Your Inner CEO: Money!

Is money the root of all evil? No, but there is absolutely nothing like money to bring all our issues to the surface. Money and also the desire for money have brought a lot excitement into people’s lives -- often the kind of excitement they could have done without.

Money is the number one source of problems between husbands and wives. It can make trouble between friends, too, and it’s an ongoing issue between employers and employees. Who is giving? Who is getting? And what does that mean in terms of any relationship?

Money makes many people uncomfortable. Salary and income are some of the last things a people want to disclose about themselves. If they don’t make much money, they’re ashamed of it -- and if they make a lot of money, maybe they’re ashamed of that too.

So money and our relationship to it can be complicated and confusing. You need to sort this out, because money and how you handle it are some of the most visible expressions of your character and personality.

To get started with this, there is an essential paradox about money that has to be understood. On the one hand, money is inherently limited: t\en dollars is not twenty dollars. You can’t pay for a twenty thousand dollar car with a ten thousand dollar check. In that sense, the value of money is very clear and straightforward.

But at the same time, money is also inherently unlimited in its potential. Ten dollars may be ten dollars today, but it can be twenty dollars tomorrow, or even twenty thousand dollars. Or it can also be no dollars at all. In this sense, money is undefined. It is raw unmanifested energy. It can be used for virtually any purpose, for good or bad.

Money can be a medium of security, but also of insecurity. There are people with millions of dollars who are still worried about their financial security. Wealthy people have been known to commit suicide because they’ve lost half their fortune. A person could still have a huge net worth, but if it’s only half of what it was before, he feels threatened, he feels vulnerable, he just can’t go on. Yet he still has more money than the vast majority of the population.

The key point is that money in itself has no specific value. It has the value that we give it. Imagine a wealthy financier pulling up at a toll booth in his Bentley. He tosses his fifty cents toll, but accidentally over shoots the bucket with his quarters. No problem, he just throws in some more loose change. Retrieving the fifty cents is not worth his time and effort.

But if a homeless person comes along and finds the fifty cents, that’s a major windfall. For one person, any given amount of money may be meaningless, but to another person it may be all they have. How you perceive money determines its worth. You actually decide the value of money.

If you don’t understand this, you can get you into serious trouble about money. But once you do understand it, you can make money your servant rather than your tyrannical master.