Your Inner CEO: Some words (about money!) you need to know

Often we use words without knowing what they really
mean….and that’s usually fine, because communication can
still take place without understanding the dictionary
definition of a word. But from a business perspective it can
be useful to explore what we’re actually talking about when
we start talking, especially for certain basic concepts.

Like money, for example…

Money is difficult to define even though it plays an important part in our lives every day. But here’s a definition of money that might be as good as any: money is any circulating, quantifiable, and symbolic medium of exchange. That definition includes three specific attributes of money, so let’s take a look at them one by one.

First, money is a circulating medium. It can be passed without much difficulty between individuals, or it can be shipped from one place to another. So a piece of land is not money. The value of a piece of land, as expressed by money, can circulate between people, but not the land itself.

Second, money is quantifiable. That’s what makes it possible to circulate. If pennies were the only denomination of money that we had, we’d have a hard time even paying for a package of gum, which now costs about a hundred and twenty-five pennies. Fortunately, different quantities of money can be expressed by bills or coins of the same size. A hundred dollar bill is no bigger than a one dollar bill. The quantity that one represents is a hundred times larger than the other, but the physical size of the bill is the same.

The last quality of money is the most interesting, and is really money's most basic characteristic. Money is symbolic. As a purely physical object, money has almost no value. It’s a scrap of paper or a piece of metal. But its symbolic value is literally infinite. Money can symbolize anything and everything, and it can symbolize all those things at once. A dollar bill can represent part of the cost of a hospital, or of an atomic bomb. It can be a gift from the Tooth Fairy, or it can be part of a drug deal. In the end, money is both tangible and mystical. It may be the most important of all humanity’s creations, and it’s certainly the most imaginative.

Riches is an easy word to define. Riches just means having a lot of money or having a lot of the things that money can buy. A rich person’s riches is easy to recognize and document. You can see it in a big house, an expensive car, or a lot of big numbers on a bank statement.

It’s usually fairly easy to tell if someone is rich. People tend to express their wealth in a public way. That doesn’t mean that all rich people are extravagant, but you don’t often find them sleeping on park benches. Also, people can go from poor to rich or rich to poor very quickly. You can win the lottery or lose your winning ticket. (You can also find it again.)

Wealth can include riches but wealth is also a larger concept. Wealth is a sense of abundance that riches can help to bring about, but it also transcends riches. When we speak of wealth-building, we mean not just acquiring a lot of money but also having the consciousness capacity to use the money wisely. Strange as it may seem, money is one of the building blocks but it’s not the foundation of true wealth.

That foundation includes many other things. It even includes developing your vocabulary. So when you have a spare moment, try looking up the definitions of everyday words even if you think you already know what they mean. 

With a smartphone, you can do that almost instantly at dictionary.reference.com. You might also subscribe to the excellent smartphone app called The Free Dictionary, which will send you a new word plus a comprehensive definition every day.