can you imagine lugging pounds of gold every time you wanted to make a sizeable transaction? Of course, there is no more gold backing these pieces of paper and there are trillions of worthless dollars floating around in an arguably arbitrary amount.
But even if you think money is an illusionary product designed by the greedy ‘ol capitalists, what if it also isn’t? With the right set of lenses, money could be viewed as nothing more than a measurement of how much you contribute to society. I mean, just take a look at what it means to earn money: you exchange labor to produce some form of value in some way in exchange for dollars. Even if you serve food at some corporate fast food restaurant, the only reason you are able to earn money is because you are aiding in providing some form of service to the public community. Just think about it in terms of barter. If you could fish, you might be able to trade some fish for some firewood. If you were the only person who knew how to fish, you’d probably be golden to the community and could trade for more firewood if needed. But instead of thinking about trade in terms of how much will it serve you, think about how much value you provide to the community by having the skill of fishing. You may not want to charge a ton of firewood for your fish, even if you economically could if you so wanted to. You may choose to help your community by distributing your value in good faith in some form of philanthropy. But in this barter example, firewood may serve as a benchmark for how much value you produce to your community, just as paper dollars do in the 21st century.
Put another way, think about money in terms of how many people you help. Most self-made successful entrepreneurs became rich solely because they helped many people in some form or another. By this perspective, try eliminating the stigma attached to the greed associated with earning money in order to provide us with more meaningful context. Money only means monetized value, and value comes in many forms, such as gold, firewood, or simply the value of helping others. When you are able to translate your value into money, view it as a measurement of how much you contribute to society. That is the essence of what wealth is–your assets, the intangible ones too that can only be found in the good of your spirit. You may choose to live life only translating your timed labor into money, or you may live life more meaningfully by translating your desire to help others into its monetary equivalent, and use your gained value for better service to humanity. Being an entrepreneur does not only serve as a means to answer the question of “how do I get rich”. Getting rich is a byproduct of what you truly contribute to the world. If you have a passion, monetize it so that the world may benefit from people who provide meaningful contributions, and not just from rich capitalists who lack the same passion as you do.
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