Master or Servant?

Money matters even when your goals are non-monetary ones

GOT ANY CHANGE
Through history money has been any object/s - coins, shells, beads, cacao beans, pieces of gold, silver and paper - that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, being a unit of account, and a store of value. The term originates from the temple of Juno Moneta located on Capitoline, one of Rome’s seven hills, where the mint of Ancient Rome was located.

George Bernard Shaw said that “Lack of money is root of all the evils” , while another philosopher said that  “Money is a barrier against all possible evils”  and the New Testament expounded : “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” 

So whom do you believe?

That’s an individual choice. But a general truth would be that money is one of the key factors that create distinctions betwen human beings. All men are born equal, but the assessment of big or small, successful or unsuccessful is all too often made on the basis of who’s rich and who’s poor.

In today’s society, if you don’t have money, you have bigger problems. For money is not everything, but it certainly makes life easier.

But as the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu (399-295 BC) has said, “To have enough is good luck, to have more than enough is harmful. This is true of all things, especially of money.” 

But how fair is it to pin the blame all or even any evil, on a medium of exchange? Blaming money for evil is like blaming the scoreboard for the cricket game. 

The desire for money is good when people play by the rules, and when their desire for money and status results in better ways of doing business and in inventions that help people and that make the world a better place. The negative side emerges when the desire for money is strong enough to make people do wrong things in order to obtain it.

For instance, money can help facilitate the development of genius and extraordinary achievements. It gives us the leisure to devote a part of our time to culture and art. It can help ease some of the anxieties that assail us.

Money can help us attain many of our goals.

But you might say, “What if I only have non-monetary goals?”  Let’s say you have fitness goals, study goals, or maybe a goal to improve your relationship. How does money figure here?

Fitness : You want to run/cycle every day? Shoes cost money, a bicycle costs money.
Education : Want to register for a course? You need to pay fees, buy books.
Your relationship : Everything from gifts to movies to your privacy costs money.

So money is a tool. How can we get this tool, to enable us to progress with our goal setting. You can either reduce expenses, or increase income. The former is not the easiest (but not impossible).

So let’s get realistic about money.

But let’s not make the mistake of seeing money itself as the goal. When we do so, we can lose sight of many of life’s joys -  we should always have time to stop and smell the roses.

As Francis Bacon put it pithily, “Money is a good servant but a bad master.” 

So money is a tool that’s used in your goal setting endeavors - nothing more, nothing less. Each of us have our individual way of prioritising money in our lives. Send me your thoughts on this subject with the subject line ‘Money’. We will discuss them next week.

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Thought for the Week

“No one on this deathbed wishes
he had spent more time making money!”
Dr Joseph Murphy (1898-1981)
Author
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First published in Gray Matter - The Hindustan Times