If your goal is to amass more money, good on ya! Go for it. You have a right to be rich.

How do you feel about shouting that goal to the stars? Do some people tell you that you are too materialistic or that your goal should be more lofty such as serving others or more ‘realistic’ by asking for less? That you only ‘need’ $50,000 a year to live on and asking for a $1,000,000 is greedy?

The bare bones, unvarnished truth is the wheels of this world are turned by commerce. And the medium of trade is money. Without it we are back to paying the doctor with a chicken, growing and preserving all our own food, having the livestock vet or the blacksmith yank out your aching tooth and making mattresses out of tree boughs!

No thank you, I like my creature comforts.

Let’s take a literal look at money. It’s simply a coin forged of metal or a piece of colourful paper. If you gave a $1,000 bill to a native in the deepest, most isolated part of the Amazon jungle what do you think he would do with it? Of course it would be of little or no value except to maybe help him start his fire.

So it isn’t money per sae, it’s the connotation we put on it. You don’t really want money, you want what it will purchase and supply in your life. You want what it will allow you to do.

There are two ends of the ‘money’ perspective. On one end you have the person who has elected to shun all connection to money by living off the land as a hermit and in compete, wilderness seclusion. On the extreme other end we have those whose sole purpose in life is to acquire money purely for the sake of money, power and nothing else.

The rest of us fall somewhere in between. Let’s admit it, we need money. If we don’t have enough, our whole concentration is centered on survival. Enough to pay the rent/mortgage, feed our family, get to and from the job that does not pay us enough, keep pace with the debt but not get ahead of it, live life from inadequate paycheque to inadequate paycheque.

There is no shame in desiring more money, large amounts of it. It’s not the acquisition of money, it’s what you do with it. It is only when you are free from ‘survival mode’ that you can begin to grow as a person, become who you were put on this earth to be and make a difference. It takes money to make a difference.

If you ever have feelings of shame or guilt because you really, really want great amounts of money just think about exchanging those shame/guilt feelings for the ones you could have if you were Bill and Melinda Gates giving multi millions of dollars to help eradicate malaria which kills 1,000,000 people, many of them children, around the world every year. Think of the feelings you would have if you were Oprah making a huge impact on the future of African nations by providing schools and education for hundreds of gifted African girls.

Have you watched the ABC program “Extreme Makeover Home Edition”? I can never get through it without a lump in my throat the size of a boulder and at least a couple of tears leaving salt trails on my cheeks. But it’s a great feeling! And we are just observers. Imagine how the people feel who are directly involved?

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