Money is a Tool, Not a Goal

As a therapist for entrepreneurs, I spend a lot of time talking to people about money.

We learn a lot about ourselves when we talk about money, because money is a completely neutral and amoral object that we imbue with immense meaning. As a collective, we project our own light and darkness onto it. As individuals, we turn money into a god or a weapon, and we force it to act as a stand-in for happiness and power and freedom and safety. 

But beyond meeting our basic needs and the needs of people we care about, and giving us access to experiences and objects that we find personally meaningful (not status symbols, but things we actually care about), money has no inherent value. It has limits.

On the individual level, most of us need to learn the lesson that enormous sums of money won’t make us happy or safe in the ways we imagined, and that needing money to feel free or powerful creates a really precarious, tenuous, conditional, and ultimately false freedom and power. (The collective seems never to learn this lesson, nor to remember it for very long.)

Deep conversation about money is important because we are only able to have our highest-level relationship to money when we can put it in its proper place: Money is a tool, not a goal, and it is meant to be deployed in the world as a means of exchange and a conduit for creation. And like another common tool, the hammer, we can use money either to build or destroy. When money becomes something different than a tool, something bigger, we’re playing games that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with our interior lives, and our unexamined values and fantasies. So perhaps money’s greatest power is not in helping us achieve some abstract feeling like freedom or power or happiness, but in revealing exactly who we are and what we want. Money, and how we behave with it, is a mirror. 

When money causes distress, when you feel like it’s never enough, when it seems like money slips through your fingers constantly, or when you conflate it with abstract ideas it can never hope to live up to, it might be worth examining your relationship to it. Coming to a mature understanding of what money means to you–what you’ve made it in your mind, which it can never live up to–is a major developmental task for most entrepreneurs. And that exploration can often lead to making money with more ease and satisfaction and creating a company and life you actually value.

Did this post make you think? Consider sharing it with a friend, and reach out below if you’re ready to explore more.