Business Secrets from the Bible

Spiritual Success Strategies for Financial Abundance

Rabbi Daniel Lapin

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118749104
• eBook ISBN: 9781118749142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

Find success in finance, friendships, and spirituality with the advice of a well-known expert

It's safe to say that nearly everyone is seeking a happier, more successful life. So then why do so few attain it? Business Secrets from the Bible proposes a new way to view and approach success—one based upon key concepts from the Bible that are actually surprisingly simple. Written especially for those seeking success in the realms of money, relationships, and spirituality, this book encourages readers to realize their common mistakes, come to terms with them, and turn those mistakes into future triumphs. Filled with concrete advice for improved finances, spirituality, and connection, this resource takes a practical approach and aims to change not just the minds, but the actions of readers with a self-evident and persuasive pathway.

Drawing on his wisdom and knowledge of the Bible, the author reveals the clear link between making money and spirituality, and urges readers to focus on self-discipline, integrity, and character strength in order to achieve personal prosperity. Special emphasis is given to establishing positive attitudes toward making money and adopting effective Biblically-based strategies.

• Demonstrates how earnings and profits are God's reward for forming relationships with others and serving them
• Stresses the importance of service, sharing, change, leadership, and creating boundaries and structures
• Encourages readers to focus on other people's desires and teaches why and how to make connections with many people
• Suggests ways for readers to transform themselves and continue toward success even in the face of fear and uncertainty

Attaining wealth and well-being is no longer a mystery. Let this book identify and correct the errors that are keeping you from fulfillment and happiness.

Secret #1
God Wants Each of Us to Be Obsessively Preoccupied with the Needs and Desires of His Other Children

As long as we all grow our own wheat and corn, and stitch our own clothes, and churn our own butter, and make our own shoes, we need nobody else. We aren’t even thinking of anyone else. We’re only thinking of how to find enough time in the day to grow vegetables, feed the goats, shear the sheep, and shoe the horses. This is no way to live if you don’t have to, and in the modern world, we do not have to.

By contrast, when Frederick, Gerald, Harry, and friends all specialize, they are able to focus on how to better serve one another, and in doing so, they will gain more in return. The good Lord incentivizes us to increase our dependency upon each other by offering the blessing of financial abundance for those of us who comply. In other words, we each win more of a living with less effort when we specialize and trade. This process is called business.

I’ve already told you what business is, but not what the definition of a business is. This need not be made more complicated than it is. Some define a business as any organization or individual engaged in commercial, industrial, or professional activities. Others define a business as any organization involved in the trade of goods or services to consumers. While these definitions are not wrong, they are overly precise. The truth is simply that a business is any person or group of people who have customers. If you have someone willing to pay you voluntarily for the work you do, products you produce, or service you provide, then you’re in business.

Everyone who works for compensation can be considered “in business.” If City Transit pays you for driving a bus, you’re not an employee—you’re in business. Admittedly you’re in business with only one customer—City Transit—but you’re in business nonetheless. If you knit scarves for fun and agree to make a few for your friends in exchange for a few dollars for your time, guess what, you are in the fashion/clothing business.

The difference between the bus driver and the person who knits scarves in this example is that the bus driver makes more, in part because they have specialized. If the person who knits scarves quits her part-time retail and food service jobs to focus on growing her business, she too might make more money by specializing. By specializing in a trade, rather than doing a little of everything, she can enjoy better efficiency and more disposable income, rather than spreading herself thin. If she goes into her own business, she will find that her customers become valuable human beings to her and she will desire to please them.

Are you beginning to see why specialization and exchange are the foundations for God’s plan for human economic interaction? If you care about your customers as people—if you like, appreciate, and desire to serve them—you will be rewarded. However, if you prefer to spurn others in favor of making yourself utterly independent of all other humans, your life will be considerably less pleasant. There’s a reason almost no one still homesteads in the developed world. Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century British political philosopher and author of Leviathan, who was almost certainly a Bible-believing Puritan, once wrote that when we are alone, “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

We all sometimes think we just want to get away from everyone else. We may daydream about some calamity sweeping away everyone in the world except ourselves. We think, finally, we will be able to get a parking space downtown. There will be no traffic on the freeway. At last you’ll be able to watch television without fighting with your family over who gets the remote.

