“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. . . . But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” – Matthew 6:25,33
Two business partners were discussing their goals for the next year. “We should aim to increase our revenues by twenty percent,” the first one suggested, to which the other responded, “No, I think we should instead aim to increase the number of people we help by twenty percent.”
In the preface to his classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning, renowned psychiatrist, author, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote: “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. . . I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run – in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”
The bedrock of our financial system and the hope for the future of our prosperity resides in our capacity to create and provide value to other human beings. Work, in other words, must be first and foremost about creating value rather than making money. Money is only a byproduct, a means of exchange, a way of measuring value.
In the end the abundance we realize in our lives will be the result of the value we create, not the money we make or the things we accumulate. The second business partner had it right, instead of worrying about making money they should instead strive to help more people. Then, by doing the right thing financial rewards will ensue. In other words, “. . . do not worry about your life . . . But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”