What If You Could Grow Money On A Tree!

Needless to say that the most prominent and deep-rooted myths about business move around our perception of money. In this article, my goal is to highlight two of the various ideas about money that, when being misinterpreted or misused, lead us to commonly experienced financial failures.

Money is NOT necessarily cash

When it comes to evaluating a company’s worth or to scan someone’s level of success, most of us focus on the figures. Is it a billion-dollar company? Has she been listed in Forbes’ list of wealthiest people? 

Not only we ask these questions, but we tend to refer to ‘’cash’’ which is the substantial part of money instead of the latter, which can be anything from cash (tangible) to any other asset or possessions that have a financial value. 

Therefore, if your overall assets ─things or activities that bring you money─ are worth some hundreds of thousands of dollars, then your (investment) portfolio is worth that much. It takes experts of all sorts to evaluate the worth of assets that you or a company owns. 

A real estate agent, for example, can, through some predictions of the housing market and historical data related to a specific house or its environment, determine the value of a home you wish to purchase. A broker can help you with your investment decisions by evaluating assets you wish to own (wholly or partly). Risk is the most reliable guide for such decisions. 

Looking at this old truck on sale or this small warehouse in your area that you could buy in a few payments, they could be a turning point for you because of their ability to bring you cash. If you happened to own them, then their financial value would have added up to your total worth. 

And by the way, may have money sitting in your garage…unknowingly.

Money (cash) is to a business what blood is to our body

Have you ever imagined blood flowing into a body without vessels? Well if you get the picture, then you can get a glimpse of how misconstructed the money-business relationship is perceived.

As much as you need vessels for the blood to flow, any business needs some structure that determines and sets how and when money is made and spent within. No surprise that many startups fail after a few months or don’t even make it to launch.  

Quite often you’d hear people complain about not having cash to create a business on their own. The simplest yet tricky question you could ask someone in that situation is, ‘’If you are given X amount of dollars right now, how will it help you start a business or grow an  existing one?’’ The more reasonable the number you pick for them, the more logical their answer tends to be. However, the higher you go, the more troubling their visualization of their project gets.

My attempt here is not to diminish the real need for cash that someone or a business owner might express for personal or professional matters. Nevertheless, I am highlighting the overfocus that money gets when we are in need. Therefore, if there is no careful planning that sets the how much, how, and when money should be earned, spent or saved, it will ─like blood flowing off the vessels leads to death─cause severe downturns to your projects or worse, terminate them.

It would have certainly been easier if we could pick money from a tree, but money, by then, would have been less important than it is now. With many more households having this ‘’ tree ’’ in their backyard, it would have taken much less to perform any financial transaction. And because, of course, supply would outnumber demand, the value of money would have systematically decreased. As simple as that! 

For what is seen in modern days, people are getting more and more loyal to money and its misconceptions. We need it, we use it, we trade it, we save it, we spend it. You get the picture! But for what is seen as well the more you focus on money instead of ways to earn it and grow your portfolio, the fewer opportunities you’ll be able to take advantage of. 

For the tree to grow and give us fruits that we endlessly enjoy, it has to be planted, watered, taken care of, and blossom. Although your financial worth doesn’t grow as in a tree, you can certainly use the same structure by rebuilding your previous biased conceptions you had of money and being aware of it as a means, but not an ideal.