This is silly daydreaming, though. Imagine if it actually happened! What if everyone did disappear? Who would be operating the television station? That remote won’t do you much good if there is nothing to broadcast, no news anchors, no TV actors. What good is that parking space downtown if there is nowhere to work? And with nobody operating gas stations or oil refineries, parking will be the least of your problems! Good luck trying to capture a wild horse or donkey once you have used up all the gas in your tank! Time for dinner? Feel like a restaurant meal? Out of luck—no cooks, no wait staff. In the grocery stores, food is rotting on the shelves. At home, your heat and electricity have gone out because no one is running the utility company.

The truth is that without other people, your life becomes even worse than that of the most impoverished third-world subsistence-level peasants—at least they have one another to depend on!

The Jewish people have always known the power of specialization. But where did they learn it? From the Bible, of course! Jews have always understood specialization, as it is described in both Genesis and Deuteronomy. In chapter 49 of Genesis, verses 1 to 28, the elderly Jacob blesses his 12 sons. He could simply have gathered them and said these few words: “I am about to be gathered to my people, I bless you all with everything good. May God take care of you always, and please bury me in the Cave of Machpelah, which my grandfather Abraham prepared. Good-bye.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, there are 28 verses to record the distinct and separate blessings that he gave to each son.

Similarly, in Deuteronomy 33, before ascending the mountain to be shown the Land of Israel before his death, Moses spent 29 verses blessing the individual tribes. Again, he could easily have issued one comprehensive blessing to the entire children of Israel and promptly taken his leave.

The idea behind both Jacob’s blessing and that of Moses was unity with diversity. Each tribe was to have its own unique niche in the rich tapestry of a durable nation. Each tribe was to have its own specialty and to become dependent upon their brethren for everything else. If one thinks about it, isn’t this what all parents would like to ensure for their children? Some way of guaranteeing that they would all have remained united, each as concerned with the welfare of his siblings as with his own? The same is true for our Father in Heaven. In desiring to unify His children, He created a world that rewarded those who specialized in some area of creative work and then traded their efforts for everything else.

Compare the outlook of the solitary survivalist with that of the business professional. The former views other people as competitors and threats. By contrast, the business professional’s life is intricately linked to many other people. He has to be concerned with providing goods or services at sufficient quality and at an attractive price in order to attract and serve his customers. He has to be concerned with his employees and associates because only if they are happy and fulfilled will his enterprise prosper. Finally, he needs to be concerned with his vendors who supply him with the raw material of his production, because without them he is incapable of operating. Now whom do you think God prefers: the lonesome isolationist whose slogan is “I need nobody,” or the business professional active within a complex matrix of connectivity in which he is preoccupied with making life better for so many of God’s other children?

Secret #2
An Infinite God created Us in His Image with Infinite Imagination, Potential, Creative Power, and Desires

Though God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden in which all was provided, He nonetheless insisted that Adam was to work (Genesis 2:15). Adam could have lived an idyllic and idle life drinking from the bountiful rivers of Eden and plucking luscious fruit as he desired from all but two trees. We shall soon see that, while a balanced life is necessary, God’s plan is for man to strive to achieve more. Ambition is a good thing. We all were created to desire as much as possible, but we also wish to expend only the least possible effort. Discontentment and unhappiness are wrong, but this in no way contradicts our legitimate desire for more.

Most of us have had the experience of being teenagers and thinking, “If only I could lay my hands on three hundred dollars, I’d be so happy.” As we get older, three hundred dollars quickly is no longer so unattainable for most, but we are still discontent because now we want more. The target has moved. The target, it seems, is always moving.

