What does service and selflessness have to do with money?
The most important aspect of service and selflessness is that it produces trust. Trust comes from promise and fulfillment. The promise implicit in the dollar bill is that when I take a dollar for an hour of work, I will get the same value when I pay someone else for his hour of work. There is no inherent value in a piece of paper. What we invest in is the promise behind the dollar. On profit and loss statements, accounts receivable are promises other people made to you and accounts payable are promises you made to others. There is no actual money – only promises. You can measure the value of a company, a relationship, or one’s character within the context of promise and fulfillment.
Society suffers from a breakdown of promise and fulfillment and an erosion of trust. Look at marriage and the high rate of divorce – all promise and no fulfillment. When a society has to have cops and lawyers forcing people to keep their commitments, it is the sign of a diseased culture. It all comes back to promise and fulfillment.
Let’s look at it on an individual basis. Richard Rose used to say that the most important thing anyone can be armed with on a spiritual path is character, and he defined character as how well you keep your promises to yourself. Character and trust, the by-products of a healthy system of promise and fulfillment, are essential to the success of any organization. Money is only the measure of how effectively the organization is fulfilling their promise to selflessly serve the needs of others.
