Get Rid of Your Zero-Sum World View and Shed the Guilt
One of the limiting beliefs that affects a lot of people is the belief or world-view that wealth is a zero-sum game. What does this mean? The myth that wealth is a zero-sum game is based on the idea that somehow the amount of wealth in the world is limited. For example, if I have $10, and you charge me $10 for something I am now poorer by $10 and you are now richer by $10.
In mathematical terms this would be expressed as $10 – $10 = $0 for me, and $0 + $10 = $10 for you. In financial accounting this is also expressed in balance sheets which always have to add up to zero.
This kind of thinking is exactly what keeps people broke and poor their entire lives. Why? Because most of us have been raised to be decent people who just want their “fair share” of the goodies in life and we don’t want to be “greedy rich people”. If we are infected with this kind of limited thinking, when opportunities to build wealth present themselves we subconsciously sabotage ourselves because deep down we don’t want to be taking more than our “fair share”.
The guilt associated with taking money from someone else who might need it more than we do is what keeps most of us just above the poverty line which we can easily justify in our minds. For some people, if they were to drive a $100,000 BMW down the street and see a mom in a broken down station wagon with her four kids, the guilt of driving around in luxury while someone else drives a broken down car would be too much for us. All of these feelings of guilt are rooted in the false theory that wealth is a zero-sum game.
Let’s explore this in a bit more detail. Let’s say we have two people, Adam and Bob. Adam, a professional dog trainer with 20 years of experience, writes an eBook on dog training which he offers for sale to Bob for $10. Bob is in need of such an eBook because his dog is misbehaving and tearing up the house, so Bob purchases the eBook from Adam for $10. In the zero-sum game theory, it would be stated that Adam now has $10 which used to belong to Bob therefore Adam is now richer than Bob by $10. If Adam went around and sold millions of copies of his eBook to people, he would accumulate tens of millions of dollars, by “siphoning” that money from millions of people. By doing this, Adam would acquire more than his “fair share” of money and would become an “evil rich person”. This is what the zero-sum theory wants us to believe.
Let’s see what is really happening here though. When Adam offers the eBook to Bob at a price of $10, Bob has full decision making power to either purchase the eBook or not, right? He thinks about the problems his dog is creating around the house and decides that he will pay $10 to solve this problem, so he purchases the eBook from Adam. When Adam receives the $10 from Bob, Bob also receives the eBook from Adam. An equal exchange of value has taken place and NO VALUE was lost. Meaning, even though Bob now has $10 less in his bank account, he also has an eBook that’s worth at least $10 to him in his possession and the training tips in the eBook could actually prove to be worth a lot more than $10 to him.
Let’s assume for a minute that the eBook proves to be of amazing quality and Bob uses the training tips to properly train his dog and prevents his dog from tearing up the furniture in the house. The eBook proves to be worth hundreds of dollars to Bob even though he only paid Adam $10 for it. So, during the transaction process of one person helping another, hundreds of dollars of “new wealth” have been created even if that “new wealth” is not yet represented in dollars and cents.
To Adam, it doesn’t cost anything extra to produce multiple copies of his eBook so he is perfectly happy only taking $10 from Bob, even though he knows that the eBook will bring hundreds of dollars more in “use value” than Bob paid for.
So, in this quick example we can clearly see that when people participate in consumer transactions, wealth can actually be expanded as one person shares something with the other. Let’s follow this a little bit further. Adam can then take his $10 and purchase an eBook from Sally who writes about house decorating, and Sally takes her $10 and purchases an eBook from Bob on photography. The $10 that Bob started with has wound up back in his pocket, but all three of them now have hundreds of dollars worth of extra value in their lives by sharing the information they each learned from each-other. Bob now knows how to train his dog, Adam now knows how to decorate his house and Sally is now an expert in photography. More wealth has been created.
I know this is a simplistic view of the process, but I’m trying to keep things simple to illustrate my point. The reason that a lot of people get stuck in zero-sum wealth limited thinking is that they ignore all types of value in the world except for cash. In the above example, a financial accountant would simply report that Bob has his $10 back and Adam and Sally are back at $0, therefore no exchange of value has happened. This is very far from the truth, however because value has exchanged hands and due to the sharing process, value has expanded.
