What is the truth about money?
We seem to both love and fear money as if it’s a god. Who gave money all this power over our lives anyway? Oh right. We did. We must take responsibility for everything we’ve created in our lives. That includes money and the power it has over us. We can create either a lack or an abundance of it due to our beliefs about it. It is all in our perception.
What is money really? Money is not good and it is not evil. It’s just a thing, neutral. What makes it good or bad depends on our attitudes toward it. It has no power over us other than what we choose to give it. It is simply an efficient unit of exchange meant to replace a cumbersome and awkward centuries-old barter system. Not so long ago in some cultures, seashells were used as a means of exchange. Would it seem absurd to get all worked up and emotional over seashells? Well, we do just that over bits of synthetic polymer! If we must assign power to money, then let’s ensure we are not its slave. Instead, money should be our servant.
Our Life Energy Quotient (LEQ) –what is it, how will you put it to use?
Whether we earn money, buy money, or were given money, we all have something in common. We are born, and we die. In between, we have twenty-four hours each day that we live – we just don’t know for how long. During that time, we put our life’s energy to use in some way that most often will involve earning, growing, preserving, and spending that money. Let’s call it our Life Energy Quotient (LEQ), where one hour of life equals one unit of available life energy. When we use up LEQ in the pursuit of money, we are exchanging LEQ for money. Albert Einstein told us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it only changes form. We therefore, alchemize LEQ into money each time we work. Every minute we spend working, whether framing a house, researching a point of law or managing our investment portfolio, we are converting our LEQ to money. We are all equal in this regard, no matter who we are, where we live, or what our other resources are.
What differs between us is:
- how much of our LEQ we are prepared to convert to money (which is a function of our values, beliefs, and motivations);
- how much money we can get for our LEQ (which is a function of our education and circumstances);
- how good we are at converting LEQ to money (which is a function of our talents and appetite for risk); and
- and what we choose to spend our LEQ=money on (which is a function of choice).
Humans are the only creatures (that we know of) on this planet who have the conscious, self-aware ability to make choices and to direct actions based on those choices. As long as you have the mental capacity, you can choose values and beliefs that are either fearful or empowering. You can choose education or ignorance in its many forms. You can choose to take risks, grow and evolve, or choose to stagnate comfortably. You can choose to consume your money or to be a steward of that money. In other words, the differences in our wealth experiences are mainly due to the consequences of the choices we make. We are responsible for our money experience.