Our culture has been filled with many myths revolving around financial education.

In addition to separating our daily life into work and play, these myths have conditioned people’s minds to view money completely backwards from what it actually is. Like a tail that tries to wag the dog, we try to get more money, pursuing wealth.

Money is strictly a tool we created to measure a part of wealth; money is not wealth itself. The way people earn their money (through wages or profits) is by trading something else of value for it. It comes about from an exchange of value. Whether it be through time and skills or through a product/service, value is transferred from one end to the other. Money is just a consequence of this transition.

Take for example the cashier at a supermarket, looking to move up the ranks and gain a position as manager. He can’t just fulfill his responsibilities as a cashier and expect to one day be a manager of the store. Instead, he has to take a larger view; he must see the business and his efforts there through different eyes. His attitude towards the organization should be similar to that of parent to infant child. Only then would his knowledge of the operations throughout the entire store really matter.

If we’re to use another example – it would be like the genuine efforts of a bee, gathering honey for the queen; the bee never stops to think about the flower, honey, or the queen bee. It just goes on doing what it does, for the sake of doing what it does. The cashier needs to find a way to work for something deeper than money, and if possible, deeper than himself.

Looking around workplaces today, we see that there’s two major types of attitudes towards this effort. One is that held by the individual who’s at peace with what they’re doing. They’re really with it. They work with an actual desire to be present with what they’re doing; and, they gain a feeling of significance from seeing good work done. They achieve a true sense of fulfillment because they lose themselves in their effort – working wholeheartedly, the work becomes play for them.

…The best way the second attitude can be described, is to sum it up, in total, as a sacrifice – clock in/clock out, all for the love of the great illusion – security from money.