In the wake of the financial crisis, there’s been a lot of talk about ethical reform. With the disgrace of so many of “the best and the brightest,” there’s a lot of soul searching going on in government, industry and business schools. Most of this discussion is focused on regulation and rules – it seeks to answer the question “what is good behavior and how can we mandate it?”

This line of questioning is important. But it risks missing the deeper issue, because meaningful ethical reform requires making ethics meaningful.

Meaningful ethical reform requires moving beyond just the “what” question and also addressing the “why”. It requires moving beyond creating lists of behaviors people should comply with to connecting them with values they freely choose to live their lives by. Not out of a sense of obligation, but because they get how these values create meaning. And because they’ve learned concrete tools to deal with the conflicts that inevitably arise as they seek to live a meaningful life.

“Why would people freely choose to live an ethical life?”

Not out of a fear of punishment. A choice made out of fear isn’t a free choice. It breeds surface compliance and hidden rebellion. It creates preachers who rail against sex while having affairs. As Joan Borysenko puts it, “Punishment is an effective way to change behavior, but usually not in the desired direction.” When motivation comes from a place of I should or I must, it’s sourced from fear and guilt. This can keep us from doing something awful, but it can’t inspire us to authentic ethics or authentic leadership, which come from a place of I choose.

Similarly, authentic ethics can’t come just out of a desire for approval. Do you remember the petty cliquishness of high school? That’s what happens when a group of good but insecure people seek to define their self worth according to others’ opinions. A life based on approval seeking quickly degenerates into an empty race for money and status. While our desire for approval can be a force for good – the shaming of investment banking’s excesses is creating a major drive for change – the whims of the crowd are fickle and can reward vice just as easily as virtue.

The primary, enduring reason to freely choose an ethical life is that a meaningful life is an ethical life. The meaning of life comes from growth, giving and connection – three of the primary forms of mature love. Mature love is the foundation of all ethics (i.e. “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) and a meaningful life is also an ethical life.

If we simplify human needs down to their essence, we all have three basic levels of needs: survival, success and fulfillment (i.e. meaning). We all crave meaning, particularly once we’ve met our basic needs for survival and success. Because of this, we don’t need to convince people that they should live an ethical life. We just need to help them understand – in their whole being – how authentic ethics are an essential aspect of creating the meaningful life they crave.

But – and this is key – ethical behaviors do not necessarily create a meaningful life. This is because authentic ethics are determined not just by what we do, but also by where we do it from. When we do ethical behaviors from a place of fear, guilt or approval seeking, the result is fragile and empty. It’s only when our ethics come from a genuine place of mature love that they create a lasting, meaningful foundation for life.

Yet how many business textbooks talk about love? How many college courses teach authentic leadership? How many high schools teach students practical tools for how to be more loving?

Not nearly enough.

In the past decades, we’ve increasingly bought into the idea that “separation of church and state” means “separation of heart and mind.” Church is where we’re supposed to learn how to love, and school is where we’re supposed to learn how to achieve.

This divorce is at the heart of the current crisis. It’s contributed to a compartmentalization between our personal and professional lives, and to an attitude in business where “anything goes unless it’s forbidden or unprofitable.” So if we want to address the roots of this crisis, we need to learn how to integrate money and meaning – both in our lives, in our businesses, and in our schools.

The practice of integrating money and meaning automatically and consistently brings up inner conflicts. It brings up challenges that can’t be solved just in our heads. It brings forward dilemmas that can only be resolved through deep personal and spiritual growth.

Because of this, there is no such thing as a theoretical class in authentic leadership. Authentic leadership requires integrating body, mind, and spirit. It requires learning how to integrate success and fulfillment, sales and service, money and meaning. It requires learning how to embrace the conflicts in life, and how to use everything as opportunities for learning, upliftment and growth.

This doesn’t mean that our schools need to become more religious. It means they need to become more loving.

Over the past decades, business schools have sought to become ever more scientific. But by increasingly basing their existence solely on the cult of reason, they’ve been feeding the divorce between heart and mind, rather than healing it. In doing so, they’ve been failing our students, failing our businesses, and failing our society.

