Is it possible that selfishness is good for people?
What’s the difference between self-interest and selfishness?
How are most of us missing the key to prosperity because we have false beliefs about this?
Tune in as Cash Flow Expert Chris Miles teaches the difference between being selfish and being self-interested and how that could make a difference in your financial life!
Chris Miles Bio:
Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert,” is a leading authority on how to quickly free up and create cash flow for thousands of his clients, entrepreneurs, and others internationally! He’s an author, speaker, and radio host featured in US News, CNN Money, Bankrate, and Entrepreneur on Fire, and he has spoken to thousands getting them fast financial results.
Chris consistently teaches audiences how to do what no other financial advisers can or will – achieve financial prosperity, NOW AND IN THE FUTURE, while spending time doing what they love most!
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Listen to the podcast here
Can Selfishness Be Good?
I want to welcome me out today. Can you believe it? We’re in October. It’s crazy. The year is finishing up. It’s wrapping up. The question is, how do you feel about this year? How has it been going for you? I know some of you reached out to me and you said, “Chris, I need to get something to change now. This year is almost done. What can you do to get going?” If you’ve got questions like that, shoot me an email at Chris@MoneyRipples.com. If you’d like to get a free money leak evaluation, shoot me an email as well. Let me know and see what we can do to stop those money leaks to help you to own your life.
For those of you that have a business, not to own a job, but own a business and get your freedom back. It’s a great thing I’d offer to you guys as well. Also, check out our website, MoneyRipples.com for other great resources too. I want to talk today about how can selfishness be good. This is a topic that usually I only present at events like the Wealth Empowerment Intensive and things like that. I want you to ask yourself. How can selfishness be good?
Depending on how you define selfishness, this will depend on whether this is a good thing or not. Here’s my definition of selfishness. Let me start with this. First off, selfishness, in my opinion, is not good, but some people, the way they define it, don’t know how to separate the two different meanings, which I’ll talk about today.
Let me talk about two different concepts. There’s selfishness and then there’s self-interest. Selfishness is when you forget the value that people have. When you stop seeing value in people and you start valuing things or valuing yourself, you fail to realize that you have a self-interest in other people. Self-interest is when you realize that people are your assets. When you realize that it’s through, you get the very things that you want in life. Let’s be honest with ourselves. All of us want more in our lives. We want to progress. We want to grow. We want something better for ourselves.
Self-interest is when you realize that through people, you get the things you want in life. Click To TweetWe overall want to be happy. We want to have a better life. We want to have better richness in that life and that doesn’t always translate to money, but it can. Money’s definitely a big part of that too. We all want what’s better for ourselves. However, if you’re truly someone who does act as a creator, not a consumer, you’re going to say, “If I want to get what I want, I need to help others do what they want. I need to be able to seek after their self-interest see.
You understand that all human beings have self-interest. I was talking yesterday. It was on a Sunday and I was talking with a friend. I said, “If you look at it, there’s the argument about whether altruism exists. Is anyone truly altruistic? Meaning that they do things for the goodness of their hearts that there’s no benefit.” Let’s play with that because some people will say and this is especially true with those that are of Western philosophy.
Especially those in Christian cultures. They’ll say, “No.” There’s total altruism. There are things that we do for the good, nothing more. Let me ask you. If you do something good for somebody else and maybe there’s no benefit for you or seeming benefit. Why do you keep doing it now? I bet you’ll probably answer, “Because I like serving people.” You like serving people. Is it about them? “Yeah, Chris, it is about them because I’m serving them.” You said you like it. “Yeah, I like it.” “Do you feel good?” “Yeah.” You get a good feeling. Do you like to have more good feelings in life? “Yes.” It’s not only about them. It’s about you too.
