Money is Distilled Life
Every dollar you earn is a piece of your life.
Money stores potential energy. It comes back to life when you buy food, experiences, or possessions. You gave a slice of your life for the shoes on your feet.
Money makes life transferable. It compresses time into dollars.
Leadership and Money:
Leaders manage crystallized energy. Budgets represent human vitality. Misusing finances is misusing people’s lives.
Spending is stewardship. Waste diminishes others. Frivolous spending insults life. Ask: Does this investment honor the people whose energy produced it?
Teach teams that financial resources are life converted into possibility. Shift conversations from greed to stewardship.
Image source: Yilan
Is a new car worth a slice of your life? How about a new house? The things we own, own us. We serve them.
Waste squanders life. Investment multiplies life.
What story does your use of finances tell about your leadership? Your values?
Still curious: Leadership is Stewardship
Read: Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest by Peter Block
You should change the title to “Sound Money” because the money printers are totally irresponsible and drink distilled life like vampires.
I like this: “Does this investment honor the people whose energy produced it?”
We’re all trading time for money – is it worth the trade? We can always make more money, but once time is gone, there’s no rewind button.
“Is it worth the trade? Powerful question. Your comment brings to mind the importance of investing time in people. It’s too easy to get caught up in doing things.
Investment is storing the surplus of my labor to benefit later. There will come a time for many of us when we can no longer earn a paycheck. That’s when investments need to pay. And that can be in financial assets or physical capital, but also social capital. Are we investing now in family? other relationships? those too “pay out” in the future. Thanks, Dan!
Thanks for your reflection, Pete. The future is uncertain. They say, make hay while the sun shines. Perhaps the hardest part is spending less than we make. We tend to adjust our lifestyle up when salary goes up.
Thought provoking – and makes me think around how we have developed as a society to focus on money and wealth as the key trigger of power, significance and responsibility. Even in our monetary focussed economies, there are a significant number of nonmonetary transactions (examples include household labour, care giving, civic activity, volunteering, childcare, or friends working to help one another). This ‘free’ labour represents a substantial and important part of the economy and often occurs spontaineously for a number of reasons including a sense of duty, compassion, community, friendship or just doing the ‘right thing’. Perhaps we could consider what could be learned from this type of activity, why our fellow human beings are driven to do it and whether taking time & effort to undertake an activity – with no prospect of financial recompense – might be more fulfilling, rewarding and value added way to thrive