If we wish to create meaningful ethical reform in business, it requires bringing meaning and love back into education. In particular, it means bringing meaning and love back into business schools. It requires teaching students practical, concrete, psycho-spiritual tools for how to work with their inner conflicts. It requires teaching them how to embrace the challenges that automatically come up as we seek to build businesses that create both money and meaning. It requires renouncing the fundamentalist dogmas of the cult of reason and of the single bottom line. And it requires evaluating our schools not just on whether they produce smart and successful students, but also on whether they produce wise and fulfilled ones.

P.S. Have you checked out the free $100 practice building kits we’re giving away yet?  While they’re particularly focused on practice builders, the first CD in particular contains some of the leading, practical tools for how to create a business that embraces both money and meaning.

Hello,
It’s Brian here, from Selling By Giving.

The current financial crisis has created a real “sink or swim” opportunity for hundreds of thousands of coaches, counselors, healers, financial advisors, real estate agents, and other self-employed service providers.  In the face of increased challenges, many people are losing clients or even closing up shop.  But some are actually growing their practices, often by $20,000, $50,000 or $100,000 a year.  What’s the difference between these groups?  Support.  The later group keeps reaching out for help, and keeps using each challenge as an opportunity for growth, rather than buying into the story that “I should already know how to do this.”

Lots of people are seeking that support.

We’ve decided to do something radical to help them.

And we’d like your help.

We’re giving away $1,000,000 in free practice building services this year, in the form of 10,000 life-changing practice building kits.  These $100 kits are powerful.  They come with 150 minutes of cutting edge content, a powerful diagnostic assessment, a 90 minute live teleclass, an e-book and e-coaching.

One woman told us she listened to the first CD over 20 times, because she got how deeply it spoke to a core challenge that had been holding her back.  Last week, she emailed me telling me she’d had more clients in the last two weeks than in the previous three months.

Another man just emailed me today, thanking us for his new level of inspiration and faith, “I have been having turmoil over the business and money, fears, etc. But now, after simply reading all of your websites, I am confident to the point where my fear is fading fast, I am not concerned with money nearly as much and I know I am on the right path FOR ME.”

This stuff works.  It can help people make a radical shift in their response to the crisis.  It some cases, it can make the difference between succeeding at their dream vs. closing their business.

Will you please help us to help others?  Will you please help us give away $1,000,000 in practice building kits?

To do so, please pass this email along to your friends.  And if you haven’t done so yet, please go to www.sellingbygiving.net to claim your free kit.

Thank you!
Brian

Hello community,
We’re preparing a conscious business manifesto, and we would love any feedback you would care to offer.

Please find the current draft at www.consciousbusinessnow.com.

Then please feel free to join the discussion on this topic, by posting your comments below.

Love and light,
Brian

Have you been feeling insecure or worried with all the financial challenges going on right now?  I don’t know of many people, including myself, who haven’t been experiencing at least some fears about money and security.  In fact, the more I’ve been seeking to sit with those fears and understand them (whether mine or others’) the deeper they seem to go.

And I think I’m just now beginning to really understand why.

There is fear in the air, in the water, in the ground.  It’s bigger than our individual fears.  It’s the fear that comes with gobal, systemic, deep change.  It’s the instinctive reaction we have when confronted with the need to either “grow or die.”

In my community, people regularly talk about 2012 as the dawn of a new age.  We speak with optimism about a quantum leap in consciousness.  We connect with a sense of hope and evolution that’s bubbling across the land.

But in doing so, we tend to skip past a fundamental truth.

Every great strength comes with an equal challenge.  This is the nature of spiritual evolution, because our strengths are what allow us to grow, and our challenges are what push us to do so.

This realization begs a question.

What challenges are so profound they could push our entire civilization to evolve?

We’re beginning to find out.

I had an epiphany today, where I realized just how much larger this crisis is than what I’ve been allowing myself to imagine. It’s going to be presenting much bigger challenges than most of us are prepared to admit.  It may literally challenge the very foundations of our current economic paradigm, requiring us (among other things) to embrace a new, more loving, more effective way of doing business.

