The Real Question is “Why?”
I was talking to Cory Long recently. He’s been around small business since he was seven. As an adult, he took over the family firm (selling industrial paint) and tripled it in four years. Then he went into missionary work for a while. More recently he has turned around his brother-in-law’s computer company. He’s also taken over marketing for a naturopathic doctor who has greatly improved the health of his (Cory’s) wife who has MS. In four months they’re up to about 300K in sales.

His brother-in-law just offered to give him full reign at the computer company and the doctor has dreams of launching DVDs and other products nationally. With so many opportunities staring him in the face, he told me: “I know I could grow any of these companies. What I don’t know is why I should.”

I complimented him on coming to such a powerful question at such an early age. He’s just 31 – an age when so many people are in the midst of careers and family that they just plow ahead and don’t consider if they’re plowing the right field.
A lot of my work is about how: how to run your business better, how to make more money and have less stress, how to systemize and grow. But that’s just a prelude. The real question is why.

The Power of Money
And the answer is never money. Because money is neutral. By itself it means nothing. If you think about it – it’s just colored paper. It only has power when you do something with it. And that power comes from us and how we use it: power to provide for us, power to give security, to provide freedom, power to prove ourselves to our dead relatives, or the power to lord it over others.

I’ll reserve comments on whether that power is real or illusory, beneficial or harmful. But let me say two things.

Takeaways:

• As fungible as money is, the power each of us ascribes to it is a unique blend.
• And when we don’t have what we consider “enough” we often forget that it is a means to an end and just focus on getting more.

That is a pretty good definition of the rat race.