Money vs. Currency

Today I re-learned a better mindset about money. I remember having a similar mindset before the Financial Crisis in 2008 and its impact on my life, and I’m glad that I was reminded about it today.

You can think of money as a finite resource, as in “person A has more, therefore person B has less”, it means for someone to do well, others have to do poorly. Alternatively, you can think of it as currency. As in “I create value and exchange it for money”. This latter viewpoint means the world becomes a better place when you sell things/services of value. Emphasis on “of value”!

That doesn’t solve the problem that billionaires and trillion-dollar-companies rarely provide as much value to the world as they hold hostage in the form of money. Money, not currency, because their money doesn’t flow through the economy anymore and thus is a clog in the pipes of the economy. Stationary money harms us all.

I can’t fix the problem of money getting stuck in dead ends like billionaires or companies as large as small countries. That is a political problem, but the world is made up from more than broke people and billionaires/trillion-dollar-companies. And I choose to focus on what I can control, which is who I do business with.