Does this resonate with you?

If so, please stay tuned to this exploration of conscious business, and please also feel free to visit www.sellingbygiving.net and register for the free practice building kit.  The first CD directly addresses the question of how to do business in a more loving, more effective way.

Also, feel free to check out http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_and_crisis_civilization – while I disagree with some of his proposed solutions, his diagnosis of the challenge is profound.

Your E-Coaching Nugget (Reading Time: 3 Minutes)

There’s just a tiny, wee bit of fear-of-failure going around right now.  Perhaps you’ve noticed?  Some of it’s real – there are a lot of business failures going on right now – but in most cases, our fears far exceed reality.  There’s a saying that “FEAR is False Expectations Appearing Real.”  We create ferocious worst case fantasies about what we think it would mean if we failed, and then we beat ourselves over the head with them, in the vain hope that this will somehow do us good.

But this misses one of the most fundamental spiritual laws – the law of attraction.  Put simply, it states that “where you focus is where you go.”  When we fear something, we’re much more likely to attract it to ourselves.   Our fears become self-fulfilling prophecies.  “The only thing to fear is fear itself” might be a little bit over-simplified, but not by much.

It also assumes that failure is a bad thing, instead of appreciating the gift of failure.

Failure and learning go hand in hand. When a baby learns to walk, they “fail” hundreds of times before they succeed.  For many years, Babe Ruth held the record for the most homeruns – as well as the record for the most strikeouts.  A venture capitalist once told me that “Training entrepreneurs is like training jet fighter pilots.  You have to be willing to let them crash a couple $20 million vehicles before they get it right.”

As long as you fail with integrity, it’s not failure.  It’s learning. Many wise investors would rather invest their money with someone who failed in their first venture, rather than with someone who had a big success, because the “failure” has a much better ideanow of what they don’t know.  They have a more realistic understanding of the risks they’re taking, and they often learned a lot more than the “success” did.

I remember a friend of mine from Berkeley, who started a company in Amsterdam.  He pointed out that one of the big reasons why Silicon Valley and Hollywood happened in the U.S. instead of Europe is that Europe historically placed a much bigger stigma on failure.  In the U.S., a good failure is a badge of honor.

For coaches, counselors and healers, we tend to think that we have to put on a front, and pretend we’re perfect.  I mean, if someone’s going to pay us for our services, we need to have it all together, right?

Whatever.

Everyone has a crack.  That’s where the light gets in.  And while our light is what lifts and inspires others, our value comes at least as much from our experience in working with our cracks.  Our “failures” are one of the best tools we could wish for, in allowing ourselves to Only Connect with our clients.  You can only take a client as deep as you’ve gone yourself, and wisdom comes from experience.  One of the things I most adore about Steve Chandler is how thoroughly he owns his past failures, and uses them to connect with his clients.

I saw one of my counselors this week, who’s also a powerful intuitive and spiritual teacher.  I asked her what her sense was of what’s going on in the world right now.  Her answer:  we’re being called to evolve to the next level of spiritual consciousness, and as part of that, we’re being pushed to release many of our old distractions and attachments.  Wherever we’ve created co-dependent relationships (i.e. with money, organizations, spouses, etc.) many of those bonds are now being broken free.  This can feel like failure and loss.  And it can be, if you choose to see it that way.  Or it can be a springboard to learning and growth.

The choice is yours.

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. Did you get the email with our big announcement?  Check it out at www.sellingbygiving.net

I have the privilege of facilitating an amazing group of soul-centered business builders who are engaged in a 12 month exploration of what it means to practice conscious capitalism. Not just as a theory, but as both a spiritual and economic practice.

Yesterday, we received a special gift in the form of Terry Tillman, one of the senior elders in the field of conscious leadership development (www.227company.com). I think I’m learning as much as anyone in the group, and I had a particularly profound take-away that I want to share with you.

