In my lower-middle-class youth, I was raised to discuss money almost never; money was mostly to be associated with all the evils of the world. As a result of my childhood, I came to hold internal conflicting messages about having money, which made it tough to go out into the world and build abundance.
As I reach the age of fifty, my money intelligence has evolved, of course. I no longer regard money as evil. Just as a gun becomes evil in the wrong hands, so it is with money. How we go about earning it, keeping it, and using it is what truly counts in the end run. Now that may sound elementary, but the implications are many.
The best way to stop a child from crying is to distract them, occupying their mind with new stimuli. The best way to get attention is to do something outlandishly unexpected. The quickest path to wealth is to have an ingenious idea that becomes virally popular. When Pearl Harbor was suprisingly attacked, the U.S. joined in World War II and the entire country came together in support of winning the war. Time and again, the solution to major issues, or a seemingly insurmountable problem, has been a novel concept (new idea), or a Cause greater than the sum of its parts, or ideally both. I’m sure you can think of many more examples even stronger than these. The point is that we tend to see only as we focus, yet that focal power can be enough to change the world, given a great cause plus new – focal changing – ideas.