The wisdom that was sitting in Adam’s head has now been copied/transferred to Bob’s head and learning from Adam’s experience has helped Bob to train his dog properly. Even if you were to ignore all types of value out there except cash, the zero-sum theory still doesn’t hold up because governments print new money all the time. Now you might say that when a government prints more money, it devalues the currency compared to another currency so no new value is created, but that’s not true either. What if all the governments simultaneously doubled the amount of cash they printed? The exchange rates between all the currencies would stay the same, but there would be more money out there.
At the end of the day, if you choose to believe that wealth is a zero-sum game, there is nothing I can do to logically convince you that it isn’t, but since neither theory can really truly be proven right or wrong, I choose to believe in the more empowering belief which is to believe that wealth is NOT a zero-sum game, and that by building wealth we are actually increasing the amount of wealth in the world, not taking away from it.
To really get into building wealth and to start making money by doing what you love, I strongly suggest you dig deep inside to see if perhaps you’re holding onto this limiting zero-sum belief without even realizing it. We all grew up with phrases like “your fair share” and “there’s only so much to go around” being thrown around. Explore your limiting beliefs and see if that one might be lurking beneath the surface somewhere. If it is, squash it or you’ll be limiting yourself to living a timid life, reluctant to pursue your greatest dreams in fear and guilt that you might somehow end up with more than your “fair share” of the pie.
“Your wealth is addition for you, but subtraction for no one.” – Dan Kennedy
Search
Lijit SearchServices
Fitness
Warhammer 40k
Blog Sponsors
Top Commentators
Categories
- Affiliate Marketing (40)
- Announcements (28)
- Better Blog Tips (6)
- Blog (402)
- Blogging (73)
- Contests and Competitions (27)
- Featured (27)
- Fitness Articles (7)
- Fun & Relaxation (15)
- Health & Fitness (17)
- Healthy Recipes (11)
- Intention & Manifestation (47)
- Intuition (10)
- Make Money Online (144)
- Maqui Berry (1)
- meditation (4)
- Mindset (38)
- p90x (60)
- Personal Development (159)
- Progress (31)
- Progress Reports (20)
- Psychic Development (5)
- Psychic Protection (2)
- Reiki (1)
- Reviews (28)
- Spirit Guides (3)
- Spirituality (8)
- the paulymath show (4)
- Videos (5)
- Warhammer 40k (1)
- Wealth & Money (81)
Paul Piotrowski is a highly ambitious and passionate self-improvement fanatic who has spent over 13 years relentlessly pursuing and studying personal development wisdom in almost every area of life. His highly intuitive drive to seek wisdom and truth in life has led him through very diverse areas of experience ranging from entrepreneurship and business, natural [...]
Copyright 2007-2010 Paulymath.com - All Rights Reserved - [ Home | Disclaimer | Privacy Policy ]
Thank you, great article. I know I would feel bad if
I were the one who drove that BMW. I did not relate that
to not being able to build wealth, so I will start
analyzing what you said. BTW, I share a $15,000 station
wagon with my girlfriend, so I don’t feel too bad
Our beliefs about money definitely affect how much of it we attract into our lives! I have written about this myself. Thanks for illustrating the concept so well.
@Michael Miles: You’re welcome. It’s one of those little hidden beliefs that many have but aren’t aware of. Even if you “know” that wealth is not a zero-sum game, it’s important to subconsciously condition yourself towards that because we are automatically being de-conditioned by the rest of the world who believes in a zero-sum game model.
@Thomas: Maybe you can think of it this way. If you make $40k this year and share that $15k station wagon, you ADDED $40k worth of value to the world in order to make that $40k (assuming a fair exchange of wages occured). If you make $1,000,000 this year and drive a $100k car, you ADDED $1,000,000 worth of value to the world in order to make that $1,000,000. The fact that you’re spending $100k on a car changes nothing as to how much value you provide. The only thing it does is exchanges $100k worth of cash in your possession for a car. You now get the car, and the BMW dealer gets $100k which goes to pay employees who make the car, and the sales guy, and the manager, and the mechanics, etc. etc.
As Dan Kennedy says “Your wealth is addition for you, but subtraction for no one.”
I guess believing that wealth is not a zero-sum game goes hand in hand with being a lightworker, right?
@Hunter Nuttall: It’s a belief / world-view not exclusive to Lightworkers, but as a Lightworker it keeps you away from “Lightworker Syndrome” which is a fancy way of saying someone who wants to help the world, but due to the guilt they feel about building wealth they stay poor thinking that there will be “more to go around for others” by doing that.