Terry reminded us that one of the highest spiritual laws on our planet is the law of abundance, also known as the law of giving and receiving. As defined by Deepak Chopra, “The universe operates through dynamic exchange…giving and receiving are different aspects of the flow of energy in the universe. And in our willingness to give that which we seek, we keep the abundance of the universe circulating in our lives.”

What is the difference between a lush tropic island and the Dead Sea? The former circulates water, both giving and receiving it. The Dead Sea doesn’t – it only receives.

The spiritual law of abundance is as automatic and consistent as the physical law of gravity, and abundance only breaks down when we stop the flow. When we become attached to things, we stop giving, we stop the flow – and we suffer. When we judge ourselves as unworthy, we stop receiving, we stop the flow – and we suffer. In contrast, a commitment to providing exceptional value means being equally committed to giving exceptional value and to receiving payment for that value. It means being committed to practicing the law of abundance.

Notice in your life, do you have a harder time giving or receiving? Which side do you have more of your blocks on? (We all have at least some blocks – otherwise we wouldn’t have anything left to learn…)

When we open to spiritual reality, our experience is one of abundance. In contrast, modern economic theory is based on scarcity. One of Wikipedia’s definitions of economics is “the social science of choice under scarcity.”

This does not mean that economics is wrong. What it means is that the world changes as we lift in consciousness. At the physical level, the world looks like it’s based in scarcity, win/lose, either/or, and survival of the fittest. But as we’re able to see things from a higher perspective, we realize that things are based in abundance, win/win, both/and, and love.

The challenge is that when we start to see this, we naturally tend to go into spiritual bypass, where we only want to focus on the spiritual and we tend to deny the physical (which is just another form of either/or). We may shift from the receiving-only focus of unconscious for-profit organizations (“money, money, I want more money NOW”) to the giving-only focus of unconscious non-profit organizations (“there shouldn’t be any scarcity so I’m going to fix things by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor”).

We may sit around and think that if we just watch The Secret another 27 times, we’ll win the Lotto and live happily ever after. Or we may see our self worth as defined by how much we sacrifice our needs for others. Or we may feel a secret sense of entitlement, where we expect that if we become good enough at providing our services, we deserve to have a full practice – without having to learn how to enroll clients.

So how do we embrace both the law of scarcity and the law of abundance?

That is a multi-trillion dollar question our world is grappling with right now.

I believe this question is at the heart of the current economic crisis, of the shift from unconscious capitalism to conscious capitalism, and the shift from unconscious philanthropy to conscious philanthropy. It’s at the heart of Selling By Giving, and it’s at the heart of our 12 month group. You can read about the three keys to integrating spirituality and business (i.e. abundance and scarcity) that I’ve come across so far, in www.sixfigurepractice.net/ebook.

I believe the answer starts by recognizing how deep this conflict goes within each of us and within our organizations, and by learning to embrace this. It also starts by recognizing that conscious capitalism can’t be measured just by the mission of the organization. It also requires focusing on the consciousness of the members in the organization. In other words, it’s not enough to focus just on what we do, it also requires focusing on how we are as we do it.

As my teachers at the University of Santa Monica say, “how you are with the issue is the issue.” Similarly, “how you are with the conflicts inherent in conscious capitalism is the measure of how conscious your capitalism is.”

Most of the work in this area I’ve seen so far has tended to come from one of two angles.

1) For-profit organizations seeking to make their mission more loving. This includes corporate social responsibility, the triple bottom line, etc.

2) Non-profit organizations seeking to make their mission more self-sustaining. This includes social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, etc.

But the thing is, when we’re coming from a lower place in consciousness, business is a battle for survival, and service is a sacrifice. When we’re at the bottom of the pyramid, we do have to choose between the left and the right, between for-profit and non-profit, between receiving and giving. It’s only as we lift in consciousness (a large piece of which happens by integrating the conflicts inside us and by learning to love all of who we are) that we’re able to actually live the law of abundance.

Because of this, you can’t build a conscious organization without also focusing on the consciousness of its members’.

When our conscious self is identified with our physical self, economics is about scarcity and service is about sacrifice. This is shown at the bottom of the triangle, and it’s what happens when we listen to the news and go into fear.

