Article 10: Money is Potential Energy

You don’t want money.  I don’t want money.  WE don’t want money.

About now, you may be asking, “Who is this clown?”  OF COURSE WE WANT MONEY.

Nope…we want what money gets us.  Whether it is the Hawaiian vacation (that I just returned from), the new leaf blower (sounds like work, eh?) or peace of mind (now we’re talking!), we want what money gets us.

Money is a useful tool, a medium of exchange, a currency (we’ll get back to that in a minute) agreed to be “legal tender for all debts, public and private.”  It keeps us from having to barter dry cleaning services for apples or trading a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card for a car.  It also provides us with a way to energize and contribute to causes we believe in and want to support.

In this sense, money is a form of energy … it can make things happen, in your life and the lives of others.  This gets right back to some of the fundamental laws of building wealth that I teach in my speaking and training programs: what goes around comes around.  Once you have your basic survival needs (food, shelter, security) met, you should be doing two other things with your money:  giving it away and investing it.

You can start to understand the true nature of abundance when you examine the the word affluence.  It comes from the Latin affluere which means to flow to.  This is what needs to happen with not only your money but the rest of the wealth and abundance in your life, including all of the talents, passion and expertise that anyone can bring to the market to make all the difference - and all the money - in the world.

Building wealth involves all dimensions of our life that are important to us.  And this definitely includes money … if for no other reason than for all the good it can do in helping you towards contentment and purpose in your life.

Article 2: Wealth is created by the transformation of energy

There sure is lots of talk these days about energy: the cost of energy, the need for renewable energy, saving and conserving energy, investing in energy - not exactly new subjects but they sure are getting a lot of attention. What’s the big deal anyway, why is energy so important?

Well, for starters, all living organisms rely on energy to grow and reproduce. Whether it’s radiation from the Sun causing photosynthesis in green plants or chemical energy from food firing the metabolism of animals, we all depend on energy to survive. From the astronomically huge world of galaxies to the infinitesimally tiny world of subatomic quanta, energy relationships are perfectly balanced to provide us with the world we live in. Everything is energy. Energy is everything. Energy is the currency of wealth, literally and figuratively a factor in all aspects of our lives.

Energy is the subject of the 2nd Article of The Wealth Manifesto: Wealth is created by the transformation of energy.

If you look back at some of the previous blogs, I have been talking about wealth, how it works to define all the dimensions of your wellbeing, the stuff that you do that makes your life worth living. The nice thing about having all aspects of your life operate under one concept such as wealth is that it means all aspects of your life, whether you are trying to generate more income, have more friends or get in better physical shape are governed by the same fundamental laws. And a lot of those laws have to do with energy. Consider a few examples.

The 1st Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed (meaning into other forms of energy). If you want to be paid more at your job, you have to demonstrate additional value to your employer so they will compensate you with additional cash. Money itself is potential energy because it can be used to get whatever you want (at least among the things that money can buy). Your additional hard work, brainpower, creativity … whatever it is that you do to add value is converted into the potential energy of money.

Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion states (simply) that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you want to have more friends …guess what? You think that is going to happen without being a better friend yourself? Nope … not going to happen. You need take action - expend energy and effort to be a friend - to have that energy come back at you (the opposite reaction because it is in the opposite direction, towards you) in the form of more friends.

This works at the quantum level too, where intentionality aligns our thought energies with our feelings to help minimize entropy (taking into consideration the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) and create the reality we want.

These universal laws are found the realm of common “rules of thumb” and spiritual teachings as well. “What goes around, comes around” - is more than just a saying, it is an everyday version of the 1st and the 3rd Laws I just discussed … you dont need to have a degree in engineering to know that you only get out of something what you put into it. Finally, there is the one Rule that everyone knows from their religious upbringing. It doesnt matter if you are a Christian or a Jew, Muslim or Buddhist, or hardly ever went to church, everyone knows some variation on:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

This is the way the world goes ’round and it all ultimately comes back to energy management (way more important than time management, by the way). Learn how to manage your energy and you can have all the abundance, in whatever form, that you desire.

Cheers to your (energy transformed and delivered) wealth!