So basically Lightworker + Zero-Sum Word View = Very Tough Life. A Lightworker that gets himself or herself out of the Zero-Sum Limited Belief system becomes a much more effective Lightworker that helps a lot more people.
@Paul: If it’s possible for me to deliver twice as much value, I should be able to get paid twice as much, and then spend twice as much as before. But the feeling is still there. I would like people to have equal opportunities in life. I guess that’s why I feel like giving money to someone who have less than I have. Shouldn’t people have equal opportunities? Did poor people choose to be poor? I realize that this feeling is holding me back. What would you feel like, if you drove that BMW?
@Thomas: If you want to give away money to the poor go right ahead. That’s your choice. Just don’t allow the Zero-Sum mentality to prevent you from making an abundance of money in the first place.
Wow awesome article paul! I never actually thought about it in that way before. You have some really good fresh info on here
One story that is similar but works for non-digital goods (I know a lot of people on here think “Oh fine that works for ebooks, but what about food etc), was one I read a while ago that goes like this:
Lets say tom has chickens and sells eggs, while harry has cows and sells milk. tom has a lot of eggs so they aren’t worth that much to him, maybe $1 per egg. Harry has a lot of milk so it isn’t worth much to him, maybe $1 a litre.
Now tom loves milk so milk to him is worth $2 a litre, and harry loves eggs so they are worth $2 an egg to him.
If tom has an egg and harry has a litre of milk they’ll have a combined total of $2 of value.
But what if tom gives an egg for one litre of harry’s milk? they will each have $2 of value making for a combined total of $4 of value. Meaning $2 of value was just created out of thin air from that one trade!
Just going to show that even for solid real goods there is infinate value in the world, we just need to tap into it
Hi Paul, I would submit that wealth IS a zero-sum game, but not in the way you have imagined. Wealth can be created through various business practices as you have illustrated, but the fact is that wealth is a relative measure. It doesn’t matter how much money you are generating. What matters is how much wealth you are generating relative to everyone else. As a capitalist society, we generally bestow deference, power, and attention on those above us on the wealth totem pole, and expect it from those below us on the wealth totem pole. If I generate millions of dollars through an ingenious business idea, it may be true that I have caused no financial harm to anyone else in the process. Nevertheless, my peers find themselves somewhat (even if only a tiny amount) reduced in the rankings on our social totem pole due to my glorious success, because their accomplishments are not measured in a vacuum. They are measured relative to the accomplishments of their peers. For every one of my peers that becomes wealthy, my relative success is diminished. For every one that fails, my relative success increases.
@Jason: Very good points. What you’re describing is the fact that Money is a form of currency exchange. Meaning, it is only meaningful relative to other people. If you were the only person on Earth, it would be meaningless to be a Trillionaire. You would still have to clean your own house for example, as there wouldn’t be anyone around to pay to do that. You’re also saying that as ONE person creates wealth, everyone on the planet gets “re-adjusted” either up or down the “Totem Pole” as you describe it, even if it’s only ever so slightly. It always looks like a pyramid with a smaller percentage of wealthy people up top and a larger percentage of poor people at the bottom. Some people think it’s not fair, and that the “rich” keep the “poor” at the bottom.
The concept I am describing doesn’t negate the fact that there is a pyramid in place, but what it shows is that (1) You have the ability to place yourself anywhere you want on that pyramid, and (2) Even though the shape of the Pyramid doesn’t change, the wealth within the Pyramid can be created/destroyed and is not a zero-sum game. Let me explain.
When someone creates wealth, such as for example creating a better vacuum cleaner and becomes a millionaire, yes he gets shifted up the pyramid and his “ranking on the totem pole” goes up while your ranking compared to him might go down, but don’t forget that the $1,000,000 in wealth that he has received also created a million dollars worth of GOOD VACUUMS that we all get to use. The money we paid for the Vacuums was there before the Vacuum was created and after it is created…it simply moved from our pockets to his, so this person who created the better Vacuum did not diminish the amount of money in the system, but what he did do is he created another MILLION dollars worth of VALUE in the system that basically came from “nowhere”. Now all of us have a better Vacuum to use, which makes it easier for us to clean our houses faster etc.
So the more wealthy people that are created out there, the more value that gets created in the world. Life becomes easier and happier. That is what I mean by it not being a zero-sum game.