This may seem like greed and taken to excess, it can be a bad thing. But it is actually a powerful motivator, and drives us to do God’s work, the work of living that we all depend on each other to do.

Imagine what would happen if tonight at midnight, all other humans decided that they already had enough of everything they need and no longer needed to work. From now on, they decide, they will stay home. Picture your own life in this scenario. You get up the next morning unaware that all of your fellow citizens have abandoned all ambition and are sleeping in forever. There goes your day! Good luck trying to get milk for your morning coffee: The dairy farmer and the delivery-truck driver are home in bed rather than producing and supplying fresh milk to your grocery store. It won’t much matter, of course, because the grocery store will be shut down—the manager who ordinarily works the morning shift is also still at home contentedly asleep. The same goes for getting gasoline for your car, gas or electricity to cook your meals, or a new suit of clothing. The economy and all it provides has come to a screeching halt. Your fellow man’s innate desire for more is what makes it possible for your own life to function as smoothly as it does. Likewise, your decision to work makes life easier for your fellow man.

As a student, I once spent a long but rewarding summer selling fine English bone china door-to-door in Europe. After a rigorous and immensely valuable training period, all of us rookie trainee sales professionals were gathered together and the manager announced that we were each to choose our preferred compensation plan. Choice A was that we received a guaranteed base salary, or draw, of $250 a week in advance against our sales and 10 percent commission on all sales. Choice B provided zero base salary or draw, but we would receive a 40 percent commission on all sales.

I did not know what to do. Not knowing how effective I would be at selling, I figured I could at least count upon a few thousand dollars if I took Choice A. This was reassuring. I was about to sign up for Choice A when all of a sudden I had an epiphany. If I turned out to be unsuccessful at selling, why would they continue to pay me $250 a week merely for trying? And if I did find myself successful at selling, why would I want to earn only a small commission of 10 percent? I thought this through again and I could think of no reason why the company would keep paying me if I failed to sell. They might pay me for a few weeks but would then surely terminate me. On the other hand, if I developed any aptitude for sales, I could do far better with Plan B. I worried about the “sure” $1,000 a month I was perhaps giving up, but surely it was not really guaranteed if I did poorly, so I went with Plan B.

We had to write our choice on slips of paper along with our names and pass them to the front where the manager’s assistant quickly divided them into two piles, which I assumed to be a tall pile of the As and a much smaller pile of Bs. Picking up the larger pile of papers, he asked everyone whose name he called out to go into the next room. That was the last I ever saw of many of my former fellow trainees.

To the rest of us, he spoke warmly and congratulated us on successfully completing our training. He welcomed us into the company and explained that he wanted only ambitious men and women who yearned for unlimited potential working for him. He wanted people interested in infinite possibilities. Anyone seeking the security of a minimal $1,000 a month was not nearly as interesting to him as those of us who had ambition for considerably more. And considerably more was exactly what I did earn that summer.

It is the exciting possibility of the infinite that drives medical research to come up with life-enhancing and life-extending drugs and devices. It is the exciting possibility of the infinite that drives all technological advances. It is the exciting possibility of the infinite that drives the business professional to find ever better ways of serving more customers more effectively. It is what drives progress in the world and is surely God’s will.

On some subconscious level, we humans are always trying to emulate God. One reason that television so fascinates us is that it allows us to enjoy a taste of God’s omnipresence. While God can be everywhere at once, the nearest we can achieve that is to be able to sit in our living rooms and observe the activities of our fellow human beings half a planet away. Television grants us the illusion of almost godly power.

This is also true with regard to air travel. Travel by ocean liner is far more comfortable and less expensive than by jet. Yet by the 1960s, most transatlantic ocean liner services were being discontinued. Why would people forsake a leisurely, comfortable, economical three-day journey from New York to Southampton in favor of being squeezed into a long aluminum cylinder and being hurtled across continents within only a few jet-lag hours? Again, one explanation is our deep desire to try and overcome human limitations of space and time just as God does.

