Money is a strange thing. It is entirely an invention of mankind and yet, in most societies, it massively dominates what we can do and cannot do, what we can have and cannot have. As with many problems in life, it is all too easy to get fixated upon the symptom of a problem (in this case and for most people, a lack of money), rather than upon the root cause of the problem (what it takes to live in such a way that money is easy to get). Key to analyzing any problem effectively is the need to understand the individual components involved on a fundamental level. By understanding the components, and the mechanisms that we create with them, we can change the mechanism, or the inputs to the mechanism, to get a different output (preferably to a result that we want).

Some years ago, I read a book called ‘The Tao of Money’ by Walter Lubeck. As with many Taoist books, it quickly became very esoteric, but it did present me with one idea that has stuck with me, which is that money represents stored energy. If take a look at the prehistory of mankind, people lived in societies where no money existed. In fact, for the greater part of human history our ancestors survived with no money. People used personal energy and ability to hunt for or to gather food. In exchange for energy and ability expended, calorific and nutritional rewards were gained. During that very long period, people lived off of the land and were self-sufficient.

With the discovery of agriculture and animal husbandry, the nomadic way of life increasingly gave way to settled farming. The concept of agriculture was something that could give an advantage to anyone who applied it. Energy was now invested into organized food production that gave better returns, at a lower overall risk. It was a massive productivity improvement. People settled into communities and the effectiveness of farming for producing food meant that energy could be put into developing other skills for producing useful goods and services. These would initially have been traded in exchange for other goods and services.

In each of these transactions, a person’s energy was invested into transforming raw materials into a useful product. The products had worth and value but were cumbersome to collect and store, and, in the case of degradable products, such as food, often had a time limited value. At some point, precious metals become a useful currency of exchange, because they save space, they are easily portable, and they don’t degrade easily. These precious metals were turned into a more standardized method of exchange and money was created. The crucial thing to remember, though, is that the purpose of money is to store and exchange energy. That’s a little abstract and we tend to forget this fundamental fact about money, but there it is and it’s important to be aware of this.

If we see money as energy, then it can become a measure of our ‘life force.’ By that, I mean that we only have a limited time and energy that is available to us on this spinning planet. The vast majority of us end up exchanging part of our life force (time and energy) to create value for other people and for which we receive a return of stored energy, which we use to provide for our survival needs and, beyond that, our aspirational desires.

Many people end up spending vast amounts of their life force in this arrangement of exchanging time and energy for money and I speculate that it is for this reason that money is such an emotionally charged subject. It is not just that money can demonstrate some aspects of achievement, it is also because money can become a measure of how much value their is in your life force. We can end up feeling pretty miserable about how limited our opportunities are when we exchange time for money. I think this is why people fight so hard to get money, to keep money, to get wage increases and to avoid taxation. Every little bit of money taken away from us represents some of our incredibly precious and limited life force. It’s not just money gone, it’s time gone and opportunity gone.

There are a fixed number of hours per day so payment based upon hours spent puts a cap upon what we can do and what we can expect. Very few people have ever gotten wealthy based upon an hourly rate alone. The way out of this limitation is to break the link between exchanging time for money. Wealth and abundance is created by leveraging the energy that you have and one of the best ways to do that is to create something and replicate it, so that it can be exchanged for energy many times over.

That’s why we live in such exciting times. Digital technology allows ideas, knowledge, information and entertainment to be created at lower costs than ever before and to be replicated at near zero cost. Add that to the internet, which allows communication and distribution at near zero costs, and the opportunities to break the link between time and money and to invest energy into producing useful goods and services that can be reproduced many times over becomes huge.

If you find yourself frustrated at the lack of money in your life, then realize that the money that you receive in your life is dependent upon how you transform the available energy in your life into useful products or services. You can increase your hourly rate by improving your productive value per hour. It’s up to you to implement the ways by which you can offer more value per hour (if you don’t know how then write a comment and I’ll create a post on this). However, if you want to supercharge your earnings then look for the ways in which you can invest energy once and exchange the value created many times over.

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[Photo by Jaz1111]