When our conscious self is identified with our spiritual self, both economics and service are about abundance and love. This is shown at the top of the triangle, and it’s what happens when we learn to see everything in life, including our inner conflicts, as opportunities for learning, upliftment and growth. It’s what happens as we find our inner conflicts, and instead of trying to fight, feed or flee them, we learn to love them instead.

Doing so requires learning to embrace both sides of Love (acceptance and loving self-discipline) and both sides of reality (physical and spiritual). Notice that the symbol for love is not a circle (which symbolizes oneness) it’s a heart, which symbolizes two becoming one while also remaining two. Similarly, to do business from a place of love and consciousness means integrating two value systems so they become one while also remaining two – the foundation to the three keys for integrating spirituality and business.

Love and light,

Brian

P.S. If this is interesting to you, please feel free to comment below or forward it to those you think would like it.

One of my clients made a major shift this month in her business. She’s building a new company that’s exciting, innovative and heart-felt. She’s got a big vision and a big opportunity, but like most of us, her fears and insecurities had been holding her back.

She kept asking questions like “Who am I to do this business?” “Why would investors give me money?” “Why would people buy from me?” Each time she did, she found herself feeling more insecure and unworthy.

The key she used to change things for herself was to change the core focus of the company. When she listened to her insecurities, she thought it needed to be about her. And when she thought she needed to be the center of the company, she kept comparing herself to others and finding herself wanting. Which created more insecurity, and more of a need to make the company about herself…

But her business isn’t really about her. It’s about a bigger purpose. It’s about a cause she cares deeply about. And when she focused on this purpose, then the question shifted from “Why would people want to work with me?” to “Who wants to join with me in support of this purpose?” The answer: lots of people, including some very rich and successful investors, who might be delighted to enlist her in their cause.

Their cause? What about her cause? Ah…but it’s the same cause. Self-focus creates a win/lose mentality. How can I take from you? How can I convince you? How can I enroll you in what I want? It puts us on opposing teams. Purpose-focus creates a win/win or no deal mentality. It shifts the game so we’re both on the same team.

I notice the same shift in me. When I start thinking that Selling By Giving is about me, I start feeling insecure and thinking that I need to convince others of its value. But it’s not about me. It’s about service. It’s about making a difference in people’s lives. It’s about a cause I care deeply about – integrating spirituality and business, so we can learn how to turn business into service and sales into spiritual growth.

Do you ever feel insecure about business? If so, what is the purpose behind what you’re doing? And how can you focus more on that, particularly when talking to others about sales, investment or partnership?

Love and light,

Brian

P.S. Big announcement coming soon! Probably this next week!

I talked with a client today who is retrenching in the face of the downturn. While it’s painful for them, they’re doing a great job of “not letting a good crisis go to waste.” They’re using the stark clarity of their new financial situation to cut through some old patterns they’ve known for years they “should” get rid of, but which have been holding them back in major ways. Like many of us, when times were good, their business was functioning just well enough to allow them to indulge in their old patterns.

So, like many of us, they did.

When we started coaching together, they started shifting these patterns. They made beautiful, powerful progress. And yet, like many of us, they had some stubborn, deeper, fear-based patterns that kept hanging in there.

Until the crisis made it clear that they had to choose between indulging these patterns and surviving as a business. To their credit, they had the self-honestly to really look at this choice, and the courage to confront their fears. In doing so, they are transforming themselves – both who they are as individuals, and who they are as a business.

And from this new place, they’re realizing that a down economy can also be a tremendous gift.

A gift?!? Really?!?

Yes.

For example, this client is a small, boutique, service based business that competes with big ad agencies and consulting companies. During good times, most of their potential clients chose to work with big, brand name, expensive firms. These firms cost twice as much, and do half the quality of work (mostly by farming it out to young associates). But during the good times, who cares? They’ve got the name, and people wanted the name. During good times, who cares if they could save $100,000 here, or $400,000 there?

Well, those times are over. This client now has such a competitive advantage, it’s almost unfair. The value proposition they offer is so compelling, they have the potential to virtually poach clients at will.