God created us with an urge for the infinite. We need to embrace it and never surrender to the seditious and spurious summons of contentment cowering in the sanctuary of security. Accepting our desire for the infinite doesn’t condemn us to misery and unhappiness. On the contrary, rejecting contentment doesn’t mean being unhappy. In a green and lush meadow on a sunny afternoon, a cow can be content. A human should never be content. Happy—yes, always. But content? Never!

Secret #3
Humans Alone Possess the Ability to Transform Themselves

The reality of animals is that they are what they are, and will always be so. A cat, a cow, a camel, or a kangaroo will always be a cat,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Secret #1: God Wants Each of Us to Be Obsessively Preoccupied with the Needs and Desires of His Other Children
• Secret #2: An Infinite God Created Us in His Image with Infinite Imagination, Potential, Creative Power, and Desires
• Secret #3: Humans Alone Possess the Ability to Transform Themselves
• Secret #4: The Universe Was Created for Connection
• Secret #5: Making Money Is a Spiritual Activity
• Secret #6: Everything Important and Joyful You Have Achieved Has Been in Partnership with at Least One Other Person
• Secret #7: Focus on Other People’s Needs and Desires, and You Will Never, Ever Be Short of What You Yourself Desire and Need
• Secret #8: Become a People Person
• Secret #9: We Love the People Whom We Help More Than We Love Those Who Help Us
• Secret #10: Life Isn’t About What You Know—It’s About Who You Are
• Secret #11: In Order to Achieve Success, We Must and Can Build Up Our Self-Discipline, Integrity, and Character Strength
• Secret #12: Your Authentic Identity Requires Other People
• Secret #13: Know How Business Works; Understand Specialization and Cooperation
• Secret #14: Each and Every One of Us Is in Business and Should Act Like a Business Professional
• Secret #15: Develop All Four Dimensions of Your Life Simultaneously
• Secret #16: Earnings and Profits Are God’s Way of Rewarding Us for Forming Relationships with Others and Serving Them Faithfully and Effectively
• Secret #17: Raise the Limits on Yourself and Others by Imposing Boundaries and Structures
• Secret #18: The Importance of Service Is That You Cannot Lead If You Cannot Follow
• Secret #19: Vision Is Necessary; Sharing That Vision Is Not Always Necessary
• Secret #20: The Most Important Organ of Leadership Is Your Mouth
• Secret #21: Change Is Scary
• Secret #22: As Painful as Change Can Be, It Often Contains the Seeds of Growth
• Secret #23: Because Change Is a Constant Reality, Life Is More Accurately Depicted by a Video Than a Photograph
• Secret #24: The More that Things Change, the More We Must Depend Upon Those Things That Never Change
• Secret #25: Press Forward Even When the Road Ahead Is Not Clear
• Secret #26: Do Not Let Your Fear Conquer You—Press On
• Secret #27: Become Strongly, Even Radically, Open to New Directions, Soft Sounds, and Faint Footsteps
• Secret #28: Use the Power of Words, Sentences, and Sound
• Secret #29: Feeling Right About Money Makes You Act Right
• Secret #30: You Can Best Attract That Which You Best Understand
• Secret #31: You Must Know Your Money, Which You Must Be Able to Measure and Count
• Secret #32: Money Is Spiritual
• Secret #33: Don’t Live Beyond Your Means—Give Beyond Your Means
• Secret #34: Giving Money Away Makes You Feel Wealthy
• Secret #35: How You Feel About Yourself Is How Others Will See You
• Secret #36: Giving Money Away Automatically Connects Us with Other People
• Secret #37: If There Is No Hebrew Word for Something, Then That Thing Does Not Exist
• Secret #38: Retirement Is Unhealthy
• Secret #39: You Can Ruin Today by Planning Bad Things for Tomorrow
• Secret #40: Retirement Tends to Isolate You
• Final Thoughts
• About the Author
• Index
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• End User License Agreement