Remember, in the scarcity world, many people believe that it’s an either/or situation. Either I serve somebody or I serve myself. It’s a zero-sum game. What we fail to realize in a real abundance is that we do want to help other people and we do want to help ourselves. We naturally want to want to be better in life. We want things to be better. We naturally want to be happy. We want to have more. We want to progress. We want to grow. We want all those things that we feel to make us better or make our lives better.
When you think about it, is there anybody that’s truly doing something just for other people? Some people even argue. They say, “Christ died for us.” There was no benefit for him. Are you sure about that? Who got greater glory from God than anyone? It was him now. Was he seeking the glory? Of course not, but he did it because he loved us. He still wanted to help us. He wanted that.
Some of you have even heard different scripture verses saying, “This is my work and my glory to bring the past immortality and eternal life of man.” He didn’t say, “This is your work. This is my work and my glory.” Even God says the same thing. I want you to understand that you can have self-interest and not be selfish. You are selfish if you start to hurt people to get what you want. That is not the principled way to go about getting what you want. Yes, you can do it, but you’re going to live in scarcity and fear the whole time wondering if somebody else is going to steal something from you.
When it comes to selfishness, there isn’t a big payoff. You could try to get what you want and that’s it. Forget about everybody else. What I’ve realized in my own life and I’m sure you’ve seen this too, is that the only way to truly get what you want is by helping others get what they want. It’s cliché. You’ve heard it over and over, but isn’t it true? Remember all the things that we have. The whole reason we act and move oftentimes begins with self-interest. We get out of bed due the self-interest. We eat food due to self-interest. Some of us even exercise due to self-interest. We even go out and serve people due to self-interest. We work due to self-interest. We get our kids to school due to self-interest.
We do all these things every day out of the name of self-interest. Many, people will get caught up and say, “I don’t like the whole word self.” Call it enlightened self-interest. It doesn’t matter. Find something that works and this is something that I had struggled with before because I did believe it was a zero-sum game. I remember being a financial advisor and this is about fourteen years ago. I believe that if I won if and made more money financially, I was somehow robbing people of their own prosperity.
The only way to truly get what you want is by helping others get what they want. Click To TweetI would say, “I can’t stand it. I’m going to be a good person.” Because I’m a good benevolent person, I’m going to make sure that I starve in the name of everybody else. I’ll tell you, that’s something that I’ve had for years, way beyond before the financial advisor. Some of you have grown up with that same belief as well. Let me ask you, “Does that belief serve?” Think about this. Are you trying to hurt yourself to help other people? When you hurt yourself, was does that due to your ability to serve other people?
If you try to go broke helping other people, does that allow you to be a better servant or do you become a worse servant? Are you able to help more people or fewer people when you have less money? What can you do when you have more money? How can you serve more people? Many people, again, even if they try to use that as an excuse, might come from a selfish standpoint and say, “If I want to help more people, I’m going to make more money. I’m going to make more money first before I help people.”
This is also false. That is selfishness. That does not work. Instead, come from it and say, “No. I want to serve people. I can serve people at any point during this process. In fact, it is not just what I do. It’s who I am. It’s who I am being and how I show up. That is why people want to also reciprocate. This is why people want to pay me. I’d even ask yourself. As yourself say, “Do I have proof that people do appreciate what I’m offering?” Because some people will say, “How do I know I’m creating value?”
When it comes to the financial standpoint, it’s easy. They pay you. If they’re not paying you, you’re not creating value. It’s possible you’re not asking for value. You’ve got to do that too. You got to make sure you ask for value in return. You have to ask for money in order to receive it. Also, a lot of people out there I know that serve like crazy, but are not asking for money and therefore, they’re like someone who’s not eating. Eventually, they’ll starve to death and then they can’t do anything.
They’re going to be a useless lump on the ground. We want to make sure that you are serving and profitable. This is why I focus on cashflow. I am focused on creating value now. Your question that you should be obsessing over is how do I create the most amount of value for the most amount of people right now? Not down the road, but what can I do right now? Who can I be right now to serve those people? Who can show up? How can I be there for them?
