Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money

by Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Don’t be embarrassed to admit that you want more money.

You can be very happy with your life and grateful for its many blessings while simultaneously desiring more.

Making money is not so different from other interests. It, too, involves skills and requires immersion in a new culture.

Very rarely does a person accumulate wealth without acquiring social skills.

the wonderful thing about learning how to make money is that it does inevitably teach you how to improve your relationships with others.

The Jewish people are known worldwide as “the people of the Book.” This originally referred to the Bible. But a side benefit of the fact that Judaism always expected every Jew to be literate in order to read “The Book” was that Jews have always had a disproportionately high literacy rate and a respect for education.

Jewish tradition teaches that after you have done new things consistently for a while, you begin to feel yourself becoming a different person.

SUCCESS REQUIRES LEARNING AND PRACTICE

(1) learn, (2) understand, and (3) practice. Phase one is learning the techniques. Phase two is understanding those principles that lie behind the techniques. Understanding how those techniques work provides assurance that they will work. Gaining confidence in the ultimate effectiveness of those techniques is important because it helps to provide the motivation to keep going with phase three. Phase three is doggedly and determinedly practicing, not only to become proficient in the technique, but also to become a different person.

helping other people make up for their deficiencies by supplying their needs is how one makes an honorable living.

Jewish tradition views a person’s quest for profit and wealth to be inherently moral.

who I am and how I earn my living are inextricably bound together.

Step one in the process of increasing your income is to begin wrapping yourself around these two related notions: (1) you are in business, and (2) the occupation of business is moral, noble, and worthy.

Believing that making money is a selfish activity will undermine anyone’s chances of success.

you would have vast additional power to inject into your enterprise if you could simply develop a deep conviction of its intrinsic morality.

If you feel really good about your profession, you sweep others along with you on the waves of your enthusiasm for what you do.

hasten to commit good acts and flee from misdeed since every good act encourages another in its wake, while every misdeed eases the way to the next.”

Turning over a new leaf and making a fresh start is enormously liberating. It allows one to recover one’s morally driven self restraint that might otherwise have eroded beyond the point of usefulness.

not only is money not bad, but it often can be a result of self improvement. You receive money in proportion to how helpful you can make yourself to other people. Chanukah is a reminder that educating oneself is surely one of the best ways of increasing one’s potential to be helpful to others.

Jews always viewed putting one’s capital at risk to enable someone else to make a profit as an honorable way to earn a living and to help others. The Jewish hierarchy of charity regards lending someone money to go into business as more noble than simply giving him the money. The latter condemns the recipient to be a beggar without enough self respect to launch his or her own enterprise. However, lending money to a needy man elevates him into an independent businessman. This way his dignity is preserved, and he retains the psychological self image so necessary to conducting business successfully.

Deep within traditional Jewish culture lies the conviction that the only real way to achieve wealth is to attend diligently to the needs of others and to conduct oneself in an honorable and trustworthy fashion.

The rule is that people seldom excel at any occupation that deep down they consider unworthy; and even if they are neutral about the morality of business, that neutrality is a weak reed on which to build success.

WE CAN’T HELP BELIEVING SOME OF WHAT PEOPLE TELL US

You cannot help believing some of what people tell you.

The Talmud provides an answer that is a frightening glimpse into human nature: Once you admit a lie or a slander into your ears, you can never totally rid yourself of its effects. You may think that you have expunged the information from your memory, but its impact will be with you forever.

You may think that you can remain uninfluenced by the things you hear, but it just isn’t so.

Sitting around wishing for more money accomplishes nothing. Daydreaming or reciting self-affirmation mantras accomplishes even less. Only by actively and perhaps even joyously interacting with other people can the circumstances of wealth creation be set in place.

In general, people prefer doing business and engaging in transactions with other people with whom they already have a relationship. It is too late to try to form a relationship with a potential transaction beckoning. Relationships need to already exist for the transaction to occur.

You are simply going to have to learn how to relate to strangers with the sincere warmth and interest that turns them into friends.

These are all activities that cement human relationships in the most profound way.

Whatever your situation, I absolutely guarantee you that opportunities to meet others do exist in your life. You may never have contemplated them, but if you brainstorm, you will find them.

friends who abandon these rituals that constantly form and discharge mutual obligation soon discover friendship fading.

Constantly creating and discharging obligations nurtures and sustains a friendship.

Succeeding in genuine relationship building will eventually increase your income. Just as important, it will immediately start improving your entire life.

“Do you want wealth?” Cain seems to be asking? If so, locate yourself in the heart of large populations of people who share your values. Then begin making connections.

if you happen to prefer spending your leisure time isolated with a good book or glued to a television set, now might be a good time to start using most of your available time for building new relationships. Is doing so going to be comfortable for you? Initially, probably not, particularly if you are the introverted sort. However, you are going to have to change if you are serious about money. You must enlarge your Rolodex, and you must intensify the relationships with the people represented by those Rolodex cards.

Never miss or ignore an opportunity to make new friends and to nurture existing ones. You can always make a point of accepting invitations to others’ happy events; and, yes, you can always make a point of attending others’ sad events, too. In other words, engage in ongoing community building activities.

Make lots of new friends, try to help them, and make sure that they all know how you could help them and that you are eager to do so.

To this day, one of the first questions people tend to ask a new acquaintance is, “What do you do for a living?” It is a legitimate question because the inquirer really wants to know what the person does for other people. He or she is wondering how others find you useful. How you help your fellow humans is a proud part of your identity.

in whatever enterprise you find yourself, practice predictability. Never impose your mood swings on your associates and customers. They should never be able to discover how your life is going. This is called being professional.

One mark of a fine person is demanding far more of yourself than you do of others.

Success in business means getting on with people.

If you really are to succeed in business, it won’t be because people think you are smart; it will be because people like you. There is an old adage, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Trying to show that you care is essentially devious, whereas trying to care enough that it shows is part of authentic human communication.

Judaism teaches that God designed the system to reward people for not remaining isolated from one another. The Hebrew word for “human interaction that is economically profitable to both parties” possesses the same root as the Hebrew word for “shop” and for “encampment.”

When large numbers of people are unified within a common system of values and are located in close proximity to one another, in a real encampment as it were, the best circumstances for economically productive interaction then exist.

build genuine and sincere relationships with as many people as possible with no thought of reward.

Make sure all your friends and contacts know that there are ways you could help them and that you are eager to help them.

Finding a job is just the beginning. Now you must grow in that job, always seeking new areas to expand your responsibilities and continually seeking ways to enhance your usefulness.

Modifying the real you for maximum effectiveness is what ancient Jewish wisdom advises its devotees. An entire body of ancient Jewish literature called Mussar, which means “redirecting,” teaches how to be different, rather than merely how to act differently.