The real question is: will they? Will they continue milking every benefit they can from this crisis? Will they continue choosing to make the hard inner choices that are going to make the difference between the winners and the losers in these new times?

I believe they will…

Will you?

When we go in to our place of victim consciousness (which we all have somewhere inside) this financial crisis feels like a horrible thing that’s taking things from us we’re entitled to. It’s like a bad monster stealing our blankie.

When we go in to our place of self-deception and denial (which we also all have somewhere inside) this financial crisis is something we do everything we can to ignore, so we can continue “putting off hard choices” in the hopes they will go away. It’s like hiding in a closet and waiting for the world to become the way we think it “should” be.

Those are two choices we can make.

Here’s another.

We can also step in to our place of personal responsibility and courage (and yes, we all have this inside too) and ask “How can I use this as an opportunity?” “How can I avoid letting a good crisis go to waste?”

In these new times, people are becoming much more discerning about the level of value they’re receiving. If you’re committed to providing exceptional value (and Selling By Giving can show you how) you too can join the ranks of the new winners that will be emerging out of this storm.

The question is: Will you?

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. If you’d like support in this choice, we’ll be releasing the full Selling By Giving information product shortly. Stay tuned!

Last week, we explored the core strength and challenge of capitalism. We looked at the coming collision between the “unstoppable force” of exponential economic expansion, and the “immovable object” of sustainability demanded by the planet’s finite resources.

And we asked a question.

What will Capitalism 2.0 look like?

(If you missed it, last week’s nugget is available at http://ecoaching.corecoaching.org/?p=48)

This question fascinates me. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Here are a few of mine.

I’m guessing Capitalism 2.0 will embrace the following.

Money and Meaning. Gen Y regularly gets accused of being lazy. But my sense is that the deeper issue is an unwillingness to devote their lives just to making money for the sake of money. They want their jobs to have both money and meaning – a key feature of Capitalism 2.0. When we only focus on survival and success, desire will sooner or later turn in to addiction. Sustainable capitalism requires explicitly supporting people, companies and marketplaces in making the shift from focusing just on their physical needs (i.e. money, desire, success and survival) to also embracing their spiritual needs (i.e. meaning, growth and giving).

An Increased Shift to Services. Value creates money – not the other way around. And there are two ways we can expand the economy – by producing/consuming more products or by producing/consuming more services. Buying more couches isn’t sustainable. Investing in personal growth services is. If you’re building a practice offering life-enhancing services, but you’re afraid to charge a lot for them, ask yourself the question, “what else would my clients spend the money on?” If you don’t charge as much as you can for your services, and your client buys couches with that money instead, look at how much your choice just cost the planet!

Long Term Focus. Greed happens when desire turns into addiction. By definition, addiction means making what’s important today a higher priority than what’s important tomorrow. It means over-prioritizing our immediate desires. And a key component of capitalism’s current addiction has been Wall Street’s obsessive focus on quarterly earnings and annual bonuses. Capitalism works much better when decisions and compensation are based on 5, 10 or even 20 year windows.

Valuing Consciousness. A related question is “what is conscious capitalism?” And a simple way I’ve found of answering it is by rating an organization on two dimensions.
1) What is the purpose of the organization? Non-profits traditionally embrace meaning at the expense of money. For-profits traditionally embrace money at the expense of meaning. CSR and social enterprises are initial examples of organizations seeking to embrace both.
2) How conscious are the people in the organization? This is a complicated but vital question, because what we do is often less important than how we are as we do it. However we measure it, consciousness rates the beingness we have as we do business.
Conscious businesses can be at least as profitable as unconscious ones. And they’re much more sustainable.

Evolving Notions of Ownership. As we currently view it, companies are owned by their shareholders, and their primary purpose is to increase the wealth of those shareholders. This notion goes to the heart of what has made capitalism such a powerful force for economic expansion. And it goes to the heart of what is turning this strength into an unsustainable addiction. It’s what has allowed Wall Street to hold Main Street hostage with insatiable demands for increased quarterly earnings. In contrast, I would guess that Capitalism 2.0 will involve an evolved notion of ownership. Think for a second. Who owns the US government? Who owns the Catholic Church? Who owns the planet?