Sometimes you don’t get paid for it, but I can promise you, as you do show up for people, they also want to show up for you. Whatever you want more of, usually, you have to lead by example first and then let others follow. I want you to consider self-interest. By the way, I want to follow up on that story. I remember I was a broke financial planner that was not charging people a lot of money. Very little money.
What’s interesting is that when I finally started charging the standard fees, people were happier. People sent me more referrals when I charged full price than when I was charging half price. People didn’t value it and a lot of times, they wouldn’t do business with me anyways. I found out that I said, “If I charged full price for my value, especially when I was offering better value than most people in that field, why shouldn’t I even charge more than the average price?” That’s where value comes in. That’s where you have to look from a place of being.
I keep bringing it back to money because this is a money show. We’re bringing this up because a lot of you are here. After all, you’re trying to figure out how to make more money. If you have a belief thinking that somehow you’re taking away from people by existing, somehow taking away from people by prospering, you are living a false belief. You’re violating the principles, the very natural laws that have been around for eternity. These have always been here.
The more productive people become and can exchange freely with one another, the more prosperous we all become. Click To TweetUnderstand that when you look at the self-interest, you’re doing these things because you want to serve people. Why do you serve people? Because you know that you’ll also receive lots of value. When you serve more people and you’re able to ask for more value in return and more service in return, what you’ll find is that everybody prospers. Everybody’s happier and things work easier.
When you restrict that when you either refuse to be reciprocated. Where people will try to serve you and you refuse to do that or where you refuse to offer service and you refuse to create value for people, you’ll find pretty quickly that you’re the problem. You’re the reason among the great whole. You’re not the only reason, but you’re one of the many people who when they believe that belief, restrict prosperity from happening for all people.
If you want people to truly become prosperous, they have to be constantly focused on, “How do I create the most amount of value for most people?” Also, be willing to receive value in return to ask for it. To be able to say, “Thank you. I accept.” When you allow this exchange to happen, this free-flowing to happen, there’s life, prosperity and freedom. Everybody gains prosperity. This is why in the 1990s or the invention of the internet, everybody started prospering more. There was more money to be made. It had nothing to do with the stock markets. They were reading what was happening in real life.
The more productive people become, the more people are able to exchange. The more freely they’re able to exchange with one another, the more prosperous we all become. This is also when governments try to restrict people’s ability to exchange and trade and work with one another and create value for one another, this is why economies fail. They’ll blame politicians. They’ll blame people. They’ll blame the rich. They’ll blame all these other people when in reality, it’s us. The people who have the real power, the people that can prosper. You are one of those people.
You have the ability to prosper. You have the ability to create value and value for people. You have the ability to bless lives, and you can prosper with them as they prosper too. This is the power of self-interest. Everyone has a self-interest. The most righteous have self-interest. Jesus Christ had self-interest. We all have self-interest. How we show up and how we go on about blessing people’s lives and serving people is how we’ll know.
We’ll start to see the evidence of that through that prosperity, through the money that you create and through appreciation, love and all forms of compensation beyond the money that you receive by doing these things. Stop thinking you’re being selfish. Begin to start saying, “I have so much self-interest. I want what’s in it for me. I know everybody else wants what’s in it for them.
Everybody else is self-interested. This is why. If you’re in business, your focus is not on what you think is valuable, but on what they think is valuable. How do you show up and serve them, ask them what they want, and find out what they have as their self-interest? What are they willing to pay for? What do they want in their lives? How can you solve problems? Serve them, create value, add value, and do anything possible to make their lives better. That is self-interest.
Let’s stop with selfishness. Know that self-interest is awesome. Self-interest is righteous. Selfishness is wicked. Remember, selfishness is when you no longer value people. You only value yourself. Self-interest is when you realize that as you value people, you also benefit as well. Join us next time as we have great information and great stuff. Remember, take this into your life, apply it and make it happen. Have a great week, everyone.