Reinvention of Production. There’s nothing wrong with consumption of products – as long as we can find ways of making this process sustainable. How can we rebuild our system so that the true global costs of each product are factored in, and each company is responsible not just for the cost of production, but also for the cost of renewing the source and waste of that production?

Interesting…

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. To learn more about how to bring together money and meaning in your business, please feel free to visit www.sixfigurepractice.net/introcds.html.

With all that’s going on with the economy, I’ve been thinking a lot about money and capitalism. What is money – really? Where does it come from? And what are capitalism’s strengths and challenges?

Here are a few interesting thoughts I’ve found…

The greatest strength of capitalism is its unparalleled capacity for economic expansion.

If you want to see something fascinating, look at this graph.

It shows capitalism’s remarkable ability to increase our standard of living. For example, for almost 200 years, the amount of real income each person in the US makes has increased by an average of 1.7% – year upon year upon year. Or look at China. Income was flat until Mao took over, then it plummeted and recovered. But in 1976 they embraced their own version of capitalism, and since then per person income has been increasing by 6.3% per year.

Over time, the power of compounded growth is AMAZING. In the US, it’s the difference (in 1990 $) between $1,200 / person in 1820 and $32,000 / person in 2006. In China, it’s the difference between $130 / person in 1960 and $7,100 / person in 2008.

It’s why in the US, people now DRIVE to their protests.

At the same time, every great strength comes with an equal challenge.

And the current crisis is exposing capitalism’s root challenge…

The greatest challenge of capitalism is its addiction to economic expansion.

Many people have been asking about the Wall Street blowup, “how could they have been so greedy?” And, “how could they have been so dumb?”

But what is greed? It’s not our desire for more money. It’s an addiction to our desire for more money. It’s desire that’s gotten out of control. And what always comes with addiction? Denial and self-deception. Greed is stupid – literally – because it’s an addiction that causes us to lie to ourselves. Above all else, this crisis was created by an almost ubiquitous level of denial. It was created by the most expensive words in finance, “this time it’s different.”

This addiction isn’t just a problem with the people on Wall Street. Or the people who took out a mortgage they couldn’t afford. Or the people who got up to their eyeballs in credit card debt.

It’s the core challenge of the system itself.

Our entire financial system is based on the root assumption that the economy will continue expanding – that there will be more money tomorrow than there is today. How are we funding our retirements? Through the assumption that money we invest in the stock market will grow, because there will be more money tomorrow than today. How do banks make money? By selling interest bearing loans. And what allows us to take out a loan? Our assumption that we’ll have more money tomorrow than we do today. Why is our government able to create trillions of dollars in new debt?

Because of the assumption that there will be more money tomorrow than there is today.

Notice how much fear there is of the “R word.” Why is a recession so scary? I mean, it’s just the difference of a few percentage points, right? No. It’s the difference between satisfying our addiction to economic expansion, and going in to expansion-addiction-withdrawal.

It’s the difference between the system working and the system failing.

But here’s the thing. Exponential expansion isn’t sustainable over the long term. It can’t be. Our planet has limited resources. Resources that are beginning to be maxed out.

And so this century may be defined in large part by the collision of an unstoppable force – capitalism – with an immovable object – the need for sustainability.

Most of the suggestions I’ve seen for how to work with this dilemma have involved regression to earlier times and ways of being. But I believe this crisis is another example of our race being called to evolve to the next level of consciousness. It’s an opportunity to step forward, not fall back. It’s an opportunity to redefine the way we do business. And it’s an opportunity to redefine the way we do life.

Which leaves me with a question.

What will Capitalism 2.0 look like?

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. Stay tuned for next week, when I’ll be sharing some initial thoughts on this question…

P.P.S. Can you think of anyone in your life who would receive value from these nuggets? If so, feel free to visit http://www.sixfigurepractice.net/give-a-gift.php to give them as a free gift to someone you love.